Viewpoint

Dear Editor,

For my school service project, I picked up trash around the forest. I picked up trash at campsites and on the forest roads. I found a lot of things like beer cans, milk containers, soda bottles, food wrappings, and someone even threw away a broken camp chair. I pulled a lot of trash out of the river also. I filled four large bags in two hours! The places where I picked up trash were in the National Forest. Please do not litter because the forest is so beautiful. Don’t you want to keep the forest clean? When you come to the woods to camp or hike don’t you want to see a clean forest, a clean river, healthy fish, and beautiful flowers, NOT a trash dump? Throw your trash away in trash cans. Trash your trash, not the forest!

Skyler Williams, Age 7
Mountain Sun Community School, Brevard, N.C.

Putting Damaged Land to Good Use

Dear Editor,

I was reading an article recently about mountaintop removal (MTR) coal mining and got to thinking….

How many square miles have been cleared in Kentucky for MTR? And, if we covered all that space with photovoltaic (PV) solar panels, how much electricity in kilowatt-hours (kWh) would be produced?

According to the Appalachian Voices’ website, 574,000 acres (897 square miles) of land in Kentucky has been surface mined for coal and more than 293 mountains have been severely impacted or destroyed. According to the U.S. Department of Energy website, the total electricity consumption in Kentucky in 2005 was 89,351,000,000 kWh.

The following projection is based on experience from PV solar installations already in place here in Kentucky and from the fact that we get four and a half hours of sunlight per day on average, accounting for clouds. To produce that much electricity in one year, around 190 square miles of land would need to be covered by a 69.1 GW (gigawatt) solar array. Therefore, if we merely put PV solar panels on 1/5th of our already cleared land, we would supply ALL of the electricity needs for the entire Commonwealth of Kentucky!

If we covered the entire 897 square miles of cleared MTR space in Kentucky, we could supply nearly 10 percent of the electricity needs of the entire U.S.! Additionally, a total of 1,160,000 acres (1,813 square miles) of land has been surface mined for coal in the central and southern Appalachian region.

According to the Central Intelligence Agency website, the United States consumed a total of 3.873 trillion kWh of electricity in 2008. To produce that much electricity in one year from PV solar panels in this region, 8,225 square miles of land would need to be covered. Accordingly, roughly 22 percent of the electricity consumed in America could be provided by PV solar panels if the 1,813 square miles of land cleared by MTR in Appalachia were covered.

At this point, you’re probably asking yourself: that’s great, but how much would it cost? And, what about energy storage so we can use that electricity at night?
Projecting costs for a solar array of this size is pure conjecture, but I’ll do my best.

Currently, large scale, megawatt PV arrays cost around $3 per watt to install without tax subsidies. A GW scale solar array might be closer to $2 per watt. Using this metric, it would cost about $138 billion to install the 69.1 GW solar array required to produce 100 percent of the electricity consumed in Kentucky per year. If the solar panels have the industry standard 25-year warranty, the cost of electricity comes to 6.2 cents per kWh. That’s cheaper than what consumers in Kentucky pay for electricity right now (LG&E residential customers pay 7.9 cents/kWh).

There are many options available now for grid level energy storage, including, but not limited to: pumped hydro, compressed air energy storage (CAES), sodium-sulfur batteries, lead acid batteries, nickel-cadmium batteries, flywheels, and lithium ion batteries.

Empty, abandoned coal mines in Germany are being looked at for pumped hydro energy storage for renewable energy systems, something I would assume we have plenty of in Kentucky.
Adding energy storage could cost around $1 per watt to the solar array. This would increase the cost of the array for Kentucky to $207 billion with an electricity cost of around 9.3 cents per kWh. That price will soon be on par [with current consumer rates] as LG&E recently requested the Kentucky Public Service Commission to allow rates to increase by 19 percent over the next five years.

Again, the cost projection is all conjecture and does not include grid transmission and maintenance. But it’s a start.
This sounds like a lot of money until you consider that, according to a study by the Environmental Law Institute, the fossil fuel industry in the U.S. received $72 billion in subsidies from 2002 to 2008. Imagine using that money to fund a GW solar project in Kentucky!

Dan Hofmann
President, Regenensolar.com