The Battle for a Solar-Powered Future

Published Apr 18, 2023, 4:00 AM

An area near the entrance to Death Valley National Park has the capacity to produce enough energy to power the entire planet if covered in solar panels. Yet for Nye County, Nevada residents, the question of what must be sacrificed – including the environmental and economic future of the area – and by whom, looms large. Hillary Angelo is the author of the Harper’s Magazine article, “Boomtown,” which explores the complexity of the solar land rush in the West. Angelo is an urban and environmental sociologist and Associate Professor of Sociology at UC Santa Cruz. Dustin Mulvaney, who was featured in the article, is a solar expert and Professor at San José State University. Alec speaks with Angelo and Mulvaney about the objections of residents, what spaces might be used instead, and how to rethink the future of energy.

 

You can find the article, “Boomtown,” here:

https://harpers.org/archive/2023/01/boomtown-beatty-nevada-solar-farms-death-valley/

This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing from iHeart Radio. After decades of debate, it is now common knowledge that the world is in the midst of an ever increasing energy crisis, and that the long era of burning fossil fuels for power is contributing to our own demise. And yet the transition to alternative energy is proving to be more complex than you might think. The Harper's Magazine article Boomtown examines the solar land rush currently happening in the American West, specifically in the town of Beatty in Nai County, Nevada. The Ni County area has the capacity to produce enough energy through its prospective solar farms to power the entire planet, Yes, the entire planet. Close to the entrance of Death Valley National Park, It's an area rife with flat land and almost endless sunlight, but residents are pushing back on proposals to use its land for this purpose. After a series of exploitative boom bust cycles like the Gold Rush. Residents are opposing the plan on ecological and economic grounds. They argue that covering Nevada in solar panels will affect wildlife, recreational spaces, and the town's future. The article asks the difficult questions of who should sacrifice for our collective future and at what cost. My guests today are deep into this inquiry. Dustin mulvaney is a solar expert and professor of environmental studies at San Jose State University, and he collaborated on the Harper's article. But first the author of Boomtown, Hilary Angelo, is an urban environmental sociologist and associate professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is also a current member of the Institute for Advanced Study, where she is working with other scholars on the issue of climate crisis politics. I wanted to know how her work in urban sociology was related to sustainability and the growing issue of water scarcity.

I do a lot of work on urban sustainability and sustainability planning in general, and so a lot of questions about how human settlement relates to the external environment. So one of my interests in this topic and in these questions about energy is are we making the same decisions again as we now confront this new environmental crisis? Because much like we've done with water. We sort of created these very large scale infrastructure systems in the twentieth century that made huge quantities of water available to you know, people who lived in cities in Los Angeles and elsewhere, and we're now confronting the unsustainabilities of those decisions, especially as the West gets dryer. And so yeah, I think there's a kind of similar dynamic that's happening now. Obviously we're not going to run out of sun, but we will run out of land, or you know, we can be making different choices about how to use these resources.

You know, when I was out there, it was like, you know, people desperate, a lot of handwringing, a lot of pronouncements, and then it would abate and it would go away again for a while. But when I read your article, I mean, now we pivot from that to Nevada. Baity is the city, NI County is the general area. And I don't want to use the word nimby, because that to me bespeaks rich, privileged people who don't want things in their vista that are necessary and they want to impose among other people. I don't view those people as nimby. How do you describe those residents there.

Yeah, I mean, it's nice of you not to use the term. When I initially heard that there were people in the desert protest solar development, I also sort of thought or assumed that they were Nimbi's. You know, that is the framework that we're used to thinking about these issues, which is a question of sort of you know, private property or private interests versus questions of public good. When I met these people, I mean, I think what I found so interesting about them and what made me write the article, is that I felt they were actually trying to make this very important critique that has more to do with what you were just talking about about, for example, the choices we made about water and other natural resources in the twentieth century. Basically, they were saying, this is a question of how we do social change, and we're claiming that climate change is this moment of large scale social transformation. But actually from our perspective, from their perspective, we're making the same decisions about land use, about infrastructure development, and so on. So I thought that kind of critique that was being made doesn't fit into how we understand Nimbi's Public land in the United States is a commons or could be described as a commons, which isn't a vocabulary that we use in the US very much, but people talk ab got it. There's sort of similar fights about renewable energy development in Latin America and Africa, and people use the term energy grabbing like so they sort of talk about this common land being taken by energy companies and the implications that has for rural livelihoods, And so I think that is actually much more similar to what's going on in the American West.

