The Ute Tribe will construct one of the largest solar farms in the US
ksut.org
ksut.org
And, if they have enough autonomy to import Chinese panels (50% cheaper), a network of these nations can blanket the entire country with renewables.
Funding and consultation started in 2004. Expected completion date 2029. Quarter of a century to build 8km of road.
So the easiest answer is: "yes"/"all of the above"
Even as energy production prices from solar trend towards zero, end user energy costs is still going to be lower bounded by transmission costs.
California in particular is getting a nasty taste of this, with many customer's bill being mostly transmission costs. However, this is largely because they're paying for PG&E's lawsuit payouts and regulatory required upgrades.
Energy can be free, but reliable and safe transmission will likely always be expensive.
Prerequisites for manufacturing panels here at an even remotely competitive price includes reducing labor costs and extracting/refining minerals at scale.
I absolutely agree we should onshore solar production but simply onshoring manufacturing isnt the first step. Frankly im not even sure the labor cost is even solvable. Will probably always have to utilize low foreign wages
The solar panels can enable other industries locally. For example, cheap and plentiful electricity can be used to produce local stuff that costs energy.
And solar panel production is not really "strategically" important - in a kinetic war, china can withold solar panels and it would not make a difference in the war.
Therefore, there's no reason not to import cheap panels.
Most likely, you will see a lot of made in Mexico/Caribbean/Canada
That doesn't sound sustainable at all to me.
https://www.renewableenergyworld.com/solar/solarcycle-to-bui...
The nice thing about them is that they're pretty simple compared to a lot of modern electronics. More hope about recycling them than piles of old computers.
We will need to process these appropriately at their end of life and not just landfill them.
Sounds pretty circular and sustainable to me.
The quip about "cheap" was that recyclability has nothing to do with it (it would likely add cost, not remove any).
The US installed about 32 GW of solar in 2023. (1)
A modern 395W bifacial solar module (2) weighs 25.7kg; about 65g per watt.
That's about two million metric tons of solar panels to handle every year. In contrast, the US produces about 73 million metric tons of plastic waste per year. We landfill a total of about 131 million metric tons per year (3) -- and that's ignoring that things like coal tailings aren't accounted for in landfilling amounts. We produce and burn about 534 million metric tons of coal per year.
The numbers are large but the relative cost of solar panels 50 years hence is likely extremely tolerable compared to the alternatives.
(1) https://www.seia.org/news/solar-installations-2023-expected-...
(2) https://signaturesolar.com/hyundai-395w-bifacial-solar-panel...
(3) https://www.epa.gov/facts-and-figures-about-materials-waste-...
Free, not exactly, but certainly affordable.
https://www.pv-magazine-australia.com/2022/04/08/andrew-forr...
For scale reference those solar farms | cattle stations are to provide power to mining operations that ship almost a billion tonnes of iron ore per annum (and remove a factor of overburden) consuming major amounts of fossil fuel in the process.
Work is also underway to upgrade trains that roll that billion tonnes to the coast down a 600m height differential to recoup energy.
See: Infinity train.
You appear to be carrying some beef about "solar power proponents" being unrealistic hippy socialists rather than multi billion dollar industrialists.
An entitled and creepy af attitude, if there ever was one.
"Foreign" "wages" are not going to stay low forever.
Already gone up and going up in some countries.
Think (and act) smarter, dude.
Only the fittest of the fittest shall survive.
- Bob Marley (Could you be loved)
Regardless, we’re already seeing the effects as manufacturing moves away from China and towards India.
Now, what happens to those increased wages when the demand for workers is gone?
That’s right. They collapse.
I don't know. I just felt it was like that, so said it. Can't really explain it. Gut feel.
>Now, what happens to those increased wages when the demand for workers is gone?
>That’s right. They collapse.
Yeah. It happens. All the time. Deal with it.
Cycles, dude, cycles.
Business cycles. Ups and downs.
Power cycles (between various power groups). Ditto.
You know, like our old pals, Xerxes, Darius, Cambyses, Alexander, Attila, Caesar, Ashoka, Chandragupta Maurya, Genghis Khan, Akbar, Timur, Napoleon, Hitler, Cortes, and many more (in no particular order).
Horse-drawn carts. Cars. ICE cars. EVs. Age of sail. Steam ships. Abacus. PCs. Mobiles.
You get the drift. It's called progress. Not so sure. But it is what it is.
This mindset lies at the center of neoliberalism and should be examined with nuance and perspective, since the quality of each individual's experience can vary wildly in a market which accepts such inequalities as necessary for the health of the overall system.
Policy makers on the other hand should consider externalities, and optimize for making them less bad, or at least not make them worse.
Im not sure I understand what you’re saying because it absolutely is orders of magnitude to import phones and laptops. Cars have more tariffs to protect the domestic market so Im unsure about that one.
Possibly not, but that can't be solved purely by employers. If a country for whatever reason does not have the economy to support this, this can't be solved quickly. Companies won't pay $15/hr to overseas workers; they'd probably just not spend the money there at all. That's the choice you're giving them.
Also - it probably will be cheaper, for three reasons:
- the local market won't bear the real price, and while this means less profit, it's still some profit, or presence, or whatever reason the vendor is selling for
- a similar but slightly different product might be offered. E.g. I bought a car in South Africa and it was a slightly simpler spec compared to the UK equivalent, despite looking identical
- local labour, fuel tax, sales tax, and other costs all increase prices. Driving the goods to a shop and buying them from it is a pretty different cost in different countries.
Should we pay everyone the same in a given country? Should a food deliverer make the same as a surgeon? No? Then this creates an economic hierarchy already. This economic hierarchy exists for countries as well.
It's not ridiculous to examine this. Your example compares the relative value of different professions, which is not relevant, because the context of this discussion is the comparison of domestic and foreign labor for the same professions.
Pragmatically speaking, there will always be an economic gradient under a capitalist system, as this gradient is necessary for the system to work. But we should still be mindful of the impact of our decisions at every level of the system.
Parent poster was suggesting that a cheap foreign labor market is required in order to create a better national energy grid. Economic policies which rely upon this sort of thinking inevitably establish structural classism. There is no moral excuse for structural classism, which is quite a different discussion than your comparison of food delivery and surgery as two services with a different inherent value.
Though, notably, the experience between someone in Mississippi and New York City is already wildly different.
I'm not comparing solar industry labor with cobalt mining, but I think cobalt mining is a good modern example of a more extreme version of this. Absolutely deplorable working conditions in order to enable a higher quality life for more "civilized" countries. The kind of classist thinking which has existed for such a long period of time that it's often taken for granted as some sort of necessary evil of society.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11668015/Devastatin...
