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Earth Matters: Floating solar could provide 35% of world electricity; the right kind of optimism [1]
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Date: 2023-03-31
John Timmer at Ars Technica writes:
The researchers note that floating solar panels on reservoirs have a number of advantages besides cooling the panels and reducing water loss. One is that you're not sacrificing unaltered land in order to cover it in panels, given that humanity has already inundated the land in question. While the panels will block light from reaching the water and can potentially cause problems for any ecosystems that have developed there, it could also help limit harmful algal blooms in water supplies. Another advantage is that many reservoirs are close to both power-hungry population centers and the grids that serve them, making it easier to take advantage of the power generated there. Finally, a lot of reservoirs are associated with hydroelectric power systems, and the two sources of power could be managed as a single unit to maintain a steady level of production around the clock and in all weather conditions. [...] The researchers also estimate that there are 40 countries that could meet their total current energy demands entirely through floating solar, although again, storage remains an issue.
Floating solar is about 25% more expensive than land-based systems, one reason being that the panels must be anchored or slung from overhead wires. Additionally, maintenance is more difficult. But floating solar is still cheaper than other sources of electricity. And the gap between land-based system and floating solar is certain to shrink. Currently, there are only about 5,000 megawatts of capacity at such floating facilities worldwide. But that is changing rapidly as numerous countries have decided this makes good sense.
China, for instance, has proposed a $1 billion, 1,000-megawatt, 6,200-acre floating solar facility at Zimbabwe’s Kariba Dam, which backs up the world’s largest reservoir by volume. Many others are already in operation. Portugal hosts a 5-megawatt floating solar park at the Alqueva reservoir, Europe’s largest human-made reservoir, providing about a third of the electricity needs of local towns. The Tengeh Reservoir is home to Singapore's 60-megawatt floating solar farm that provides power to five water treatment plants. The city of Healdsburg, California, has a 4.8-megawatt floating solar operation that supplies about 8% of its electricity needs.
A conceptual rendering of solar panels spanning the 110 foot-wide Turlock Irrigation District's main canal. The $20 million project is designed to test the feasibility of covering some, most, or all of the state's 4,000 miles of irrigation canals with solar panels that reduce evaporation, improve water quality, and generate significant amounts of electricity.
In California, there’s another plan—Project Nexus—to cover the state’s canals with solar panels. As Earth Matters, April Siese, and community writer Mettle Fatigue have previously reported, this pilot project is underway to cover 8,500 feet of the Turlock Irrigation District’s main canal with solar panels in a test case.
California has 3,946 miles of irrigation canals, all of them open to the sky. A study released in 2021 concluded that covering them with solar panels would annually save the state 63 billion gallons of water now lost to evaporation. That’s enough to irrigate 50,000 acres of farmland or fulfill the residential needs of more than 2 million people. Covering the canals would improve water quality and reduce the need for maintenance by $40,000 a mile, the researchers calculated. Farmers could eliminate the diesel generators they now use to pump their share of water from the canals, and the project would add 13,000 megawatts of electricity-generating capacity, equal to about 15% of the state’s total existing capacity—enough to meet half of the state’s decarbonization 2030 goals.
Talk about win-win-win.
In case you want to learn more about Project Nexus from someone intimately involved with it, here you go:
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ECO-QUOTE
“To make the changes we need to make and to reach a safer future, we will need the resources of everybody here — the scientists, the policy makers, and the industrialists — all working together towards a common goal. And that goal is a planet that can continue to support life.”—Piers Sellers, astronaut
Eco-Resources & action
Feeling Hopeless About the Climate? Try Our 30-Day Action Plan. By John R. Platt at The Revelator. A recent poll found that people today, especially younger people, feel helpless when it comes to fighting climate change. Here’s the thing: That’s exactly how polluting corporations want you to feel. The more people believe their actions don’t matter, the more they find themselves rolling over and accepting the status quo. Yes, solving the climate crisis requires bold action from governments and corporations, but that doesn’t mean individuals have to sit on the sidelines. Not only do our actions add up and influence others, we also have the ability to push for — and demand — systemic change. And that push, importantly, can help turn our individual feelings of hopelessness around. Psychologists and climate activists tell us we can go from feeling helpless or hopeless about the future and toward a more positive, productive attitude just by taking a few steps forward.