Now, you know, here in New York, where as everybody knows, you know, Robert Moses condemns and through eminent domain takes whole neighborhoods in the Bronx so we can build a highway. In New York City in cooperation with the state, sees through eminent domain valleys of land that they evicted everybody from and flooded them to make the reservoir system for the city's drinking water. But in the area of Nevada you were in, do they view it purely as another rush companies coming in private companies to alter the landscape. Do they see it as a critical element potentially in something that we all have to make some sacrifices for in some contribution, which is to address climate change.

Right, Yeah, it's a good question. I don't know. I think some of them do and some of them probably don't.

Right.

For some people, there is a very personal emotional reaction that any of us would have, right if the government was coming and seizing land or you know, building flooding a valley and putting a reservoir in your backyard. Of that kind of thing, they just got themselves as fighting for their lives. So that I think often in that framework it doesn't sort of rise to the level of the public good questions. But you know, one thing I would say is that even within that, like even when we start thinking in those terms about you know, what is in the national interest or the public interest here, and how should these public lands be used, Like, there's a real question about what the highest and best use is. So for example, in the West, there was a period of time when valleys were being flooded for reservoirs.

Right.

So, I mean there have been shifts in the kind of American public consciousness and sentiment about these issues over time in terms of saying to themselves, well, you know, the thing that's really in the public interest is to have this reservoir here versus the thing that's in the public interest is to save this you know, beautiful valley so that we can have that as part of our heart fish stocks exactly. And so yeah, I think what I find complicated about this question is is that that's an open question. Right. There's a climate crisis and we have to be carbonized, but there's also an extinction crisis and a biodiversity crisis, and so one can argue that preserving desert habitat is you know, is also an important part of responding to claims.

Just so if you have where you you mentioned in the article, the eighty five percent of the land mass in the state of Nevada is federal land. Yeah, and is all of that controlled by.

BLM basically yes. So yeah, So for.

People who are listening, is Beaty and n County is that on federal land that they're allowed to occupy or are they in private land?

It's federal land. So Beaty is a small is a town that they describe as sort of landlocked. So it's a little island of you know, people have owned parcels of land and then it's surrounded by public land and for people who are listening. So public lands managed mostly by the Bureau of Land Management, which is a department of the Interior, sometimes the Forest Service and other things, and they're managed under what's called the multiple Use Mandate, which means these lands, unlike national parks, are open for extractive activities or energy development as well as recreation. And it's actually one in ten acres of land in the United States, which I found amazing just to learn. So, yeah, so it's a little island of a regular town where people own properties surrounded by this public land.

When did the people of NY County get introduced to this rush?

Basically now it's happening now. So there was a sort of initial solar rush or you know, phase one of the solar rush, which is about ten years ago. And Dustin Melvini, who you'll be speaking to later today, has been studying that so can talk about this over a longer timescale. But much of that took place in California. And so the people I mentioned in the article, Kevin and Laura, who run a nonprofit called Basin and Range Watch. They have been part of a group of sort of western desert advocates and desert protectors, who include people trained in conservation biology and that kind of thing, but also many tribes and indigenous groups and activists and artists and kind of other people who care about the desert for various reasons. And so they started arguing, you know, ten years ago that renewable energy development of this sort sort of large scale on what is called undisturbed lands was going to threaten deserts and was a problem. It's just come to beaty kind of now. And it's come because there's a new transmission line that's going to be built around the state of Nevada. So it's a big triangle and that's going to help carry renewable energy but also fossil fuel based energy probably and export that to other states. So the solar developers are kind of following where these transmission lines are likely to be.