That’s a surprisingly vague statement on a billion dollar project. I’d expect there would be spreadsheets and models estimating production/consumption locations for decades out and the company would be quoting a percentage figure even if that was a guesstimate.
Assuming 4 trillion kWh. https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/use-of-elect....
edit: Oh, and that $6.8 billion looks optimistic. This project with two AP1000s looks like it costs $30 billion. https://www.ans.org/news/article-3949/vogtle-project-update-...
So even if you discount the capacity by a 25% capacity factor, and use the lower cost per reactor that I originally quoted, this is still cheaper than nuclear. And that's just the up-front investment. Operating costs are much cheaper for solar as well, the majority of the cost is in the initial build.
Given that transmission isn't free, there are areas of the country where solar has a lower capacity factor than this, and solar and wind take more land, there are still cases where nuclear may be a better investment. I'm just pointing out that there are plenty of simple, economic reasons why solar and wind are growing at a much faster rate than nuclear; it's cheaper overall, it requires less up-front capital, etc. Nuclear is likely to fill niches for a long time, but investment in nuclear is not going to be the major way to decarbonize.
The only real drawback to building solar power in a desert is sand storms. That means the capacity factor is less relevant but life span and repair costs is a different matter. It is a bit similar to ocean wind farms. The capacity naturally goes up, but the salt water and transportation (as well as increased risks to engineers) makes life span and repair a bit more of an issue (it should be noted that most ocean based wind farms tend to use shallows and nature reserves near large cities).
But again, this project is built in a desert. The very definition of a place with consistent amount of sun. I hope the project works out.
I want the Utes to have success in this, but I don’t want the general attitude to be “trash the desert because there is sun there”.
It might be worthwhile to exclude certain areas of particularly rare variations of the ecosystem to be built in. But it's easy to end up with too much red tape that will be abused for NIMBY and by people who hide a fossil yolo attitude behind a facade of conservationism.
Perhaps there could be some mechanism for operating some veto quota, "pick the project you want most desperately to be stopped"? That scheme would probably end getting gamed in the ugliest ways, with sacrificial decoy projects getting proposed, not vetoed and then getting built to keep up appearances. Better not, heh.
An that's before even mentioning the other thing. Would you be interested in talking about uranium mines? Oh, not the other thing you expected?
Nuke advocates do themselves no favors playing shell games and weasel words with the economics. Nuclear is expensive. The nuclear industry needs to figure out how to make it a lot cheaper. And no, it's not just the NIMBY regulation.
The legacy nuke industry has a ton of deeply embedded lobbying and relationships with the regulatory agencies and congress, including ancillary groups that do fuel rod reprocessing and waste transport, cushy high-cost satellite industries.
Nuclear is stuck in a rut. Economically viable nuclear needs a clean-slate redesign and all the old players need to be thrown out. Computer designs, modern software and sensors, materials, etc. Research LFTR to the wazoo.
One of the big pushes IMO should be the US Navy, which should start using nuclear power for all its fleet ships not just subs/carriers.
Yes, nuclear is getting buried on price, but you make out the total cost of solar much lower and much more certain than it is in reality. Nobody really knows how much will renewables end up costing when they start to make up the majority of production.
https://www.csiro.au/en/news/all/articles/2023/october/genco...
> Even with this extra VRE cost in 2030, the answer to whether renewables are the cheapest form of energy is still yes. And it remains so when VRE is at 90 percent of the energy system
Look, you're treating the current LCOE numbers and making the (mistaken or disingenuous) implication that solar/wind won't fall EVEN FURTHER, but they almost certainly will.
With solar, there is perovskites and many other avenues of improvement in the core technology. Both wind and solar will still drop in price from increased economies of scale. And battery storage is going to plummet with sodium ion in the near term, and hopefuly sodium-sulfur techs in the future in addition to whatever grid-specific use cases are developed.
So it's true! Nobody know how much renewables will cost... or HOW LITTLE they will cost... in the long run.
Existing already-built nuclear is woefully noncompetitive, but I'll take it for grid levelling over gas turbine and (ugh) coal, so keep the lights on.
But NEW nuclear? What price are you targeting? I would guess in the timespan of a new nuke plant construction (10 years), solar will drop by 50%-60% in costs (inflation adjusted), and I think wind still has 33% drops coming. I mean, how does a sensible person approve a nuclear project with this degree of uncertainty/evolution/revolution in power costs?
And if you want to talk uncertainty in cost of electricity, the unreliable final construction and operation costs of nuclear are much more unreliable from that standpoint.
Believable models of achieving that goal call for setting up capacity markets where traditional suppliers are paid to not emit, and stand by to intervene when required by weather conditions, achieving close to net zero year round emissions (¹. Nobody really knows how this will end up costing because no such grid exists today.
Grid scale battery storage is still very far from competing with traditional baseload production, even when supplied with free renewables. Sodium has been the next big thing for the last decade, but its only deployments are in the experimental, MWh range. It's still far from a mature, proven technology, let alone one that can disrupt lithium in the gridscale storage space.
Perhaps you are handwaving substantial technical and economic details away and making too bold claims insufficiently supported by data. Not unlike the nuclear fanboys who are seeing thorium fast breeders just around every corner.
(¹ Btw, this is just another nail in the nuclear coffin - coal too - because they can't play nice with a fast moving grid.
It is very expensive, there is no way around the extreme engineering costs of nuclear reactors. Even before trying to make then safe from threats extant and possible.
That is before the unknown costs of handling long term waste using technology that has not been proven, or invented, yet
A lot of the nuclear risk is already included in that cost; we have fairly robust nuclear regulation and safety engineering these days. I have pretty high confidence in the safety of modern nuclear reactors, because there has been the engineering needed to ensure it, and there's fairly strong regulatory oversight. Of course, that all gets factored into the price tag, which is part of why the price tag for nuclear is so high.
I'm just saying that I see a lot of discussion of more nuclear investment as the solution to decarbonization, but it's hard to make the economics work out; nuclear has gotten more expensive over time, while renewables have been dropping in price dramatically.
I'm sure there is some room for nuclear in the market, but it's hard to see it providing more than a fraction of what renewables do, just due to the massive cost difference.
Plz bro, just 10 more years and the next design will finally solve all the probs.
I don’t like solutions that don’t ever make real progress. Solar is getting cheaper in real-time, as are batteries. Nuclear is getting comparatively more expensive every year.
This might still make solar cheaper but difference will be smaller than headline numbers.
The basic point is that nuclear is just really, really expensive, and it has been getting more expensive over time, while solar and wind have been getting cheaper.
