California Legislature last year mandated 60% renewables used by all power companies by 2030 and 100% by 2045.
So large open area’s are being looked at for large solar and wind plants. As I’ve mentioned a lot – thse solar and wind plants take up large amounts of land.
So this last week, What does California’s largest County say?
California’s largest county has banned the construction of large solar and wind farms on more than 1 million acres of private land, bending to the will of residents who say they don’t want renewable energy projects industrializing their rural desert communities northeast of Los Angeles.
Citizens of the county have spoken through their elected officials:
“These vast open areas are precious for their natural, historical and recreational qualities. But they are fragile, and no amount of mitigation can counter the damage that industrial-scale renewable energy projects would cause,” Fairchild told the supervisors. “Once destroyed, these landscapes can never be brought back.”
I predict you’ll find more and more of this as time goes on – the ol’ “not in my backyard” syndrom.
You can’t even put a power line through those area’s let alone build solar or wind plants on them.
Wonder what kind of acerage we are left over with by now don’t you?
12 million acres sounds like a lot till you start doing all the subtractions.
Oh and after all federal land, cities and such . . . then you’d need to look at the topography and see if land would be suitible to build solar or wind power on.
Not all areas are suitable and that county clearly isn’t going to be rife with solar fields. I just don’t think it’s a big deal nor representative of our ability to find more suitable areas.
Do you have a time frame on when that will happen? There a thousands of ton’s of coal that are not being mined (for power). Everytime they “think” they’ve hit max produciton on oil they have a new find.
now me – I’m for the solar plant proposed in the county I live. What I’m not for (and told our county commission) is the company getting 20 million in tax money over 10 years 4 years after the county raised taxes by 70+%
Based on BP’s Statistical Review of World Energy 2016, we’d have about 115 years of coal production, and roughly 50 years of both oil and natural gas remaining.6 Again, these figures are only useful as a static measure; they will continue to vary with time as our capacity to economically source and extract fossil fuels changes, and our levels of consumption rise or fall.
I recall reading other things indicating that we are far from running out of oil any time soon.