Now, knowing as we do that similar to the water crisis, there's a clock ticking here in terms of climate change and global warming, and I'm wondering what you think what it's going to take for us to have I never used the word Manhattan Project because that bespeaks war. I tend to use the word Apollo Project, where we're going to really, really the government's going to get serious about spending money on these projects, not waiting for private developers to do it. What do you think it's going to take.

What an excellent question. I think we're all we're all asking that question right now.

Yeah.

And to be clear, just since you were talking about some of like sort of where nationally we're going to be putting renewable energy development, right, I am not. I mean, most energy experts agree that we're going to need some you know, large scale utility scale solar and wand and renewables. So this is not a this is not an argument against large scale solar per se. It's a question about where we put it and how we're building it out. Human settlements are all kind of unsustainable in their own ways, right, So some cities need water brought to them, some cities need food brought into them, like New York. So it's not again, it's not also to say that, you know, we've made a terrible mistake creating cities in the Southwest. I mean, I think there's a few things that are missing right now. So one is we don't really have good frameworks for large scale planning in the United States. And I sort of mentioned this, I think in the article in passing, probably in one sentence. But there isn't other than the Bureau of Land Management, which isn't really staffed or funded for playing this kind of role. There is not a federal agency that can make really big, coordinated decisions about land use. Seems very important. So there are you know, there are planned energy corridors like so there's a they know where these transmission lines are likely to go. There was some federal planning around that, but there's absolutely no coordination between different types of activities related to renewables, So lithium, geothermal, solar farms, all that can kind of happen in the same place. All those permits are assessed separately. The planning of transmission lines and location of substations takes place separately from questions about where to put actual solar farms. So all of these things are happening in this really piecemeal way that makes it hard to make good decisions. And I think also the role that the federal government is playing is one of kind of lowering barriers to private development. Right They've tried to make it easier for many good reasons for private developers to build out solar, to build out renewables, to reduce the financial risks that those companies are taking on to do it. Which is good in terms of facilitating you know, solar happening quickly, it is not as good in terms of helping guide projects to the best locations or having these kinds of big picture questions in mind. Right, So the federal government could be making decisions like should this land in central Nevada be part of our twenty five y twenty five initiative, which is the goal to build out twenty five gigatts of solar by twenty twenty five on public lands, or.

The thirty ontograt for that.

They're trying to be Yeah, but there's also at the same time a thirty by thirty initiative, which is to conserve thirty percent of the land mass in the United States as you know and whatever they call it, you know, intact habitat. And so this land in Nevada be part of the energy sort of portfolio or part of the conservation portfolio. I mean, those are the kinds of questions that I think the federal government could be stepping in to help answer.

You're an urban sociologist, describe for our listeners what that is. Yeah.

So I usually say I'm an urban and environmental sociologist, and so a lot of my work is about ideas about nature and the environment and how we mobilize them when making decisions about the built environment about cities. So, before I got my PhD, I worked for the New York City Parks Department.

Actually, so, where are you from.

Originally I'm actually from Kentucky, but I went to college near here. I went to Vassar i.

Vasa, Yeah, nuts valid, and then you got your PhD.

Yeah, So I worked here in city government and then I stayed here. I worked for a program called Partnerships for Parks that was actually a public private partnership, but it basically existed, exists, it still exists to get communities involved in their city parks and to advocate for them, and to also help the parks department work better with the public.

I first moved here in seventy nine to go to NYU, and then the Conservancy emerged, and there was all this brief, as I recall, debate about what union labor no city workers who worked there, how much were they being usurped by this private group. Now we have this quasi private public marriage of the two. I mean Central Park is like a business.