No, that is a red herring. That exact comparison would be only for greenfield projects disconnected from everything else. When connecting to an existing network, the existing (and future) generation on it is also important. For instance, if the network already has a high enough amount of gas generation, 10MW of solar or 10MW of nuclear would reduce the use of fossil fuel by the same amount; the same applies to reducing the use of water stored in hydroelectric dams.
Nuclear will continue to be viable in denser areas, with lower solar resources, and when you want to get a lot of production closer to large population.
There's a reason there are so many nuclear plants in the Northeast Corridor (Boston to Washington area), and so many fewer in the southwest, and I imagine that this trend will continue.
This might still make solar cheaper but difference will be smaller than headline numbers (and you might retort that for nuclear we then need to include dismantling costs as well).
There are probably studies that have done an analysis of this kind for the entire U.S. and calculated various scenarios. I know that these have been done for Germany and other European countries. A 100% renewable system usually comes out cheaper than including nuclear in the mix to any large extend (though Germany has no remaining old reactors which could get their lifetime enhanced relatively cheaply).
You don't get to say "oh well it'll be 1GW of solar if we also build 1GW of wind" because that's not the project.
This is all an excuse to talk around Solar's god awful capacity factors which take the shine off those $/MW headlines.
And remember, nuclear generally needs some form of storage or supplementation with on-demand generation (generally via fossil fuels). Nuclear reactors are very slow to increase or decrease their output; they're best providing a constant base power output, but to account for periodic changes in demand across the day, you need either grid-scale storage or to supplement them with things like gas turbines that can quickly spin up and down. Many of our existing grid-scale energy storage systems are there to support nuclear. For example: https://www.wbur.org/news/2016/12/02/northfield-mountain-hyd...
But if you're already going to be building the grid-scale storage, supplying it with renewable energy can be a lot cheaper than supplying it with nuclear.
I'm not saying that nuclear will have no place in the energy grid as we decarbonize. But the economics are hard to justify as renewables and storage become cheaper.
Plus, when the hydro storage fails and floods a town, that’s still pretty bad.
Somewhere like Kansas, wind power and battery based storage may be more effective.
Here's a map of pumped storage hydro potential; note how dense the potential is throughout most of the Western US. https://maps.nrel.gov/psh
Depending on how you measure, lots of states are flatter than Kansas. Florida is the flattest state by nearly all measures. Illinois is crazy flat as well.
I don't like it. I do like renewable power, but this kind of puffery makes people think that we're right on the verge of building an all-renewable electrical grid. Which we are not.
We could have a zero-emissions electrical grid in ten years, by embracing a nuclear baseline, putting in a bunch of solar and wind where it makes sense, and adding some battery storage to soak up the intermittency of the latter. But when people read solar by the nameplate, they think it's 7x cheaper than it is, and try to compare that number to nuclear, rather than the actual one.
Edit: 3.58B, not 12 from another comment. Still, pretty large investment for Philippines.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhadla_Solar_Park?wprov=sfti1#...
So 35% of the Ute Nation's GDP vs 1.3% of the Phillipines. OP is clearly either uninformed or biased. Or just doesn't understand Tribal Sovereignty status in the US.
[1] One feels that 30 life for something where components can be constantly replaced as they wear out is a misnomer.
Additionally, the Ute will need to weather that impact for a full 30 years, while the Filipinos will only need to for a few.
https://www.durangoherald.com/articles/la-plata-electric-put...
Incentivize home energy storage and invest in grid level energy storage and encourage purchasing EVs that can be used as grid batteries? Nope.
Invest in better grid-level interconnects to export electricity? Nope.
Work with the community to attract industry that uses lots of electricity and approach commercial/industrial users to find ways to decarbonize? Nope.
Ban customers from new grid-intertied solar: YES.
Engage in scare-mongering about solar causing fires and being dangerous or causing grid instability when grid-intertie systems have a slew of safety mechanisms? YES.
Absolute morons.
Also buried in that article: they signed a contract with their wholesale provider mandating that they can only generate 5% of their own electricity. The article claims, but does not explain, how this doesn't limit solar generation - there's a bunch of hand-waiving about how "it doesn't prohibit homeowners from generating solar power."
That contract goes until 2050. Who looked at the electricity market and said "you know what? Let's sign a multi-decade contract, that seems smart!"?
Many incumbents will try their best to prevent it, and to be fair it's not entirely for malicious reasons. Energy taxes and income from power plants pay for a lot of community value. The income has to be replaced somehow if it is removed.
I think that solar + various storage options are technically already the best solution for energy supply, and this kind of political inertia is the main obstacle to overcome in order to make it a reality.
https://www.canigougroup.com/news/evaluation-of-green-hydrog...
Methanol is another valuable endpoint, the Chinese version of this (CEEC Songyuan) is using the same approach but intends to make both ammonia and methanol.
It's a PBS special about the history of the Boston subway (which was one of the first in the nation).
To give you an idea of what construction safety was like back then, they would routinely encounter gas lines, cut them WITHOUT turning off the gas, and keep working.
Obviously, this led to lots of explosions but also very quick construction. If you are optimizing for speed over safety/environmental/etc it's pretty surprising how quickly you can build something.
Near where I live is a bridge over a river that needs replacing. The county had to study three different ways to do it, weighing environmental impact, traffic disruption, total cost of each option, and so forth.
The planning and regulatory portion of the project is easily 75% of the timeline, and that's for a fast one due to the condition of the bridge itself. If it were less urgent, it would have likely taken even longer.
Right next door to that bridge are three other projects: a cliff/dirt collapse/erosion/retaining project that kept the river parkway closed for like 4 years, and two bridges being reconditioned that have been closed for 3. Those went through the "normal" channels.
I think a part of the difference is that the federal government provides funds for maintenance of the interstates, and the sheer volume of traffic that was being re-routed down other roads that weren't really intended for the extra traffic (adding lanes to 94 certainly helped some).
Shame that it requires a catastrophe to see what we can really do when it needs doing.
That's still done today, evidently! A few months back, there was a small gas leak in my neighborhood. When they knocked on my door to say they'd be working in the area, the repair crew leader was kind enough to indulge my questions.
I asked them if my gas would be shut off. They said no, they do the work while the gas is still on!
And they must have been cutting into the gas line because they replaced a section that ran under the street. They used a backhoe to dig huge holes on both sides of the street and then fed a flexible pipe through.
Here's a video about something kind of similar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCMs__ZnOfA
I'm sure today's techniques are different and much safer, so I don't think it negates your point that they used to do risky stuff.
My understanding is that most "last mile" gas lines are pretty low pressure and low flow. On purpose, so that if theirs a leak they aren't releasing massive amounts of gas into the atmosphere in a hurry, so the concentration doesn't raise to dangerous levels.