New Tool Maps Sidewalks From the Sky—And Encourages Cities to Fill The Gaps. By Kea Wilson at StreetsblogUSA. Cities across America will soon be able to easily map their pedestrian infrastructure using the power of artificial intelligence—and challenge them to have a long overdue conversation about why those networks have such an acceptable number of gaps. This spring, an international coalition of urban studies and computer planning researchers has announced that they will debut Tile2Net, which they're calling "the first open-source scene classification model for pedestrian infrastructure from sub-meter resolution aerial tiles"—or, in layman's terms, the first free tool that uses machine learning technology to scan satellite imagery for the presence of sidewalks and crosswalks.
weekly green video
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Ecopinion
We need the right kind of climate optimism. Climate pessimism dooms us to a terrible future. Complacent optimism is no better. By Hannah Ritchie at Vox. People might defend doomsday scenarios as the wake-up call that society needs. If they’re exaggerated, so what? They might be the crucial catalyst that gets us to act on climate change. Setting aside the moral problem of stretching the truth, this claim is wrong. Scaring people into action doesn’t work. That’s true not just for climate change, air pollution, and biodiversity loss, but for almost any issue we can think of. We need optimism to make progress—yet that alone isn’t enough. To contend with environmental crises and make life better for everyone, we need the right kind of optimists: those who recognize that the world will only improve if we fight for it. To understand what sort of thinking does drive positive change, we can imagine a framework for how people conceptualize the future and their ability to shape it.
Conservation Efforts Have a Massive Blind Spot. How creating protected areas for insects could help stem the biodiversity crisis. By Grace van Deelen at Sierra magazine. Shawan Chowdhury, lead author of a new study and postdoctoral researcher at the German Center for Integrative Biodiversity Research, said, “Insects are the center of ecosystem function.” Without them, the gap in the world’s ecosystems could cause further biodiversity loss and contribute to food insecurity for humans, too. He and his colleagues mapped the distribution of all known insect species, then measured the extent to which their habitats overlapped with the world’s protected areas. Protected areas included national parks, wildlife refuges, and nature reserves. They found that 67,384 species of insects—about 76%—did not have sufficient protected areas. The authors write that the shortfall is “much more severe” than the results of a similar study on vertebrates, which showed that 57% of vertebrate species did not have adequate protected areas. In response, Chowdhury and his team call for the global conservation effort to better incorporate insects into protected area designation and management. But what would an insect-smart protected area even look like, and how would it be different from existing protected areas? Making sure protected areas overlap with known insect distributions is a good first step, but there are other important considerations conservationists can make.
Monarch Butterflies Will Go Extinct if We Don't Take Action Now. This is not a drill. By Melissa Breyer at Treehugger. Despite heroic efforts to save monarchs by planting milkweed, we could still lose these extraordinary butterflies by not taking bolder action,” says Tierra Curry, a senior scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity. “Monarchs were once incredibly common. Now they’re the face of the extinction crisis as U.S. populations crash amid habitat loss and the climate meltdown.” As explained by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, which placed monarchs on the Endangered-Red List in 2022: "Legal and illegal logging and deforestation to make space for agriculture and urban development has already destroyed substantial areas of the butterflies’ winter shelter in Mexico and California, while pesticides and herbicides used in intensive agriculture across the range kill butterflies and milkweed, the host plant that the larvae of the monarch butterfly feed on." Anna Walker, part of the IUCN SSC Butterfly and Moth Specialist Group and Species Survival Officer at the New Mexico BioPark Society, acknowledges the dire nature of the situation but believes there is still time. “It is difficult to watch monarch butterflies and their extraordinary migration teeter on the edge of collapse, but there are signs of hope. So many people and organizations have come together to try and protect this butterfly and its habitats. From planting native milkweed and reducing pesticide use to supporting the protection of overwintering sites and contributing to community science, we all have a role to play in making sure this iconic insect makes a full recovery." Here are a few things we ordinary citizens can do.