Now it is. And you know this actually relates to the other things we're talking about. I mean it's a double edged sword. In the West. I mean, national parks are much like Central Park. Right. National parks, as many people know, are these very controlled spaces. You're shuttled from here to there. They're super crowded, there's lots of infrastructure, bathrooms, internet for tourists. It's for tourists. Public lands are like the interstitial spaces were I mean, I will just say so coming from California, there's a lot of state parks there. They don't allow dogs in state parks. So it was the middle of COVID and I got dog when I moved to California from New York because I didn't know what else to do with my time, and so I discovered public lands because it was a place you could take your dog. You can take your dog, you can shoot guns, you can ride motorized vehicles, you can live there, you can camp for fourteen days without a permit. It's a really kind of interesting and amazing place. Again just because as an urban nite and a coastal urban nite. I really had no sense that this land existed in the United States and that it still exists. And it's not to say that it's a free for all, but those are the kinds of questions that are coming up now about about these landscapes. I think in a similar way, and the changes in parks in New York, I think can show us how public relationships to these spaces changes so dramatically. Right, Central Park went from being a dangerous place that was not particularly valued or was seen as like a liability.

We don't go in the park. Right, the park was dangerous as a very dangerous space.

Yeah, everybody, it's like the mall.

It is.

Central Park.

No, No, No. Urban and environmental sociologist Hillary Angelo. If you are interested in conversations about energy sources and our future, be sure to check out my episode with journalist Nicholas Narkos, who investigated the cobalt rush in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Just like chatting with his kid ZICKI. He was working in mind since he was three, basically, and then there was this moment where I showed him my phone. I said, the new iPhone is going for a two hundred dollars and everybody there knows that it's going into batteries something like fifty percent of the cobalt. Mind there it goes into letting my own batteries. How do you feel about this? And he was just like, I feel terrible, And I think he sort of thought, you know, how can people sort of sanction such violence against people like me?

Hear more of my conversation with Nicholas Narkos that Here's the Thing dot org After the break, Hillary Angelo proposes new ways of thinking for the solar model. I'm ATLEC. Baldwin and you were listening to Here's the Thing. For her article on the solar boom in the West, Hillary Angelo dug deep into the history of the area and the exploitation of its land. I wanted to know if places like Ni County were deemed off limits for development, what spaces might be used instead.

Yeah, it's a great question. People talk about locating large scale solar on disturbed lands, that's what they call these. So this is sort of industrial I think in terms of things like brown Field. So yeah, where there was a factory and it's polluted. They talk about areas where there was strip mining, and Appalachia so often prison top, yeah, mountaintop. So often prisons come to those regions now because they're sort of, you know, undesirable land uses. People don't want prisons near their houses. But it's also not the best thing for a community in Appalachia, right, Maybe you'd prefer to have a solar farm in a prison. There's also farmland. This is in California, so exhausted farmland that can't be used for farming anymore, or that they don't have water to farm on anymore, Like that's another good place for it. So yeah, I think those are all possible.

Now, the energy that could be accessed by the residents of Ni County doesn't have to be part of a solar farm that they're constructing. You could literally in the bargaining say you're going to build us our own solar farm. In other words, we're going to have free energy for everybody that lives here, free for the rest of our lives. And that's the gift you're going to give us, an exchange for us not getting in the way of your project. When you say this energy goes elsewhere, that's the reality. It goes elsewhere. They don't get it they don't get to wet their beak. As we say in the mafia.

It's tricky to answer that question. It does. Like the very simple way that it could be stated is, yeah, it goes elsewhere. This is like large scale renewable energy being generated to send and be purchased by companies. Yeah, exactly. But you know, as I've heard the Bureau of Land Management and other people say, like once you get the electrons in the transmission line, that you can't really parse it out in those ways. So there is a you know, obviously there is local energy being generated and used in Baby, So I assume they get some of it, but.

It feels like maybe they should get more of it.

Maybe they should get more of it. Yeah, I don't I don't think. I don't know. I mean, I think, you know, again, the bigger question for them is what is the economy of this town, And for them, this kind of tourism model seems to have a better long term future for them, and it makes them less reliant on a company that may be kind of here today, gone tomorrow. Renewable energy not just solar, but also things like lithium and geothermal, Like there's a lot of speculation. You know, it's a new in just and so there are many companies that are trying to get their hands in it. And some of them are good and stable and some of them are not. And so they yeah, they I think they worry about, you know, becoming a new company town basically, and then the company folds.