Then when they are working on the lines and in those pits to make connections, they have detectors to tell if there's a dangerous build up, and ventilation to ensure it doesn't happen anyway.
The system generally being low pressure is why sometimes during really cold periods when demand is high, the gas company has to adjust field regulators to increase flow so that demand can be met. They normally run at low enough flow that if everyone's furnace and stove and water heater all run at once, the lines would effectively run out of gas.
we now build projects to relocate utilities (so that you don't have to shut down a subway line to replace an adjacent water pipe) but that stuff is costly and everyone is prepared to sue the other in case of a mess-up. but there is a lot of the physical version of tech debt; New York is still replacing wood and lead piping, for example.
- digging down a small amount (in contrast to London where they dug DEEP under everything else)
- rerouting ALL of the existing pipes etc (you can find photos of the rerouted gas lines)
- Putting in the subway
- Putting everything back
Each crew had field archaeologists and biologists and representatives from the tribes and Bureau of Land Management working closely with us to insure that we followed all procedures to protect sensitive areas from disturbance.
That meant in practice that local or BLM archaeologists and biologists led the way across the area where we intended to acquire data. Just as you see in the photos in the linked presentation (user 1970-01-01), teams of experts surveyed the land looking for sensitive or threatened plants and animals and archaeologists identified areas with cultural artifacts. These areas were flagged and that flagging placed them off limits to our operations. They were No-Go areas. We had permission to operate within a fairly narrow easement across the landscape with strict guidelines about vehicle access, allowable damage to existing vegetation and the landscape, trash removal, etc since that region is very arid and small things like orange peels become items that are recognizable centuries after they are discarded.
For this survey I expect that they staked the potential affected area and walked every bit of it using pin flags to mark things that are not to be disturbed. The area is only about 8 square miles so it shouldn't take that long.
In case of a chip factory currently developed by Intel in Germany, they went out onto the 200ha (roughly 280 football fields) and found and resettled 7 rare hamsters. 2 of those had to be dug out: https://www.mdr.de/nachrichten/sachsen-anhalt/magdeburg/magd...
"The last hamster of the fields gave a timid crow when Alexander Resetaritz drew it out of the construction on his paw and pushed it into the transport box."
I wouldn't underestimate how effective experienced and qualified humans can be in finding and interpreting signs of the presence of a small number of specific species in a large area. Drones and AI will probably get there at some point, but I doubt that its close.
Hopefully they can attract further industry, that will consume that cheap energy close to production. Metal smelting ones for example.
> Alcoa released hazardous substances, including polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), onto the facility property as well as into the Grasse River through four industrial outfalls
I wonder for what you need PCBs in sufficient quantities to cause a superfund site.
Reading the slides from the biological/archaeological impact studies from Canigou Group shows that someone didn't proofread their slide.
The burrowing owl study states that it is "Threatened with the State of Colorado but not Federally".
It was probably supposed to say "Threatened within..."
Good luck to the Utes. There is not much industry other than oil and gas exploration in that region unless recent interest in nuclear power generation has restarted local mining operations shut down in the 1970's that used to be large employers (and polluters) out there.
EDIT: Following the link posted by another comment shows that the slide in this article has been corrected. The same slide on that link says "in" instead of "with".
As long as they properly distribute the profits to tribe members. There have definitely been some boondoggles in the past that only help the 1% ers
Electing tribal leaders who will focus on improvements that spread the wealth and boost living standards can be as difficult for them as it is for other Americans to elect leaders who attempt to improve their constituent's lives and create opportunities for them.
It is also a challenge, less so today than in the past, to find tribal members with the domain knowledge to be able to understand how all this can be put to best use for the benefit of all.
Then you also need firewalls in place to prevent exploitation by multinational corporations with the domain expertise who use that to draft agreements that end up cheating the tribes out of profits that should go to the tribes.
It's a hard problem since it is so endemic in the American business world and since many programs that are currently in place have no one conducting effective oversight to insure that business is conducted transparently and to the benefit of the ones owning the resources.
Those who should be regulated end up writing the regulations that govern their activities and so they do this in a manner that offers the least friction to their operations at the lowest cost to them.
It is definitely not just a tribal problem here in the US. It is endemic in the corporate world and in government. That's why I mentioned that part at the end of that post.
If you don’t eat your vegetables I’m sending you to live with your uncle Phil, in Colorado.
> Annual capacity is estimated to be about 756 megawatts.
756 MW/year = ~2 MW/day = less than 1 watt per day per panel?
I get that the sun doesn't shine 24/7, but even so that seems way off. What am I missing? Maybe the 756 MW figure is daily instead of annual?
971MW, producing up to 1700 to 2400 GWh/year.
That puts it at 2471 hours/year of full-power production equivalent, or 28%. That's good - it's a nice area for solar.
(1)- https://www.utilitydive.com/news/solar-wind-renewable-energy...
“756MW of annual capacity” doesn’t make sense, given that MW is a measure of instantaneous power. They might mean that the average daily peak output over the whole year is 756MW?
yep, they’ll waste the energy trying to transmit it
sounds like they’re going to be attracting bitcoin miners. they’re the only use case that’s able to be in the middle of nowhere without needing other infrastructure, like robust internet.
any other use cases you all know of?
High voltage transmission lines are very efficient. On the order of 1-2% loses per 100 miles for 500 kV carrying 1000 MW [0].
[0] https://web.ecs.baylor.edu/faculty/grady/_13_EE392J_2_Spring...
But you also need/want robust power delivery to run a datacenter, and a single local solar project isn't robust power delivery. If you had robust power delivery, those transmission lines could be used to export the solar, and it wouldn't make sense to put a datacenter there anymore.
I'm pretty sure this tribe has a casino on their reservation, but I know the one in Utah doesn't, both get money from oil extraction, but I'm not sure if they are totally independent from each other?
But then again, those data centers could have bitcoin miners, at which point, we'd be back to the casino. =)
https://energypeople.com/news/story/green-returns-for-green-...
They also state that they're interested in developing hydrogen and ammonia production capability using the electricity produced, rather than selling it to the grid, but building such production facilities would increase up-front costs by several billion.
Utah is already a power exporter. Utah generates about one-fifth more electricity than it consumes, and the state is a net supplier of power to other states.[1]
Transmission is expensive; you'd rather sell locally. Before you finance a $1B project it would be good to have a sense of how you expect to sell the outputs!
Part of what made this project viable IMHO was the adjacency to existing WECC Interface Paths.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WECC_Intertie_Paths#/media/Fil...
Right now we get past a lot of that by bundling up coal and natural gas in trains and pipes and generating closer to the sink.
