Image Credit:
Canva/ Dorothea Lange
Massive solar farm development on arid land throughout California and across the southwest may prove to be an environmental calamity. The analogy to the 1930’s Dust Bowls is inescapable, as fragile land is again being stripped bare by speculators.
The only difference is that early 20th Century speculators were non-resident “suitcase farmers” motivated by high wheat prices. The solar farm speculators of today — often foreign companies and affiliates of large energy firms — are chasing taxpayer-funded New Green Deal subsidies, without which solar and other renewables are neither feasible nor sustainable.
As a century earlier, this rampant speculation will likely collapse - and we may well be left with another costly environmental disaster.
The haunting images of the Depression-era Dust Bowls were re-popularized in Ken Burns’ 2012 documentary,1 but they became real to many Americans in June and July 2023 as much of the east coast was covered for several days by a thick haze of smoke from forest fires across Canada that shuttered airports, sporting events, and incidentally caused solar power production to drop in half or more.2
While it received almost no media coverage, it reinforced the unreliability of solar and wind as 24-7 power sources, and their unsuitability as anchors of a modern power grid. The reality is both are rooted in their constant vulnerability to unpredictable atmospheric conditions and weather — on top of solar’s obvious dependence upon daylight. Neither fossil nor nuclear generation, of course, has these vulnerabilities, and typically operate 24/7.
But the headlong rush to implement solar generation across the US — in no small measure spurred by the “Inflation Reduction Act,” along with other state and federal incentives — brings with it growing concerns of future environmental calamity.
One concern is the simple need to dispose of what will be billions of solar panels, the first generation of which are now reaching their typical useful life of 25 years or less, which will have to be placed in landfills unless the still experimental recycling technologies become scalable and economically feasible.3
The larger concern involves concerns that the massive expanse of a typical utility-grade solar farm — 400 acres, or 6.25 square miles for a 400 MW project — is destroying fragile and ecologically valuable habitants4 as vast amounts of land are put into permanent shade. These large-scale projects typically occupy arid lands in the southwest from California to Texas that are not suitable for agricultural uses without irrigation, and which have excellent insolation properties for solar generation. But these lands are not devoid of vegetation and animal life and have low-lying but deep-rooted plant systems that, among other attributes, capture and store carbon dioxide.5
Not everyone is convinced that carbon dioxide — a key ingredient to life on earth — is the magic dial that controls global climate.6 But “carbon reduction” is the battle flag behind which the renewable advocates march. Our concern is more basic: that huge areas of desert vegetation will be destroyed and laid bare, not incidentally opening them to wind-borne and other erosion.
This is precisely what happened in the semi-arid Great Plains beginning in the 1910s. It was a major precursor to the dust bowls that began a decade later, and the drivers were the same as what we see today: hastily enacted Federal policy and speculative land mismanagement, all with no understanding of long-term consequences.
The 1930s Dust Bowls and their causes continue to be a lively topic for academic debate.7 The critical precursor was the conversion of an estimated 30% of the Great Plains in the US from native grasslands to wheat and other crop cultivation by late 19th and early 20th century settlers, who were encouraged — despite the Plain’s obvious semi-aridity — by a then popular mantra that “rain follows the plow.’’ This wholly unscientific narrative was cooked up by an academic and promoted by a journalist8 (which should be a caution to modern Americans insufficiently skeptical of environmental crusades).
The agricultural shift accelerated during World War I, where combination of high commodity prices, mechanization, and a period of unusually good rainfall “stimulated an entrepreneurial rush of new entrants to farming on the Great Plains and the expansion of plowed acreages by established farmers (in what was colloquially known as the ‘‘great plow-up’’).” 9 When the war ended and commodity land prices collapsed, the speculative “suitcase farmers” departed, leaving the broad swathes of land unfarmed and devoid of their natural cover of thick native grasses that had accumulated over centuries.
A long period of severe drought through the 1930s set the final conditions for wind erosion of this uncovered land, which was focused in the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles and adjacent parts of Kansas, Colorado, and New Mexico. Along with the fact that the speculative farming resumed with the WWII spike in commodity prices and, once more, wetter weather, the Dust Bowl era of drought was indeed severe but not anomalous for the Great Plains’ highly variable climate:
Recent studies of paleo-records have found that twentieth century droughts were shorter in duration and perhaps less severe than past Great Plains megadroughts, such as those of the sixteenth century or the tenth to thirteenth centuries AD. Atmospheric scientists have observed that droughts of comparable severity to those of the Dust Bowl era have occurred in subsequent decades, including 2011–2012, but that the 1930s droughts stand out because of their spatial extent. 10
That this drought and earlier mega-droughts occurred well before the modern era of supposedly irreversible climate change and increasing climate volatility is worth pointing out. Acolytes of climate apocalypse would be well-advised to know that the US saw some of the worst weather ever recorded in the early 20th century, ranging from drought to severe floods.
