270. KUNSTLER IS WRONG ABOUT PHOENIX AND LAS VEGAS
When he's not regaling us with in-depth chronicles of his hip replacement, Jim Kunstler is busy reasoning with curse words and telling us that Phoenix is "fucked". Here's some standard fare:
I have maintained that we will see cities like Phoenix and Las Vegas virtually depopulated in the next fifty years as all their artificial means to support human settlement grow scarce. Imagine Phoenix without cheap air conditioning.SourceHe must have said this a hundred times already, but it's still just as retarded as the first time he said it.
Phoenix and Las Vegas are the last places which will have air-conditioning problems. How do I know this? Because the western desert is the U.S.'s Saudi Arabia of solar energy. Conditions are ideal for generating large power flows from solar energy, and it just so happens that those power flows will be available at the same time air conditioning demand is highest. It's a no-brainer, and investors are already breaking ground:
But as oil, natural gas and electricity costs soar, companies are racing to build commercial solar thermal plants that are the size of conventional power plants.
[...]
Utah-based International Automated Systems Inc. on Thursday signed an agreement to install a $150 million, 100-megawatt power plant for Solar Renewable Energy in Nevada.
And North Carolina-based Solargenix, in which Spanish building and services company Acciona SA is buying a 55 percent stake, will break ground over the weekend on a 64 MW, $100 million solar thermal plant called Nevada Solar One. The company said it will be the first U.S. commercial solar thermal plant, coming on line in 2007.
Currently, all the types of solar energy provide only about 1 percent of U.S. power. One hurdle is price. Solar thermal at present costs about 12 to 15 cents per kilowatt hour, Westerholt said, compared with natural gas power which costs 10 cents per KWH.
But as production grows, solar companies expect costs to slip to 8 cents per KHW in five years.
SCHOTT will provide components for at least one 50 MW plant per year in the U.S. Southwest deserts every year until 2010, said Westerholt.Source
-- by JD
posted by JD @ 12:00 AM
8 comments
8 Comments:
Don't these cities power themselves through Hydro, Coal, and Nuclear? What does peak OIL have to do with air conditioning?
nick and dub, you're right that Vegas and Phoenix have lots of dysfunctional elements. I used to live in Phoenix, and I agree with Kunstler that it's an auto-dependent crud-scape. On the other hand, if solar energy is the future, I don't see how the country's best locations for that energy are going wither and die. In an era of energy scarcity, are we just going to blow off high-intensity solar power from desert locations and not use it? That doesn't seem likely, considering that we're already breaking ground on such facilities. It seems more likely to me that Vegas and Phoenix will boom as energy centers, just like Alberta is booming today.
Apparently the Nevada Solar One design is based on parabolic trough concentrators. There will still be the problem of night time power so some form of energy storage will be required in the absence of fossil fuels. In a desert, electrolysing fresh water to store daytime capacity as hydrogen for later use may not be feasible.
With developments in solar Stirling engines it may become cost effective to operate solar generation plants in areas with less sunlight. Stirling engines only need a sufficient temperature difference for power generation whereas Nevada Solar One is driven by steam pressure.
I think this article is an excellent example of why predicting the future is so hard! If you take a simple trend and apply it uniformly into the future you miss all the subtle interactions which really determine the future.
SO doomers like Kunstler make simplistic extraplations like no oil, no suburbia, no Vegas. Too simple! As JD points out, places like Vegas may be actually be points of growth, not decline.
A feature of suburbia is it relatively spread out. Instead of an Achilles heel, this could be an advantage. Imagine every other house with a windmill or solar powering a local grid. They may become the power sources for nearby cities, which due to lack of space simply cannot host much in the way of renewables.
Hey, I haven't run the numbers, just speculating. The point to keep is that what people expect to happen usually doesn't, and things that were quite unexpected happen instead. You have to follow all the connections, think laterally.
People always thought that the weapon of the future was a beam weapon, like a laser. Well, the "beam generator" is actually great for communications, but lousy as a weapon. Who could possibly have predicted that?
Also, I still don't get why people are so attached to the status quo. A hundred years ago we had no cars,no suburbs, now we do, in hundred years we will probably have something different. So? Rapid change happens, there is absolutely no reason to think we are in a inescapable corner.
James Burke did a great series called "Connections", which showed how completely unlikely (and unpredictable) many of the key events in history were.
The doomers constant refrain reminds of the joke by Eric Morecambe: "now, get out of that without moving!" We can adapt, and we will. It may not be easy, change rarely is, but the possibility are there.
Nice try. So when the heat is more intense the solar power is also the highest. Problem is when it gets real hot the efficiency of solar cells also degrade. And when the sun sets guess you don't need air conditioning any more?
My bet is to provide power for air conditioning of a typical home during the hot summer, it probably require several time bigger surface area than the roof of the house itself. Not a feasible solution.
Arizonians are better off digging holes in the ground and call it their homes. 3 feet underground, the temperature will be spring like all year around. All animals know that for billions of years already. But still how do Las Vegas survive without tourism?
Don't forget that Phoenix currently is powered by a large nuclear reactor. I'm not sure about Nevada.
yeah, when the airlines fail people are going to walk to Las Vegas to keep the toursim industry afloat, don't ya think?
When will the airlines fail? Care to take the acid test and give us a date?
I also used to live in Phoenix, and suspect they will have a big problem largely because their economy is still focused on continuing the sprawl. When I was there (1997-2001), they were just starting to talk about a limited rail transit system and had a mediocre bus system (good if you lived in Tempe, awful almost everywhere else), but even today haven't finished building the freeways every other major city finished 20 yrs ago.
IF (a big if) they can get solar up & running soon, I could see the sprawl breaking up into several much more concentrated cities with the outlying areas either migrating inward or away from the heat. I think quantoken's snarky idea about digging homes in the ground is actually a good one; if we can design complex subway systems, I see no reason we can't design livable underground communities. Combine that with building up and a lot of people can be concentrated in a small area.
Energy isn't the major issue, though; WATER is. The desert cities are already drawing more water than the Colorado River supplies, and many of those blue lines you see on any AZ map are dry. Given how far Phoenix is from the ocean, I'm not sure how they'll work their way out of that even with desalination capability. Las Vegas has a better shot b/c of the proximity of Lake Mead (but there you run into the overdrafting the Colorado issue).
I'm also not so sure about them being the leader in water recycling; one huge issue there has always been the golf courses, green lawns, and cotton fields on the outskirts which consume megagallons annually. Although there have been efforts to encourage desert planting for yards, many people import the water-hungry grass and trees from wherever they used to live.
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