Geophysicist Exposes Balcombe’s Solar Illusion
By Paul Homewood
Further to last week’s post on fracking, there is an interesting article by Dr James Verdon, geophysicist at Bristol University.
[Just a quick note, for those who don’t know. Balcombe, a small village in Sussex, has been the centre of violent and organised protests in recent months, as Cuadrilla have been test drilling for oil]
Balcombe’s solar plant: A footprint comparison
In this week’s news, the residents of Balcombe are looking to raise funds to install solar panels to power the village. The initial plan is to raise £300,000 for enough panels to power 7.5% of the village, with the intention of continuing as far as possible towards 100%.
On the one hand, I think community involvement in energy generation is a good thing. On the other hand, these projects are made financially viable via subsidies added to everyone’s energy bills. Indeed, project documentation makes clear that their efforts are only made financially viable via the feed-in tariff.
The regressive way that renewable projects are currently funded is something that irks me. We spent time in Balcombe last year deploying seismometers during Cuadrilla’s drilling, and it’s a typical well-heeled home county village. Current solar subsidies have the effect of taking money from the average bill-payer, such as myself, who is a long way from owning any property at all, let alone a property suitable for solar panels, and handing it on a plate to wealthy landowners: people who already own buildings with large roofs on which to install panels.
That issue aside, this provides an excellent opportunity to compare the footprint of different energy sources. While the group itself don’t make the connection, the way the story has been reported gives the impression that the solar developments represent in some way an alternative to the drilling conducted last summer, with a significant portion of the village opposing Cuadrilla’s plans to conduct flow-tests on the well.
With that in mind, how do the two plans stack up in terms of the energy they might provide?
To answer this question, things will have to get a little hypothetical. We all know that in fact drilling at Balcombe is for oil, rather than gas. As such, a direct comparison with solar is slightly tricky, because solar farms will be used for electricity, while oil is mainly used for transportation – we’re a long way from solar-powered aeroplanes! Also, the operations at Balcombe are not actually targetting shale rocks, and hydraulic fracturing will not be required.
So, for the sake of a meaningful comparison, lets pretend that the pad at Balcombe were to be developed into a full-scale shale gas production pad, with 10 lateral wells, such as we might expect on the Bowland shale in Lancashire.
I shall now revisit a calculation I performed at the end of a previous post. In that calculation I assumed a total recovered gas volume (Estimated Ultimate Recovery, EUR) of 3bcf (billion cubic feet) per well. This may already be well out of date, as Cabot are now reporting EURs over 20bcf! Regardless, I shall continue to use the conservative numbers here. So our single well pad will produce 30bcf, over a period of 30 years or so. 30bcf is 30 million MMBTU, which at $8 per MMBTU in the European market is $240 million (or about £150 million). So following UKOOG’s community charter of 1% of revenue, it would pay over £1 million to the local community.
In terms of electricity generation, 30 MMBTU will generate approximately 5,000GWh of electricity. Therefore our hypothetical Balcombe shale gas pad will, over the 30 year production period, produce an average of 166GWh per year of electricity.
How does this compare with proposed solar development? How many solar panels would be needed to match this rate? I’m not a solar expert, so if someone has better numbers then please comment. I’ve based this calculation on the numbers provided by the Westmill Solar Park in Wiltshire. The Westmill site occupies 30 acres, and produces 4.8GWh per year. This means, assuming that output scales linearly with area, we would need 35 Westmill Parks to match the output from our single hypothetical shale pad. Our hypothetical solar park would occupy an area of over 1,000 acres, or 4 square kilometres.
As regular readers will know from my new "Image of the Day" series, a picture tells a thousand words. The map below puts these areas into context. The satellite shot is centred on the well pad at Balcombe. The small yellow rectangle shows the extent of the well pad. The large blue square shows the extent of land that would have to be completely covered by solar panels in order to generate the same amount of electricity. The whole of Balcombe village (excluding outlying farms etc) fits easily into one quarter of our hypothetical solar plant.
This comparison highlights the issues facing us today as we try to tackle the energy triumvirate: cheap energy, supplied securely, with low CO2 emissions. This video demonstrates the same issue, but comparing nuclear energy to wind. Our modern economy has been built on energy sources that provide a lot of power for comparatively little footprint, and changing this will be incredibly difficult.
While I have my doubts about the way they are funded, community energy schemes are to be encouraged and applauded. Equally, it is important that we continue to develop renewable energy sources, as this will allow engineers to develop the technologies, improving them to the point that they become capable of providing a genuine and feasible alternative.