> “We, as the Ute Mountain Ute tribe, had been a fossil fuel tribe with oil and gas for a long time, probably over 50 years. Today, with the changes in legislation, global warming, and climate change, you can see the impact of what's happening to our world.
I think I only ever heard tribe used to describe a group or maybe 10-30 hunter-gatherers, or perhaps the descendants of such a group, but this is clearly not that. It sounds more like it might be a municipality with jurisdiction over some city+-sized plot of land? Or is it like a church type of structure where anyone in the area can sign up to be a member? Or something completely different?
I've tried looking up tribe but the definition I get is this
> A unit of sociopolitical organization consisting of a number of families, clans, or other groups who share a common ancestry and culture and among whom leadership is typically neither formalized nor permanent.
That doesn't sound like the type of structure to have a billion USD to invest. There's three definitions given but none of them fit the context here
And a FAQ: https://www.bia.gov/frequently-asked-questions
The land they directly control can be anywhere from tiny to gigantic, depending on the particulars: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ef/Indian_L...
Many people also live in surrounding areas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Indian_reservations_in...
Much of the time the tribes have their own small governments, similar to municipal services, but also often with their own equivalents to "courts", "police", etc., who may utilize different corrective measures than the US ones. Often they will have an agreement with surrounding law enforcement (or the federal government) to partner up on certain categories of infractions, such as traffic violations or murders.
Some tribes have some money thanks to casinos and other business activities, but most are unfortunately quite poor, and many of their communities must work very hard to survive.
(This all is just my layman's understanding. I am not Native American, but I've lived near their communities. Please correct me if I'm wrong!)
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Edit: The 2023 movie Killers of the Flower Moon is really worth watching: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killers_of_the_Flower_Moon_(fi...
> I had no idea some enjoyed so much autonomy, or that something other than the democratically elected government arranged for courts to exist in some regions.
I just want to clarify that while "autonomy" may be the case on paper, the reality on the ground often seems more bleak -- at least to me :(
From what I can see as an outsider living near and traveling through some communities in the West, it seems like they don't really "enjoy autonomy" as much as "learned to hang on, by a thread, to what they have left".
It's a really sad sight to behold, ancient cultures reduced to communities smaller and poorer than your average middle-class California suburb. Depending on the particular tribe and reservation, a lot of times they are more "trailers and mobile homes scattered over acrid plateaus" than "thriving communities". The cultural ties they have to the past -- in food, in dance, in song, in story, in way of life -- seem to be more acts of remembrance, occasionally celebratory but often somber or perhaps even mournful :( By and large the dominant theme today is poverty. Overwhelming poverty, at 300% that of the White poverty rate.
I don't mean that they are joyless or hopeless, but that it's a very far cry from what real sovereignty and community would look like if they still controlled their ancestral extents and resources, everything from land to water to fish & game and real diplomatic autonomy, not as a "domestic dependent nation" beholden to the US Congress. Today they exist not in equal partnership with the United States, but at its mercy.
Whatever US laws say on paper, in reality the tribes are often treated as second-class citizens living in the invisible margins of American life, and only in ways that Congress allows. And to the extent they are protected by US law at all, those laws can be changed on a whim by a new generation/administration of US policymakers, as they have many, many times in the past through the United States' frequent betrayals. Yes, the tribes have some specialized courts and law enforcement today, but that's more Congress throwing them a bone. It's not true sovereignty, but something more like house arrest, where they're "allowed" to manage some of their internal affairs, but only as long as and only in ways that Congress sees fit.
They don't often have their own economies beyond casinos and tourism, they can't manage their own foreign relations with other nations outside the USA, they often don't own their own land, etc. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tribal_sovereignty_in_the_Unit...). TLDR the United States forcibly relocated the tribes to some of the worst geographies (after killing many), and then told them what they are and aren't allowed to do on the land that we allow them to live on. Many are freely murdered and never investigated (https://www.nativehope.org/missing-and-murdered-indigenous-w...).
> If I ever visit the USA, this sounds like they'll be some of the culturally most interesting places to include in the trip.
If you ever visit (welcome! sorry for the grimness above), just please approach them with the respect you'd show any unfamiliar culture. Some tribes have facilities (like museums or visitors' centers) for receiving tourists. Others may be less welcoming, especially, well, if you're a White European.
If you want to understand their cultures, don't just see them from the US side, with our laws and statistics and treaties glossing over the centuries of violence and erasures.
In books, movies, documentaries, and even video games, many tribes have tried to tell their own stories from their own points of view. If you want to visit any, it might be worth doing a bit of reading beforehand and then maybe reaching out to tribespeople to see if they would be willing to actually meet you...?
If you just drive near or through these communities, you'll only see them at their surface levels, because they're usually not a tourist destination in the way that, say, the welcome centers of a US state would be.
Sorry if any of the above sounded preachy. That wasn't my intent. I just didn't want you to blindly stumble into a situation thinking things are great now, with tribal members welcoming you with open arms and eager to show you their culture.
Anyway, I do hope you come visit someday and see for yourself, then come back and tell us where we were wrong!
You will run into confusing situations where a county law enforcement official might patrol on a reservation because there is overlap or nebulous boundaries with the blessing (cross deputizarion) from the tribal law enforcement. However some tribes defer more of their governance to a Federal Bureau of Indian Affairs.
For a largely autonomous example, the Cherokee in North Carolina are interesting. Largely funded by their casinos and now marijuana which is legal on their reservation but not the encompassing state of North Carolina. They have fairly strict rules around membership, such that a Cherokee that was shipped off to Oklahoma is not eligible for membership. Land ownership is based on tribal membership, not quite following standard American rules. It’s a fun deep dive to read up on their system.
Each tribe is free to determine its own legal structure, as it is a separate polity (a sovereign nation) from the US -- sort of. US federal law still applies on federal reservations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_Americans_in_the_United...
But it's certainly nothing like the primitive society you are imagining, and that's partly why I think a lot of American Indian nations don't use that word to describe themselves.
For example, the "Seneca tribe" calls themselves the Seneca Nation. That is, they were and are a group of people sharing common ethnicity, culture, language, and some kind of governmental organization across their territory, which at one point covered a large portion of what is now western New York state. They lived in towns with palisade walls and farmed several crops. They interacted with other nations in a complicated geopolitical system involving trade, alliance, and war. It's a far cry from the image of dumb savages in crude huts.
In the USA today, American Indian nations are essentially sovereign nations, and have some of their own territory in areas called reservations. So that's what we are talking about here: the actions of a sovereign nation, with its own government and geographical territory.
That sounds a lot more accurate given the explanation (also from other comments) where they have their own courts and everything. Odd that the words reservation and tribe are still in use like this.
