Coal Mining Uses More Land than Corresponding Solar

A back of the envelope calculation by Grist guest commentator Gar Lipow shows that since solar uses the same lay of land year after year, and coal has to mine new land each year, the energy per sq foot of land for a facility like Nevada Solar One is higher than a typical coal plant and eastern mountain-top removal coal mining.

Nevada Solar One will make approximately 154kWh per square foot in the next 20 years.  Coal mining will get you approximately 11.5 kWh per sq foot.  So for a comparable sized coal plant, it would take 13 times more land acreage to produce the energy, in this case 5300 acres for coal mining to 400 acres for the Nevada Solar One facility.

Surprise! Reducing Emissions is Actually Going to be a Big Deal

Architecture 2030, a pretty sweet group, lays out on a page of their site how all the seemingly significant things that organizations are doing doesn’t mean shit if we keep building coal plants and don’t cut our energy use. There are 151 coal plants in development in the United States today. A new coal plant goes online in China every two weeks.

Here’s one of them:

Home Depot

Home Depot is funding the planting of 300,000 trees in cities across the US to help absorb carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions… The CO2 emissions from only one medium-sized (500 MW) coal-fired power plant, in just 10 days of operation, will negate this entire effort.

Read them all here.