And then do you like writing? I do like writing? Yeah, yeah, Because I'm not saying this to be kind. What really hooked me was that this is such so well written, this piece you did you mean you're writing? It is fantastic. And I'm an old Harper's junkie. Louis Lappham is an old old friend of mine, and I don't mean old chronologically, which he's old chronologically too, but he's a dear friend of mine. So I'm a big Harper's reader. What are you working on now.

I'm working at a book. So I'm working at a book on public lands and the energy transition, so basically looking at the future of public lands in some ways that we've just talked about, like basically, climate change is this moment of large scale transformation. Old infrastructure systems are crumbling, old ways of doing life on Earth are crumbling, and we're building a bunch of new systems. So I'm curious about, you know, how that's happening and whether we are actually able to kind of change the way we do things, change the political economy, change the relationship to the environment in fundamental ways. I just want to say one thing. I'm going to invite myself to say one thing before we sign off, which is, you know, as an urban sociologist, a lot of what my work was about was looking at kind of the decisions we made in the name of nature that were not sound decisions environmentally, Right Like, we often oppose housing construction because we want to preserve open space, but in not building housing, we push people out, out and out and out, We increase commuting, we increase emissions, right, we fragment habitats, you know, and that kind of thing. So I think this is a similar thing, right Like, we need to decarbonize, we need to do it fast. We're in the middle of climate crisis, but there are multiple there are you know, competing issues here, including habitat and biodiversity crisis, and in using this land for scholar, I think we are sort of failing to think about the big picture of all of the environmental challenges that we're currently facing, different ways to solve them. Well, thank you very much, Thanks so much, thank you. That's a pleasure.

Institute for Advanced Study scholar Hillary Angelo my next guest. San Jose State University Professor Dustin mulvaney is the author of Solar Power, Innovation, Sustainability, and Environmental Justice, and he is also a source for the article Boomtown. I was curious to learn what the people of NY County know and understand about our climate crisis timeline and the sacrifice that is being asked of them.

I do think that these communities have a long history with extractive industries, and I think that that's the lens through which they're interpreting a lot of the land us change that might be coming their way and is already coming their way for solar development. These folks who live out there tend to be very tuned into the natural world, so to speak, the desert ecosystem, and they know things are changing. I have a sense that they they're familiar with the climate change overarching challenge that we're all facing. I think that they just have had these experiences where when let's say, you know, a major city like Las Vegas or Los Angeles needs a dump, they go to the desert. When they need lithium, like they need today, where do they go? They go to the desert. Where do they need in this case, lots of sunshine. You know, they feel like their resources are being somewhat squandered in the sense that they also look around and see areas that are disturbed, meaning they're not just living in these rural areas that are rich ecosystems. They're living in a rich ecosystem that also has pockets of extractivism all over it. There's mining all over the California Desert. There has been for a long time.

What are they mining were now?

Primarily there's gold mining, there's silver mining in Nevada. The there's new mining projects that are being proposed in and around the area where the solar development's happening as well. Lithium mining. We have somewhere on the order of last I checked, it was something like seventeen thousand plaster claims for lithium in the state of Nevada, which is you know, lithium. That's another major challenge, right we don't right now have the supplies of lithium to get to the electrification of vehicles that we are hoping to see in the future. So I guess the way I think some of these communities are seeing what they're being asked to sacrifice here, they see it as somewhat of a false choice because if you zoom out of the Mohave Desert and the areas of the Colorado Desert, which is southern California, if you zoom out, there's a lot of agriculture there. You know, if you look at blythe a major city on the Colorado River, they're growing lots of alfalfa for export for horses. Now, those are opportunities to cite solar farms in these agricultural areas the Imperial Valley.

So in an area where there's a lot of agriculture, the solar is built adjacent to that. It's land that they're not farmingland. It was one of the conditions there that makes it less problematic for them.