A Heat Wave Index chart from the US EPA11 that clearly shows how extreme things were in the 1930s:
Yet, immediately preceding this drought, the central part of the United States saw almost continual rain from August 1926 to April 1927, with only occasional respite. The Ohio, Missouri, Arkansas, Tennessee, and other tributaries of the Mississippi were at flood stage throughout most of that spring. When the Mississippi burst through its levees on April 27, 1927, it submerged 500 square miles of the Delta under 20’ of water, and ultimately flooded 27,000 square miles across ten states.12 ”Extreme” weather is nothing new in the US.
While the amount of semi-arid, fragile land covered by new solar development is nowhere near the estimated five million acres ultimately affected by the “great plow up” over several decades through the 1930s, the Dust Bowl’s wind erosion actually emanated from a much smaller subset of land within the Great Plains. The point is that it doesn’t take millions of acres to create an ecological disaster.
And even so, utility-scale solar’s land consumption is still very significant: the largest projects are now 400-700 MW, requiring 4,000 acres or more each. California has the largest solar capacity of any US state — over 38,000 MW at the end of 2022, with another 27,000 MW expected over the next five years. Excluding the 30% of rooftop capacity, California’s existing solar farms alone occupy some 100,000 acres.13 These projects are spreading fast across the southwest14:
Rooftop solar installations, which as noted above are a substantial share of California’s capacity, do not affect virgin land, but they have their own issues. Solar panels absorb heat that would otherwise flow to the building beneath. This can help cool the building in the summer, but would conversely add to its heating requirements in colder weather.
The Israelis, for example, have adapted solar panels to float on the surface of aquaculture ponds, because removing insolation helps moderate the water temperature most suited to fish-farming.15
Wind and solar energy is fundamentally passive and unreliable, dependent upon the basic and daily vicissitudes of weather, very much unlike on-demand nuclear or fossil fuel generation A final note, then, is to emphasize that wind and solar energy sources are not only vulnerable to weather in terms of energy production but simple longevity--they are much more susceptible than traditional generating plants to high winds, ice storms, or hail, a fragility underscored by the recent destruction of a three year old 4.4 MW, 14,000 panel solar farm during a Nebraska hailstorm.16
Perhaps the ultimate irony is the fear of rising temperatures associated with climate change that solar farm speculators are using to obtain their taxpayer subsidies and seize large parcels of land. The great Dust Bowl kicked up so much sand and other particulates that temperatures spiked during the 1930s. (See EPA Heat Wave Index Graphic)
This raises the question: could negative environmental impacts from solar farms lead to temperature spikes greater than those that would have happened under even the most gloomy temperature projections of climate activists?
The point is ultimately, everything has a cost – particularly an environmental cost. Just as the “suitcase farmer” speculators did not consider the environmental impact of their actions, neither are the modern day solar farm speculators.
1https://kenburns.com/films/dust-bowl/
3https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-65602519
5https://desertreport.org/a-costly-omission-in-planning-for-climate-change/
7McLeman et al, “What We Learned From the Dust Bowl: Lessons in Science, Policy, and Adaptation”, NML 2013 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4015056/
8https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/james-a-garfield-and-rain-follows-the-plow.htm
9 Worster D. Dust Bowl: the Southern Plains in the 1930s, New York: Oxford University Press; 1979. [Google Scholar]; and Worster D. “The dirty thirties: a study in agricultural capitalism” Great Plains Q. 1986;6:107–116. [Google Scholar]
10 Op Cit, McLeman et al
11 https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indicators-heat-waves#%20
12 John M Barr, Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997.
13 The rule of thumb is 4-7 acres per MW; the 4 acreas/MW estimate here recognizes the insolation value typical for the southwest
14 https://www.seia.org/research-resources/major-solar-projects-list
15 Nofar Energy floating solar: https://www.nofar-energy.com/world-wide/general/?ContentID=45628
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