(And perhaps I should clarify: I didn't mean to imply that these people (evidently having a billion to invest in solar) are living in huts or otherwise are like the historic hunter-gatherer societies I mentioned. The word evoced that image for me, but of course I realise that this cannot be accurate, hence the confusion.)
The Ute Mountain Ute Tribe referenced in the article is one such Federally recognized tribe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tribe_(Native_American) https://www.bia.gov/service/tribal-leaders-directory
B) its more like what would be referred to as a "semi autonomous region" in other countries. They have their own governments, police forces, etc.
C) they probably secured some sort of outside investments, these native american reservations are by no means unsophisticated. Other reservations have been able to bring in revenue by using their autonomy to establish casinos and resorts on their lands, even in states where that would be illegal outside of the reservations (because the reservation's autonomy means that they aren't necessarily bound by the laws of whatever state they are in).
In any case, it’s quite common in the US for groups like this to be referred to as a “tribe”. I guess today you’re one of the lucky 10,000.
> Because the Constitution vested the Legislative Branch with plenary power over Indian Affairs, states have no authority over tribal governments unless expressly authorized by Congress. While federally recognized tribes generally are not subordinate to states, they can have a government-to-government relationship with these other sovereigns, as well.
> Furthermore, federally recognized tribes possess both the right and the authority to regulate activities on their lands independently from state government control. They can enact and enforce stricter or more lenient laws and regulations than those of the surrounding or neighboring state(s) wherein they are located. Yet, tribes frequently collaborate and cooperate with states through compacts or other agreements on matters of mutual concern such as environmental protection and law enforcement.
From https://www.bia.gov/frequently-asked-questions
Unfortunately, this is just a continuation of the numerous betrayals the US and military units have inflicted on them for the past centuries. Our government and soldiers routinely violated the treaties we signed and forcibly relocated and murdered many people.
Many tribes did not retain their federal recognition and just kinda exist in a no-man's land between states and the federal government, lacking much of the autonomy of the federally recognized tribes.
I seem to remember being taught in school that the native american reservations exist because of treaties signed by the united states government with sovereign nations (those nations being the native americans) and that the US government is obligated to respect their autonomy and sovereignty by the terms laid out in those treaties.
i don't mean to contradict your claims that the Federal Government has a long history of violating these treaties, as that is undoubtedly true. i'm just curious because the way i interpreted your description makes it seem as if they're only autonomous because the federal government has chosen to recognize them.
Through centuries of conquest and betrayal, the US governments have eroded much of the tribes' previous power, and these days they exist under a complex legal framework in which they have some sovereignty and some autonomy, but not to the same degree that, say, Canada or China have. Their rights under US law are granted by (and can be revoked by) acts of Congress. Lacking their own militaries and international diplomacy, they are more like states than countries as we think of them.
But it's actually way more complicated than that and depends on whether the tribe is federally recognized, what specific rights Congress withheld from them, whether they are prosecuting tribesmembers, other Indians, or non-Indian Americans, etc.
At the end of the day, it unfortunately comes down to who has the bigger stick. Tribes can say no all they want but it's up to the US Congress to listen or not. And they don't necessarily have the same Constitutional protections that US states have, either. It just really depends. And again, I'm not an expert at all!
This page has more detail: https://www.uaf.edu/tribal/academics/112/unit-4/generalprinc...
But you're totally right, the name itself doesn't mean much.
No, I just did not know what it meant and certainly would not have guessed something close to nation as it turns out to be! I'm feeling like there's suddenly more countries on the planet than I knew about, and wondering why we never hear from them on the news or elsewhere! Well, until now at least :)
A sibling comment says they avoid the word tribe to avoid the historic associations though, so I don't know what their preferred word would be. Probably it also differs between groups or even individuals within one.
A lot of bitcoin miners use stranded power, which would otherwise go to waste. People often respond to me on HN that the power could be easily/cheaply sent elsewhere for better uses [0]. Comments like this just re-enforce the fact that these people have literally no idea what they are talking about. Thanks, I'll favorite this one. =)
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
(We detached this offtopic subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39411064.)
Often claimed, rarely supported by evidence or numbers.
It's also unlikely to be very practical, because that'd essentially mean running bitcoin miners in load-balancing mode, and not running them most of the time. Given that bitcoin hardware tends to loose value quickly, as the next generation of mining hardware comes to the market, this is unlikely to be a feasible model.
Update: I got downvoted for not posting them. I did in the link above though.
https://www.coinmint.one/ is the data center. They have about 500MW of power going to them from the Moses-Saunders dam.
They don't need to shut down cause it is hydro and 24/7. They actually help keep the dam running cause they balance the load coming from it. Just like the aluminum smelter before it did. The location of the facility and dam are near the border of Canada and the US. It is very remote and in the middle of nowhere with enough population to consume the 500MW. There are main grid lines going past them, but it would likely need new infrastructure to connect to it at that much power.
I've seen their power costs (including transmission), I can't post that, obviously. But, a large chunk of their costs, is transmission, which pays for the install and maintenance of the lines running the few miles from the dam. These are large / tall physical towers.
Disclosure: I'm a former very large scale bitcoin/litecoin/ethereum miner and now building an AI bare metal gpu service.
Even if the argument is that compute heavy data centers are the only use-case that makes sense, there's lots of compute use cases other than bitcoin. And obviously the former presence of the aluminum shelter suggests data centers are not the only good use-cases. I understand the appeal of the argument that bitcoin mining has less energy impact than people think because it can uniquely take advantage of weird edge cases, but it doesn't make sense to me.
The fact that the smelter shut down and literally nobody picked it up and put it to use, speaks volumes. Heck, Alcoa was so desperate to unload it, they let those "dirty" bitcoin miners move in, over any other business potential.
Here is another one... the Quincy/Wenatchee area of WA state. Also sparsely populated, but more hydro power than anyone knows what to do with. This is where a huge number of data centers are, including bitcoin miners.
When people say that the power "could" be sent elsewhere, they are right, you just need to build the damn transmission lines. It's not rocket science.
The reality of the situation is that certainly a lot of stuff "could" happen, like Fusion and Nuclear power too.
My point is that whataboutism, is probably a bad take here.
A lot of bitcoin miners are keeping fossil fuel spewing power plants from being retired because the regulations that keep power affordable for Americans haven’t caught up. There’s a reason China killed bitcoin mining and the US needs to follow suit. Literally killing the planet for imaginary coins that don’t solve any problems that weren’t already solved. Well, besides the whole anonymous ransom thing.