Well, the key thing is the habitat. So you know, when we're talking about the controversies in this particular region of California and Nevada, the controversies are usually around the public lands, and these public lands have been in conservation by default because they have never been developed. So that means that they're very good habitat for desert tortoise, which we've lost almost ninety percent of that population of that animal, that species that's been in that area since there were sabertoothed cats, right, that species has been there for a long time, and now we're we're damaging its habitat. So when a solar farm is cited in agricultural areas, it's usually a decision made by that farmer to convert either out of agriculture or maybe you know, in some cases, Blithe and the Imperial Value are going to be asked to retire land because we're over extracting water from the Colorado River as well. So there's this opportunity to kind of put that puzzle together. As agricultural lands are retired, maybe those are the opportunities to put the solar farms because you don't damage the habitat.

And when you say damage the habitat, when you have these installations in these places and quote unquote habitat is disturbed, are they talking about one or the other of boat or both of habitat for wildlife? You talk about the tortoises and so forth are not necessarily baby in Nevada, but are different areas worried about. They want things left absolutely pristine and you know natural or is it They want to be able to tear it up with an ATV and have a dirt bike track. And there's cultural imperatives and there's preferences they have that are not necessarily in harmony with nature. Is it a combination of both.

It is a combination of multiple factors, partly because the public lands system, which is managed by the Bureau of Land Management in the Department of Interior, is the one federal agency without a mission, meaning the National Park Service has a mission to provide park services and get people to see nature. The Forest Service has a mission to manage sustainable yield of forests in some places and manage wildernesses and others. But the Bureau of Land Management has multiple priorities. Conservation is one of them, but energy development is another, mining is another, Recreational ATV use is another. So in some ways this controversy embodies the challe faced by this federal agency since it was developed. You know, the history of that agency is the General Land Office was a federal agency that gave away land for development the Homestead Act. As the West was settled, the General Land Office offered out these lands for if you were going to develop these lands and work them, farm them, you could have it. And the desert areas were not farmable, so the General Land Office could never give away these lands. In fact, in the nineteen twenties, the Bureau Land Management tried to give away lands back to the states and that didn't happen. So the General Land Office gets merged with a grazing agency, and that's the land that the Bureau Land Management manages today. It's the nation's largest landlord. It manages two hundred and fifty million acres across the West, and it manages for all these different activities. Take the desert tortoise again for an example. The desert tortoise. We spend more money conserving that species than grizzly bear, bald eagle, and gray wolf combined. So that species we make a lot of federal investments in it. And on the flip side, we've now permitted somewhere on the order of ten gigawatts of solar on public lands. That's more than any other state has, So that means that there's this kind of inevitable clash of conservation because those lands were never developed. And the Energy Policy Act of two thousand and five was actually the biggest energy law that we had until this most recent inflation Reduction Act. So the Energy Policy Act of two thousand and five mandated that the Bureau of Land Management develop for solar and the idea there was partly, hey, we've been given out public lands for coal, oil and gas for all these years. Now it's the solar and other renewables industries turned to have the public lands.

Professor Dustin mulvaney, if you're enjoying this conversation, don't keep it to yourself, Tell a friend and follow here's the thing on the heart radio app, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. When we come back, Dustin Mulveny shares a potential way to move forward for the communities that will be affected by solar expansion. I'm Alec Baldwin and this is here's the thing. Dustin Mulveny's research focuses on the production of emerging technologies and their environmental impact, and specifically solar energy commodity chains. I wanted Mulveny to share what if any dangerous byproducts we might have to worry about from the expansion of the solar industry.