However, it is disingenuous to suggest that a few solar panels on a cowshed can replace the energy we currently get from coal, gas and nuclear power. Thats why James Hansen (grandfather of climate change) said that:
"suggesting that renewables will let us phase rapidly off fossil fuels in the United States, China, India, or the world as a whole is almost the equivalent of believing in the Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy."
http://frackland.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/balcombes-solar-plant-footprint.html#more
I would add two points:
1) Using the same calculations of 166GWh/year, we would need something like 30 x 2.5MW wind turbines, firing away intermittently, to produce the same amount.
I’ve no idea how much acreage that lot would need, but I am quite sure the residents of Balcombe would soon be up in arms if they were all built outside their village.
2) The current Strike Price for large scale solar is £120/MWh (at 2012 prices), index linked and guaranteed for 15 years. This equates to an effective subsidy at the moment of about £76/MWh.
On these figures, over 15 years, Dr Verdon’s “1000 Acre Solar Farm” would attract a subsidy of £189 million.
Comments are closed.
NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
“I’ve no idea how much acreage that lot would need”
It is rarely mentioned that the (fairly) standard spacing of typical windfarms is used because it makes life easy for the developers, in terms of access roads, and grid infrastructure. But as the (now famous) aerial picture of the Horns Rev offshore windfarm shows, it would actually be far better to locate turbines individually, and well apart, as they wouldn’t then be aerodynamically interfering with each other.
I read a report on the above site, and it measured that actual output of each turbine, so was able to compare the relative efficiency of those at the upwind side, with the ones sitting in the very disturbed airflow downwind. IIRC the losses were in the order of 30-40%. This turbulence also causes vibration and can reduce the lifetime of various components.
Not that I want to see ANY more of these bird munchers, as it happens…
“….we would need something like 30 x 2.5MW wind turbines, firing away intermittently …..”
Freudian slip!!
Paul, just consider the average wind power per square kilometer: 7 MW. This means about a little more than 10GWh pear annum and km². Thence you would need 17km² to produce the related 166GWh per annum.
And what about the absolute erratic behaviour of such a source? Your lights will not often be lit up when needed !
1. You have used sq. km. and acres. Thus, you report about 1,000 acres for the 4 sq. km. I wonder if this mixing of units is common practice in the UK; just certain places; just those of a certain age; or of education and training? The comparison would be to 400 hectares. When explaining such things to young Americans I often use football fields (with or without end zones) as this is about the only area they relate to. Acres – they haven’t a clue. Your use of the photo and colored spaces is very good.
2. An essay in the Wall Street Journal (subscription required**) this month took Bill McKippen to task for assuming energy for the world could be supplied by wind mills.
http://online.wsj.com/articles/robert-bryce-dreaming-the-impossible-green-dream-1402527502?KEYWORDS=wind+energy
About solar: “Thus the world would have to install about 16 times as much photovoltaic capacity as Germany’s entire installed base, and it would have to do so every year.”
About wind: “This means that installing the requisite additional wind capacity would require covering about 280,000 square kilometers (108,000 square miles of land)—an area nearly the size of Italy—with wind turbines, every year.”
**An earlier article by Robert Bryce is here:
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/352832/green-dreams-america-coal-africa-robert-bryce
Not forgetting that your hypothetical gas powered generator would produce its output 24/7, with a high degree of reliability. Compare that with the 4 acre solar park, which will be useless at night (unless it employs Spanish technology), and will only give full output for a few hours at the middle of the day…
And because the UK’s climate demands heating more than cooling, peak solar output is substantially out of sync with peak heating demand.
This is a very interesting post and I commend your method of showing the area these things take up. My thoughts are to do the same here in Australia it should make some interesting graphics.
As you explain “feed-in tariff” does not do justice to the true intent. It is middle income welfare since those with a middle income get tax money from the rest of us. Perhaps we should call it an energy tax loophole. I think those who take it up should look very carefully at the capital cost though.
Typically, 1MW of solar capacity requires about 5 acres of land. The typical capacity factor in England for solar farms is 10%. The AP1000 at a capacity factor of 90% would occupy no more than about 60 acres and produce about 8TWh/year. To produce 8TWh/year by solar would need about 9,000 acres of land (14 sq mile). To produce 8TWh/year by 2MW wind turbines, at a capacity factor of 25%, would need about 1,800 turbines. At a density of about 10 turbines/sq mile, it would need about 150 sq miles of land (with no people living in it). it’s all about average energy density.
A unique that is meant for the mankind to save energy.