According to this data, China tried, but failed to kill bitcoin mining. As of the last update in Jan 2022, China currently has 55% of the hashrate it had before the ban. https://ccaf.io/cbnsi/cbeci/mining_map
Also, mining is a global industry. Banning it in one country is like grabbing a fist full of water. It just oozes out elsewhere. It looks like the China ban mostly oozed into the US and Kazakhstan, before rebounding back into China. The effective reduced total energy use from the China ban barely lasted 6 months before it surpassed previous levels.
This was the result of one of the strongest authoritarian surveillance states in the world. What makes you think anyone else can do better?
Oh and I'm more of a fan of Ethereum. They've now moved to PoS, which consumes a fraction of the power, and there is actual utility on that chain. Moved my bitcoin to wbtc too, but looking forward to more decentralized versions of it eventually.
https://medium.com/the-bitcoin-times/bitcoin-is-a-pioneer-sp...
Ethereum abandoning it just cements bitcoin as the winner. It might have some great utility, but bitcoin is now the standard for immutability that all other solutions will be measured against.
Only because there is only one chip that can be produced in mass, asic's.
> Ethereum abandoning it
Ethereum didn't abandon it, it was part of the plan all along. Bootstrap on PoW, move to PoS. I agree with you about immutability, but that is going to be an issue moving forward, as I believe strongly that human nature favors utility.
That money came straight from Texas citizens who gain nothing from the operations of these coin miners and who have already had to pay for the near collapse of the power grid back in Feb. 2021 which occurred because utilities are largely unregulated and can ignore requirements that they upgrade facilities or worse, just whine about the costs of bringing power generation plants into compliance with modern air quality standards like a bunch of rich spoiled toddlers. Many of these plants were grandfathered in when standards were established even though they would have been easy to upgrade at the time.
It is about time that the feds do what the Chinese did a few years ago and take a hard look at all the energy waste in shitcoin mining. [2]
In addition to energy consumption, this facility in Granbury, TX is already under fire for being a huge noise nuisance from the cooling fans that operate 24/7. [3]
[0] https://theweek.com/in-depth/1022698/how-voracious-bitcoin-m...
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/bitcoin-mining-cryptocurrency-r...
[2] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/02/large-cryptocurr...
[3] https://time.com/6590155/bitcoin-mining-noise-texas/
I understand from your replies that you had a personal stake in shitcoin mining and you're pivoting to something else. Maybe for you the handwriting is on the wall.
> I understand from your replies that you had a personal stake in shitcoin mining and you're pivoting to something else. Maybe for you the handwriting is on the wall.
This feels like a personal attack, which as I understand it, is against the guidelines. But, to explain... I worked for businesses with stakes. I didn't have it myself. That would be like blaming someone who works for SpaceX, for Elon's bad takes.
As far as the Texas political situation goes, I do what I can. I'm only one vote and experience has demonstrated that when you contact one of your elected reps here, the best that you can hope for is that they forget to add your contact information to their list of Texas residents who might support the election or re-election of people just like them. I made the mistake once of correcting one of my reps during a community phone roundtable discussion and later followed up with an email. Since then I have been trying (with some success) to remove my contact info from their call and email lists. The simple fact that they spam your contact accounts from every state-wide and national candidate in spite of the fact that they should know that they will never have your support tells me that they are trying to discourage people who will vote against them from participating in the process. It won't work with me but it might with others.
This is as far off of the topic of solar panels in the Four Corners region as I think I need to go today. Good luck in your new ventures.
Ethereum switched from PoW to PoS. GPU mining stopped. The company I was working for wound down. So, yea... way ahead of you.
Bitcoin is about to halve its emissions. I expect a lot of miners to shut down (or at least continue to concentrate into the larger corporations).
Comedy must be your true calling.
Edit: I'm not advocating fossil fuels. I think solar makes a ton of sense, but it also seems crazy to think we could build enough solar + storage capacity for the world. Nuclear energy is the real future.
The environmental impact of mining/refining is certainly significant and worthy of some concern. But it is worth noting that fossil fuels also require significant mining and refining. In general it is thought that solar panels would offset their environmental cost within 1-3 years, with an average lifetime of 15-30 years. So roughly, you could expect them to “recoup” about an order of magnitude more than it took to manufacture.
It’s actually a very good and smart question to ask. But I think sometimes it’s perhaps a question over-asked by some groups in bad faith to sow doubt. Similarly you’ll hear the same argument applied to plastic vs cloth shopping bags.
Either way, the plastic bags will be here as microplastic fragments long after the cloth bag has disintegrated and been recycled by microorganisms. The science isn’t quite consensus-level, but it isn’t looking good for microplastics, negative externality-wise.
This fixation on picking up plastic bag pennies on the ground while refusing to pick up the $100 bills like funding an electric train transit network and enforce the law on current transit systems so people feel safe to be on them makes it feel like there are no real adults in the room when it comes to these things. Nobody is building nuclear power plants in the desert running mass CO2 scrubbers either.
Also, land usage can be minimal. Vertical panels can allow farming, and are also more efficient (allow heat to escape), cover the early mornings and evenings better.
40m acres (just in US!) are used for ethanol production to produce a small fraction of fuel. I'd imagine the material costs of these 40m acres over 25 - 50 years (fertilizer, harvesting, shipping, refining ....) would be a lot more than solar panels.
Also, 40% of shipping is fossil fuels, we are mining, refining and shipping billions of tons every year.
Also remember the fossil fuel plants and infrastructure are not material free. There is a one time cost of materials there just as much as solar panels. But for fuel, solar panels have zero input costs, zero processing costs, zero waste production.
Solar is roughly on par with coal, depending on the exact type of solar technology used. Of course you can put solar on existing structures, in which case the land use is negligible and on par with nuclear.
Regarding energy input, solar panels break even after about two years, I think (no source on hand currently). It would be quite easy to have solar panel production run entirely on renewable energy input.
Regarding the other resources, you can't really compare energy sources to one another, as all are using vastly different inputs and have different challenges regarding disposal of waste and recycling. You'd have to make a judgement based on impact. I.e. coal is really bad, because it produces CO2 which has potentially society-ending consequences. Nuclear has challenges, because the waste remains radioactive for so long. My personal impression is that solar has some challenges, but those are manageable and likely can be mitigated by regulating disposal and recycling of old panels.
Solar is already cheaper than nuclear in terms of cost per MWH, and while adding extensive storage tends to even the cost out, nuclear still has some disadvantages including: uncertain uranium fuel sources and costs, black swan catastrophe concerns, cooling water demands, and long-term waste disposal costs - all issues solar mostly avoids. Some niche nuclear uses are more promising, e.g. China's current attempt to make pebble-bed helium-cooled models work for industrial process use (500C steam).