Five Ways to Force Washington to Pass Better Climate Policies. By Heather Souvaine Horn at The New Republic. In response to the latest dire warning issued by scientists at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change telling us humans to get cracking to seriously address the crisis, Ketan Joshi wrote that “Every next step must be a step where emissions fall. How to do that? It’s going to be tough, but here are some steps in the right direction. Mobilizing nonvoting environmentalists. Research by the Environmental Voter Project found that “far more nonvoters list climate as their top priority.” Nonvoting environmentalists, Liza Featherstone reported, “tend to be young, low-income, or people of color. All those groups vote less than other demographics.” In addition: getting fossil fuel money out of politics; getting fossil fuel money out of policy; adopting the framework of the rights-of-nature movement; and making climate a local issue. Primary challengers who talk about climate not in national terms but in terms more immediately relevant to their potential constituents—hurricanes, water shortages, wildfires—often get more traction than the political establishment might have predicted.
Manuel Esteban Paez Terán’s tree camp in the forest near Atlanta where he was protesting as part of a campaign to stop the construction of the Atlanta Public Training Facility.
How the FBI used ‘Cop City’ protests to snoop on activists in Chicago. By Adam Federman at Grist/Type Investigations. Since the FBI opened its file on Chicago Against Cop City, more than three dozen activists involved in the Atlanta protests and forest defense have been arrested and charged with felonies under Georgia’s 2017 domestic terrorism law. On January 18, a law enforcement officer shot and killed 26-year-old Manuel Esteban Paez Terán, a community medic who had been an active member of the campaign, during a raid on an encampment in the forest. Autopsy results recently released by the family revealed that Tortuigita, as Terán was known, was likely sitting on the ground with both arms raised when they were shot at least 13 times. In public statements, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation maintains that Teran shot a state trooper first. However, the bureau has released only limited information, citing the ongoing investigation. Another autopsy carried out by the DeKalb County Medical Examiner’s Office has not been made public. A Grist analysis of 20 of the early arrest warrants found that none of those charged with domestic terrorism were accused of seriously injuring anyone.
The US is the world’s richest country. So why can’t I get a glass of clean drinking water? By Arwa Mahdawi at The Guardian. Accidents happen, of course. But there is a difference between an unavoidable accident and a series of public health disasters caused by corporate greed, deteriorating infrastructure, and a lack of regulation. The U.S. is the richest country in the world. Clean water shouldn’t be a luxury—and, yet, that is increasingly what it is becoming. The most high-profile example of dirty water in the U.S. was in Flint, Michigan, which had lead-poisoned tap water for years. But tap water across the U.S. is laced with disturbing amounts of “forever chemicals.” A 2021 investigation by The Guardian and Consumer Reports found that millions of people across the country are exposed to potentially toxic chemicals in their drinking water—disproportionately people in poorer regions.
Eco-Tweet
x Only by using a microscope is the scale revealed of our microplastic rubbish that litters my plankton samples and the once pristine sea surface from where it now enters the marine food chain. @zeiss_micro pic.twitter.com/Uv0zwaQViQ — Dr Richard Kirby (@PlanktonPundit) March 28, 2023
Half a Dozen Other Things to Read (or listen to)
Average People Have the Power to Impact Climate, EIB Survey Says. By Laura Millan at Bloomberg Green. People say their individual behavior can make a difference and want governments to impose stricter measures on consumer behavior to tackle climate change, according to an annual survey by the European Investment Bank. More than 70% of people surveyed in the U.S., European Union, U.K., and China said governments are too slow in acting against climate change and environmental degradation. At the same time, an overwhelming majority said humanity is headed for a global catastrophe if people don’t drastically reduce consumption of energy and goods in the coming years. The majority of respondents said their own behavior can make a difference. The participants also supported tougher legal measures, especially among those surveyed in China, where 90% said the government should implement stricter rules on people’s behavior to tackle climate change.
