Saving Soil with Solar
November 16, 2022
I shared an Indiana podium in August with Connie Neininger, a rural development expert from the Center for Infrastructure and Economic Development.
Connie’s insights are gleaned from study, and a lifetime of living in a rural community.
I’ll be posting more from Connie soon.
Below, I also spoke last summer to Dr Peter Schubert at Indiana University, who added some details to Connie’s overview.
Climate Denial Crock of the Week 
November 16, 2022 at 3:57 pm
What’s this? They’re planning for these solar farms to be replaced with real farms. Is the plan to demonstrate that solar can’t power the grid so we can switch to nuclear?
November 18, 2022 at 11:20 am
Right. You’ve nailed just like you always do.
November 18, 2022 at 12:55 pm
‘It’–I nailed ‘it’ like I always do.
November 18, 2022 at 1:01 pm
always good to get a window into the thinking of nuke bros.
November 19, 2022 at 4:00 pm
As disingenuous as ever, I see.
The whole point of the video was that solar arrays are land-friendly. They’re also flexible in that they’re straightforward to move if you ever want to.
How much does maintenance cost for a nuclear power plant (with no outstanding technical problems), divided by kWh? Compare that with the cost of maintaining or even completely moving a solar farm.
https://www.eia.gov/electricity/annual/html/epa_08_04.html
OMG, the truck hauling the solar panels crashed, dumping them on the road!
Call a hazmat crew and report it to the proper state and federal agencies!Call the boss and the insurance company and get out the push-brooms!November 29, 2022 at 6:23 pm
‘How much does maintenance cost for a nuclear power plant (with no outstanding technical problems), divided by kWh?’
$30.41 per megawatt/hour, for the whole fleet in the US in 2019, according to the statista website – that’s 3 cents a kilowatt hour.
It was $44.57 in 2012, but since then a few of the costlier-to-run plants have closed. It was about 3 cents a kilowatt/hour back in 2002-2007, as well, so the jump might have been the cost of putting in post-Fukushima retrofits. Lazard puts commercial-scale PV solar and onshore wind in the same ballpark, but that’s without storage.
I’m not aware of any accidents with transport of nuclear materials involving any release of radiation. It’s heavily regulated, the containers are incredibly tough, and spent fuel usually stays on site.
November 29, 2022 at 6:46 pm
Thank you for this.
You mentioned Lazard, and I found a 2020 report (PDF):
Click to access lazards-levelized-cost-of-energy-version-140.pdf
(Of course it predates the war-related natgas price spikes, which goes outside of their 25% +/- fuel price adjustment, but that’s OK, and with the Fed hiking interest rates, the cost of capital will be going up.)
November 30, 2022 at 1:30 am
Everyone looks at Lazard’s figures for new build, in black, but in red they show the median price for existing nuclear, at $29, is just above the median for combined cycle gas, at $28 – before the price hikes of gas. I’m very dubious about the prices usually quoted for wind. Most of the large manufacturers are posting losses in the hundreds of millions – two billion for GE’s renewables division. https://www.rechargenews.com/energy-transition/ge-renewable-energy-to-lose-2bn-in-2022-as-us-giant-sharpens-restructuring-axe/2-1-1340796
December 1, 2022 at 10:50 pm
“I’m very dubious about the prices usually quoted for wind. Most of the large manufacturers are posting losses in the hundreds of millions – two billion for GE’s renewables division.”
In the renewable energy gold rush, as with the late-1990s internet gold rush, I guarantee there will be a lot of money lost to investors betting on who’s going to grab—or at least do well in—the various markets. I’m guessing that grid storage solutions will particularly be an investment slaughterhouse, but those left standing will make a lot of money.
November 23, 2022 at 7:55 pm
30 or 40 years is nowhere near enough to restore today’s typically-abused land to what it was before poor practices and especially chemical industrial ag wrecked it and eroded most of it into the—well, formerly, into the dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico etc. now into Oklahoma where the shrinking Mississippi dumps it as it slows. But the process can be helped considerably by planting various native grasses and having them grazed either by native wild or foreign domestic animals.
Grazing causes an imbalance with the roots; since they support each other in the right amounts the roots then need to die back as well. Roots, made of carbon made of sunlight and CO2 carried from leaves down into the ground; once the roots die back the carbon is sequestered and added to the soil. That, combined with not using excess nitrogen and poisons on it and not compacting it with heavy farm machinery allows the soil community to thrive, fluffing and building the soil more.
Plains topsoils in North America were as much as 6 feet of fertile loam, often called black whether in the bison-ranges there, the black earth plains of Hungary or Australia, (pop. 74) or terra preta (Portuguese, “black earth”)—fertile indigenous Amazonian anthropogenic soils created with charcoal, very unlike typical red tropical laterite soils containing iron and aluminum. Civilizations are founded on such soils, and die when they die.
Without having a better plan than “let it sit for 30 years”, the soil won’t recover enough to make any difference to our civilization. This needs to be a well-thought-out program of stacking functions on permacultured land.
November 25, 2022 at 6:11 pm
I think you grossly underestimate how fast organisms (plants, bugs, vertebrates) move back in once you stop fighting them off. Most of the problems are from ongoing practices. The dead zone in the GoM, for example, is maintained by a constant source of excess fertilizer that feeds the microbes/algae that consume the oxygen from the water. Take away that food and regular currents will do the rest to bring in oxygenated water.
BOOK RECOMMENDATION: The World Without US (2008), by Alan Weisman.
Weisman wrote a magazine article about the wildlife taking over the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, which apparently does better with radioactivity but no humans than it does with humans but no radioactivity. Impressed by how quickly the area’s abandoned towns were recaptured by the forest, he started to explore other similar situations, and wrote a book.
The book includes the original Chernobyl article, plus a number of other disappearing-human scenarios, including New York City, an abandoned house, Panama Canal, Houston area refineries and chemical plants, and other situations where humans no longer interfere. (I think he addressed the new growth on the Mt. St. Helens lava flow, but that may have been a different article.)
A beer bottle or a wind turbine blade in a forest may offend nature-lovers’ sensibility, but wild organisms don’t give a damn.