New Jersey Power Poles to be Outfitted with Solar Panels

In a phone conversation with my mother just now, we talked about this article in today’s New York Times:  a pending project whereby 200,000+ power poles in New Jersey will be outfitted with solar panels.  Apparently, residents are dismayed about the aesthetics.  Mom asked my opinion, to which I reply:

Until I actually read the article, I figured that this project must have been about generating a small amount of power to enable smart-grid communication.  But no, it’s about generating meaningful amounts of power.  Here are two points:

1) At $6 per watt, it’s clearly no bargain.  But how could the idea of nesting small amounts of PV at the top of 200,000 different locations possibly be cost-effective?  The industry is trying to get PV to $1/watt — and we’re already close. Paying $6 shows poor thinking, corruption, or some combination of the two.  Though, from what I read, it’s not exactly as if either of these two concepts would be strangers to the state of New Jersey, would it?

2) To me, and I can’t imagine that I’m alone here, one of the key costs of renewables is aesthetics.  The only reason we’re still using fossil fuels is their high “energy densities,” i.e., their ability to pack a lot of energy in a little space.  This means that they can be kept in small, unobstrusive places, e.g., in our gas tanks, where each gallon gives us 35 kilowatt-hours of energy.  Even the space in which to make this all happen is fairly compact; though no one wants to live next to an oil refinery, they occupy a relatively small portion of our land mass.

Clean energy, by contrast, requires certain amounts of space onto which the sun can shine or across which the wind can blow.  Because of that, it’s incumbent upon us proponents of renewables to get clever in ways to deal with these issues — to try to hide our wind turbines, solar panels, etc., in places where they affect us the least.  This, of course, is why the 6.6 gigawatt offshore wind project going in off the Atlantic coastline will be 12 miles offshore: far enough away so as to be invisible to anyone but marlin fishermen.

Having said all this, I would argue that the project in New Jersey is the worst of all possible worlds.  Here, we have 200,000 assaults upon the natural beauty of the landscape that the NJ citizens have a right to expect to be preserved.

If they honestly wanted a better solution, all they needed to do was to ask me first…  🙂