So solar doesn't seem to have the same level of challenges that batteries do up the supply chain. The key ingredient for solar panel is quartz. Most of the solar panels made out of glass, so by weight, quartz goes into that glass, but there's a semiconductor grade quartz that's mined and that's turned into a very very pure type of silicon that eventually becomes the wafers that you see in a solar cell. The key metal that is interesting that the solar industry uses is silver. So on a given year, the solar industry uses somewhere around fifteen percent of the global silver supply, which is quite incredible. Now. That is also interestingly hasn't led to an increase in silver mining, partly because of the photo industry going away. Silver was widely used in developing photographs, and that supply basically now has kind of slid over to the solar industry, not the direct supply, but has basically substituted that demand over time. So a solar panels a somewhat simple technology which poses some challenges for recycling. So that means that like the solar panels not very valuable inside problematic elements that are in a solar panel might be lead at the end of its life, there's a little bit of lead in the sod or it's not like a television set that has a real lot of lead in it. But that's probably the exposure of concern. For example, if you're recycling solar panels, they've recycled ninety five percent of their solar panels in Europe.

By the way, cadmium as an element in solar panels, what role does that play.

So there are two major types of solar panels. Most of them ninety five percent of them are crystalline silicon, so they rely on that quartz and that very very refined silicon. There's a different technology, a technology actually people thought would be more widespread today, which is called thin film. The silicon ones are exceptionally thin, but these thin films are actually like one hundred times thinner. They're on the order of one hundred nanem of thickness, and those are the semiconductor layers that generate the electricity. So there's one major manufacture of cadmium telluride solar panels, and that is a thin film technology that is based on cadmium compounds, so there's no quurts in that technology at all. It's literally a totally different solar technology. The materials are totally different.

Now in France where recently they ruled that you have to have a solar on every new parking structure that is built, and we have a little bit of that in this country. Without getting too political, Where in the triptich of what I understand in terms of the menu of renewable energy, where does geothermal fit in and does it really work? Is geothermal something to your understanding, something that only works site specific meaning your home. You drill a geothermal well to provide certain resource is heating and cooling, but it only works on a house by house basis. Or are there is there the potential for geothermal to work in the utility sense?

Yeah, so you're describing kind of the two different types of geothermal. There is a household level heating cooling geothermal where there's no electricity generation involved unless there's a heat pump associated with that, which could be the case. Geothermal at the utility scale is very location specific because it's taking very hot steam or hot water and bringing it up to the surface to turn a turbine. So there are some advances that people are talking about enhanced geothermal where they essentially go deeper and they may even fracture some rock, some of that heat source rock that's down low, to increase its surface area to get a little more steam out of it. But that is certainly another area that's growing right now. Geothermal power is growing and it also has the potential to provide some other resources as well, So not just generating electricity from these power plants, but district heating, so you could potentially so geothermal tends to have a lot of waste water cooling water associated with it, so you could potentially deliver just like we have our water systems in our under our streets, you could have a geothermal hot water system linked under the seats. In fact, New York City has the largest i think district steam system in yes, so you could do that.

What are some of the byproducts as well? It seems like every time we address a problem, renewable energy as an attempt to address a problem, and every time we do that, not that we have an equivalent number of problems we create, but we create some. What are some of the problems as far as you're concerned that the move to solar, that the build out of the solar future, what are some of the problems that result from that.

Well, there are man issues, as I mentioned at the end of life, I think that are important. There are chemical stewardship questions around some of the very easy to deal with chemicals. The industry actually doesn't use extremely toxic materials. It uses materials that could be relatively easily treated even in regular municipal wastewater treatment facilities in some cases, so I'm not overly worried about that, I'll be honest, I think the big issue is the land issue. We really are moving from subterranean energy resources where you just poke, you build a pad and poke a hole in the ground and get tremendous quantities of dense energy to a very diffuse resource that does require a lot of space.

But as far as I'm concerned, if I may, when you make that point, the first thing that comes to mind for me is you poke a hole in the ground and you have presumably less damage to the crust if you will to the exterior, But once that stuff comes out of the ground, it more than makes up for it and the toxicity and the damage it creates. Absolutely, we punch a few holes in the ground, we inject water into rock formations and force gas out with God knows what the byproduct of that is. Who really knows what the long term consequences of fracking are nobody, But the resultant energy is far more what we want. Do you see it that way?