A spotlight on consumption-based emissions. By C40 Cities. More than 4 billion people—half of the world’s population—live in cities. These bustling economic hubs bring together people from all backgrounds to share ideas and work together to find ways to thrive. They’re also the source of two-thirds of greenhouse gas emissions. What would it take to improve goods and services in ways that help us keep global heating below 1.5°C [2.7° Fahrenheit] and avoid even more debilitating storms, heat waves, and droughts than we’ve seen lately? And how might those changes affect quality of life? That’s what the researchers set out to answer in 2019, in an area of work that was very new to them then, just as it was for many important stakeholders, from governments to businesses and beyond. The result is a report C40 published with Arup and the University of Leeds, entitled: “The Future of Urban Consumption in a 1.5°C World.”
Visions Beyond an Apocalypse: Science fiction writers explore better climate endings. By Jonita Davis at Yes! Magazine. Climate science fiction, or “cli-fi,” is having a renaissance, with writers like Kim Stanley Robinson and Emily St. John Mandel garnering national attention. Although the genre is recent, the bleakness of post-climate-change stories is nothing new in science fiction. But not all of these stories are grim post-apocalyptic journeys after climate catastrophes. In fact, a particular kind of cli-fi with themes of hope, resilience, and renewal has existed for years. Until recently, it’s been the purview of authors from communities that are underrepresented in publishing. These books offer a new and socially responsible look at what Earth could be like after an apocalyptic event—written by authors who were already living in spaces damaged by climate change and who had survived horrors in real life. Among the authors featured is Omar El Akkad, who wrote “What Strange Paradise.” He says “I don’t know how you write any kind of story in the world today without having to grapple with, in some way, what we are doing to this Earth. I’m not saying that every novel has to have a Category 12 hurricane in it or specifically address wildfires. But all literature is about what it means to be human. And right now, what it means to be human is to grapple with the place we live in and what we’ve done to the place we live in.” He goes on to say that the term “cli-fi” is now more of a “designation of novelty than it is a designation of craft.” He expects the label will fade away at some point, but the topic of climate change will remain.
Why climate ‘doomers’ are replacing climate ‘deniers’. By Shannon Osaka at The Washington Post. Influenced by a barrage of grim U.N. reports and negative headlines, a group of people believe that the climate problem cannot, or will not, be solved in time to prevent all-out societal collapse. They are known, colloquially, as climate “doomers.” And some scientists and experts worry that their defeatism—which could undermine efforts to take action—may be just as dangerous as climate denial. “It’s fair to say that recently many of us climate scientists have spent more time arguing with the doomers than with the deniers,” said Zeke Hausfather, a contributing author to the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and climate research lead at the payments company Stripe.
Cameron liquified natural gas operation in Cameron Parish, Louisiana.
Fossil Fuel Firms Use Permitting Loopholes to Fast-Track LNG Export Projects Near Black Communities. By Sara Sneath at DeSmog. The residents of Louisiana’s southernmost parish, on the doorstep of Venture Global’s proposed facility, have been asking for more scrutiny in permitting LNG export facilities. They aren’t the only communities of color calling for this: About 400 miles to the east, the Black community in North Port St. Joe, Florida, was caught off guard when they learned that an LNG export facility would be built in the place of a shuttered paper mill. Nopetro LNG applied for and was approved to be exempt from Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) oversight by claiming that its liquefaction facility is separate from the port where the LNG would be loaded onto ships, even though they are a mere 1,329 ft apart. Because the LNG would be trucked a quarter of a mile to a port for export, the facility does not fall under FERC’s jurisdiction, which only applies to terminals where natural gas is cooled to a liquid and directly loaded onto ships, according to the commission’s decision. With these permit exemptions, Nopetro LNG and Venture Global avoided lengthy environmental reviews to begin building two polluting facilities as fast as possible near Black communities in the Gulf of Mexico.
Green Links
Record Heat Waves Push India Closer to Limit of Human Survival • Crypto Mining at Gas Wells Sparks Regulatory Headaches, Outcry in Northwestern Pennsylvania • How Much Steel Will All Those Wind Turbines & Solar Panels Need, & Can We Make It? • Nuclear Waste Borehole Demonstration Center started • Study shows that people are more likely to be eco-friendly if others around them are • A Sting Operation to Save Elephants, With No Sting • Biden admin curbs EVs eligible for tax credits • Rapidly Melting Glaciers Threaten Collapse of Crucial Ocean Circulation Systems
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