Look at France, they've got a big expensive mess on their hands after betting on nuclear: https://www.reuters.com/world/france-braces-uncertain-winter...
At present in the US there's no reactor that anyone will build. No one will build any more big AP1000s after the unmitigated financial disasters that were its 2 initial projects. Everyone has put their faith in small reactors (SMRs) but the only one with an approved design (NuScale) had its initial project fail after a Utah utility coalition fell apart.
The NuScale project that failed was supposed to come online around 2030. Their other project was some sort of Bitcoin mining fiction, its not clear they will have a future. There are a bunch of SMR startups that are at various stages of development, however, none has an approved design. So, we're looking at after 2030 if we're lucky with speculative designs that may or may not work out.
Not a very certain bet.
The medium term future of energy in the US at least is california, ie ridiculously expensive and unreliable. Hopefully costs will eventually come down as we get enough batteries and grid infrastructure in place so everyone can have their indian solar power energy--but a sane policy that would have been to have excess nuclear capacity in place and slowly transition to solar panels as the reliability improves.
So China, surely the best case scenario for nuclear power expansion anywhere in the world, will go from 5% nuclear power generation today to 7.7% by 2035. That is about all that you need to know about the potential contribution of current and near future nuclear power technology to solving the climate crisis.
As we need to be basically net 0 CO2 emissions by 2050 at the latest, there is simply no scenario in which nuclear can play more than a minor part in solving this. Meanwhile renewables are cost effective investments today, you simply need to improve the regulatory and infrastructure context (transmission lines). Yes, solving storage is required as well, but that seems vastly more feasible than somehow beating 80 years of real world experience telling you that putting it all on nuclear is not a politically or financially viable path forward.
Yet no one has picked up this project. Why? Because the construction risk is too great, not because of environmental regulations.
They might also abandon theirs on account of being able to make solar incredibly cheap domestically, but they also might not, we have to wait and see.
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/chinas-coal-country-f...
Or, maybe they'll build out all-of-the-above electricity-generating options, depending on how their political leaders feel.
1) just based on real world observation. The country with the most ambitious nuclear power buildout program is China. It has the perfect combination of incentives: nuclear power is needed to maintain status as a nuclear weapons power, it needs to expand its energy production dramatically while at the same time limiting CO2 emissions, nuclear fuel is a domestic resource and they have a domestic nuclear industry and a generally quite innovative tech sector. But even China only plans to produce 7.7% of its electricity output from nuclear in 2035, barely more than now, while renewables are slated to expand dramatically: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China
EDIT: China also doesn't need to worry about domestic political backlash to new nuclear construction.
2) cost and political risk. There is not a single privately owned or listed company in the world that is willing to take on the risk and cost of building a substantial nuclear reactor. And governments are not keen on spending billions of dollars on potential boondoggles either. In comparison, renewable power generation is already cost-effective and can be built out rapidly with available technologies. If you want more, you can simply spend more. Energy storage is somewhat unsolved, true, but you can probably get 90% of where you need to go in terms of climate change mitigation with existing energy storage technology, while nuclear has no viable financial or political path to your goal at all.
Contrary to what other might be saying, that's not a question we can avoid asking, as there is a physical realities behind the ideal of switching to a fully decarbonated and decentralised grid... Even though that's basically the only thing we can do to keep existing as a specie.
> Does anyone have a breakdown of the materials required to create 2.2 million solar panels?
In academia, these are called "lifecycle analyses" (or sometimes cradle-to-grave/cradle-to-cradle analyses). Here's one by the International Energy Agency, a NGO: https://iea-pvps.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/IEA-PVPS-LCI...
PDF page 21 has a detailed bill of materials for PV modules (solar panels), and pg 60 for li-ion batteries. There are also breakdowns for various parts of subcomponents.
In general, as you noted, we're pretty good at analyzing the carbon impacts of PV manufacturing (TLDR: it's a net positive), but the land use question is much harder because it's not a mathematical equation that you can apply. How do you weigh X solar panels vs Y endangered tortoises or whatever? It's often just a case-by-case determination, and in the US that usually means an specialized environmental review under NEPA (National Environmental Policy Act) or similar state laws.
It always boil down to a judgment call (and also local community sentiment, to some degree), the quality of the review, and maybe just plain dumb luck (whether the site surveys happen to notice any listed species at that particular time).
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Re: Land & mining...
Climate change isn't great for many species either (it does help some plants and such), so even from a land use conservation point of view, the opportunity cost of not building more solar/nuclear often means increased desertification or flooding, etc., just because climate change will slowly affect big swaths of land and water. In a way, these renewables projects can be thought of a way to sacrifice small plots of land to try to protect the rest. With some exceptions (like old growth forests), I think in general we are better able to manage around localized disruptions in land area than global climate change, if only because most land is controlled (and thus permitted/reviewed) only by a few entities and maybe 1-3 governments (federal/state/tribal), vs anything climatic involving the whole damned world and all its politicians and protestors.
The mining of materials, though, also causes a lot of human suffering that a lot of these academic analyses don't fully account for, or illustrate very well on a visceral level. Read: child labor in highly dangerous mines under terrible conditions, just so Joe American can feel a bit better about driving his Tesla with a few panels on his roof. But, to be fair, that system of exploitation is going to exist no matter our energy source. It's not always foreign kids, but coal mining is no easy life either.
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Re: Nuclear
I'm pro-nuclear myself, but many people still aren't (for reasons not worth getting into here, which I'm sure you already know).
I think PV has reached such a low price point (thanks, China) that nuclear just isn't really speed- or cost-competitive anymore.
Realistically, though, we really need both (like a solar bridge to nuclear), much more than we have now, and much faster, and we're not going to get enough of either one in time =/
I don't think it's really a "PV vs nuclear" but a "all of the above, and then some!"
Low carbon and low footprint options like nuclear should be our top priority. All this focus on wind and solar power is a distraction from real long-term solutions to preserving our ecology and climate.
Global climate? or strictly local area effects?
Global nuclear currently generates approximately half the energy that hydropower does, and less than an eighth of that generated by coal and gas which is the goal to replace - to replace that with nuclear will take many many years which will then no longer be "low foot print".
All this focus on wind and solar is largely because it is delivering replacement power now and at less cost than nuclear.
> paving over many square miles of land with solar panels
You can graze animals | have market gardens | etc. underneath you know (maybe you don't, perhaps you might wish to learn more).
Solar farm trial shows improved fleece on merino sheep grazed under panels
https://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2022-05-30/solar-farm-graz...
That's the trick of it. Turns out "leave nothing but footprints, take nothing but pictures" philosophy doesn't scale. We can respect andanage nature while recognizing we are part of it too.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.