I agree with that. Where I try to take a little different approach to that is to not think of it as training off one bad energy for another bad energy. Meaning it's absolutely the case that even if the worst case land use, solar is still better than what we're doing right now in terms of the level of fossil fuel extraction. That's not the question, But the question is how to do it better because we have so many other alternatives. That's the one beauty of this solar technology is that it's the only technologlogy we can live under that generates electricity. It's the only technology that we can integrate into the built environment. It's the only technology that we could easily integrate into agricultural areas. So to some extent, I think the challenge is exactly what how you framed it at first, which is that we tend to silo these issues. We're only thinking about solar development from the narrow lens of carbon. We're just like in the past, we'd clean up water. You know, when I lived in New Jersey, I was a site engineer cleaning up MTBE spills MTBs an additive and gasoline. And the way we cleaned up the groundwater pollution based on the rules that we're supposed to follow, was to put it in the air in New York, So we just shift problems from water problem to air problem. Air problem the water problem, like we have acid rain from coal, right that we somewhat solve that problem by taking the acid rain potential out of the air. But now we have solid weight problems and fly ash problems at all these coal fire power plants because the scrubbers have collected all that toxic stuff and now it's sitting at the coal plant. So with the case of solar, we need to be thinking more than just about like the trade offs on the carbon question. We need to be thinking about how could we build this in an integrative way where we're thinking about water we're thinking about land, we're thinking about air pollution at the same time, instead of trying to just solve the carbon problem and then we'll figure out what we'll do with the land problem later.

Typically, for what you'd see on its solar farm, how long do solar panels last? If you're wondering if a material that the urns generates energy is nonetheless banking in the one hundred and twenty degree sun, a wind turbine is out there in the ocean in salt water, and how long do those last. Let's just stick with solar. Solar panels typically last.

How long a typical solar panel is warranteed to last twenty to twenty five years, So that's unlike any other products that we really see. And the way the warranties work is that they put out a certain amount of power of their initial amount. So if you have one hundred watts solar panel, it will put out eighty watts by the end of its life twenty twenty five years. Because impurities in those very hostile environments on your roof in the desert, impurities creep into those solar cells and that's what takes away their ability to generate power over time. However, we've seen solar panels that are operating now fifty years, so we certainly are seeing solar panels that are made very very well. They go through all sorts of advanced degradation tests, hail tests, corrosion tests, all sorts of tests to make sure that they last a long time. In fact, they have to do those in order to get to ensure the warranties for the solar panels that they're selling.

What do you think is one step that we can take that you think is triage? We need to do this now. Now what do we need to do now?

I'll say two things. One, I think community ownership of some of these assets is really critical. So it might not be resolvable in its current situation, but we know that, for example, when ranchers get together and they own the wind farm, no one fights it. They all welcome it because they're definitely they're going to receive direct benefit from that. But I think it's really important to also note that when we're talking about building out solar, the US will need somewhere on the order between five thousand and fifteen thousand square miles of solar to power its portion of the great according to some modelers, so five to fifteen square miles. We have three hundred thousand square miles of brown fields, degraded lands, salt contaminated agricultural lands. All to say that I've often I feel like this conservation versus solar energy development is a false choice, because I think there is a path forward where we could keep many of the lands that we value for their conservation benefits, for their cultural resources, and find the places where the disturbed lands could be utilized because we have so much of that already and we know that those projects don't face any opposition.

Well, I want to say thank you so much. You are so authoritative about this. It's been my great pleasure, truly, thank you so much. My thanks to Dustin mulvaney and Hilary Angelo. This episode was recorded at CDM Studios in New York City, where produced by Kathleen Russo, Zach MacNeice, and Maureen Hobin. Our engineer is Frank Imperial. Our social media manager is Danielle Gingrich. I'm Alec Baldwin. Here's the thing is brought to you by iHeart Radio.

Here's The Thing with Alec Baldwin

Award-winning actor Alec Baldwin takes listeners into the lives of artists, policy makers and perfor 
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