Solar power update

Today's New York Times:

In a rural corner of Nevada reeling from the recession, a bit of salvation seemed to arrive last year. A German developer, Solar Millennium, announced plans to build two large solar farms here that would harness the sun to generate electricity, creating hundreds of jobs.

But then things got messy. The company revealed that its preferred method of cooling the power plants would consume 1.3 billion gallons of water a year, about 20 percent of this desert valley’s available water.

Now Solar Millennium finds itself in the midst of a new-age version of a Western water war. The public is divided, pitting some people who hope to make money selling water rights to the company against others concerned about the project’s impact on the community and the environment.

“I’m worried about my well and the wells of my neighbors,” George Tucker, a retired chemical engineer, said on a blazing afternoon.

Here is an inconvenient truth about renewable energy: It can sometimes demand a huge amount of water. Many of the proposed solutions to the nation’s energy problems, from certain types of solar farms to biofuel refineries to cleaner coal plants, could consume billions of gallons of water every year.

“When push comes to shove, water could become the real throttle on renewable energy,” said Michael E. Webber, an assistant professor at the University of Texas in Austin who studies the relationship between energy and water.

It's interesting to see the environmental movement grapple with the trade-offs inherent in energy policy, and the realization there aren't any magic bullets.

Use of solar power means the destruction of desert habitats, placing the energy source farther away from where it is consumed (thus reducing efficiency) and water usage in environments that typically already suffer from low supplies. Windmills may be clean but the wind doesn't always blow and they require the development of wide open spaces. Prohibiting oil drilling in a small -- and not particularly scenic -- part of the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge means the oil will come from other places where environmental safeguards may not be as strict. Ethanol's problems are well documented.

This isn't to say that solar, wind or any other power source is evil or should be avoided. But we need to move beyond the simplistic debate we currently seem to be engaged in where fossil fuels are automatically deemed bad and alternative energy sources hailed as a pure unalloyed good.

Related post here.