Turn in your toaster and destroy a Joshua tree. Flip a lightweight switch and feed an endangered turtle to a badger.
Solar energy, widely viewed as humanity's best hope for avoiding catastrophic climate change, can have high environmental costs depending on the situation of solar panels and transmission lines.
Some of that infrastructure — powering tens of millions of Californians — goes places where it doesn't belong, says Dustin Mulvaney, a professor of environmental studies at San Jose State University and an authority in sustainable energy. Killing plants and animals is after all not a goal of solar developers, however the collateral damage has sparked a bitter debate about where panels and wires belong.
California has done an excellent job of protecting its public lands while encouraging solar development, Mulvaney says. But many residents get power for his or her homes from Nevada, where pristine natural areas are increasingly being degraded, and from private California projects in necessary animal and plant habitats, he says.
Several “aggregators” — community-based alternatives to utility giants often marketed as “clean” — have contracts for power from a project in Southern California that might cut down 4,000 Joshua trees, he says. Other aggregator feeding projects end in significant lack of wildlife habitat.
Mulvaney believes that sacrificing nature for solar energy is unnecessary. California could meet its electricity needs by installing solar panels on only a tenth of its contaminated sites, old mines, unusable former farmland, parking lots and other disturbed areas, he says. “We need to expand our power transmission infrastructure toward these locations,” Mulvaney says. The more solar energy available near large urban areas, the higher, he adds. Every home and each Amazon warehouse offers one other opportunity for rooftop solar, he says.
This news organization recently met with Mulvaney to debate solar energy. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: Describe the controversy over where to locate solar panels.
A: Most large solar farms are usually not controversial. They develop into controversial in terms of landscapes which have significance, either ecological or cultural – sometimes there are necessary cultural resources for tribes.
Q: Do we want each rooftop solar systems and large-scale systems?
A: We must have more roofs, but depending on the way in which our grid is built, we may also need greater utility capability.
Q: Why do we now have solar developments and proposals for pristine areas when altered land is already available?
A: Transmission lines are the rationale we see projects where they’re. In the Nineteen Sixties, we built transmission lines to connect with coal-fired power plants within the western United States. When these coal plants shut down, power suddenly becomes available on these transmission lines. The (proposed recent) Greenlink transmission line, which is able to connect Las Vegas and Reno, runs through Native American territory and numerous sensitive ecosystems. And we’re already seeing applications for solar farms along this transmission corridor. That will probably be electricity going to California. Nevada has fewer protections for its public lands.
Q: What role do major utilities like PG&E and Southern California Edison play in constructing solar farms?
A: Community selection aggregators currently play a bigger role than utilities in determining these development patterns. The community selection aggregators take over a big a part of the (electricity) purchasing. The Yellow Pine solar farm on the Nevada border (to generate electricity for Silicon Valley Clean Energy and Central Coast Community Energy) required the removal of many desert tortoises from the location. About forty of those turtles were immediately eaten by badgers.
Q: Could we meet our electricity needs without large solar parks?
A: In theory, there may be nothing that prohibits a community from being powered by rooftop solar and batteries. Do you’ve got enough sun? There are at all times hurricanes in winter. Sometimes cloud cover extends across your complete Central Valley. Do you’ve got enough batteries? Battery storage probably makes this prohibitively expensive for the time being. We have to rethink how we move power.
Q: What can we lose if we construct large solar farms within the wilderness?
A: All kinds, old growth barrel cactus, desert tortoise, kit fox. The desert tortoise was added to the endangered list by the California Department of Fish and Game just last week. This species has lost 90% of its population since 1980. Bighorn sheep and pronghorn antelope are affected by solar farms because they fragment their habitat. Their populations develop into more isolated and inbreeding occurs.
Q: Could we meet all our needs without solar powering undisturbed wilderness?
A: There's an amazing study. You can Avoid necessary conservation areas According to their estimates, it will only increase electricity costs by 3%.
Q: Where are there places where reasonable amounts of solar energy might be generated? to stop electricity from being fed in from the desert or Nevada?
A: On the west side of the Central Valley, a lot of these soils are contaminated with selenium. This could be an area where you would have less influence. You could put pretty large utility projects there which can be very near the Bay Area, and above the bottleneck – California has a (power line capability) bottleneck for electricity, around Los Banos. We need to construct more renewable energy across the Northern California shortage to assist the Bay Area.
Q: What about Southern California?
A: There is already numerous renewable energy in Southern California. Southern California just needs more solar roofs on its warehouses and things like that.
Name: Dustin Mulvaney
Occupation: Professor of environmental science at San Jose State University
Education: Doctor of Environmental Sciences, UC Santa Cruz; Masters in Environmental Policy Studies and Bachelors in Chemical Engineering, New Jersey Institute of Technology
Born and raised: New Jersey
Place of residence: Santa Cruz
Age: 48
Family: married, two children
Five things you need to learn about Dustin Mulvaney:
- Likes to go for walks along with his dog Wilder
- Proposed to his wife on a motorbike ride in Wilder Ranch State Park
- Likes to look at sea otters
- Studied insect ecology during his doctoral thesis
- My favorite leisure activity is mountain biking
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