Take a pause to plan out the transition to renewables in Alachua County

Climate change — how big of a deal is it really?

For us here in North Florida, winters will soon be a memory; temperatures will drift into 110s; all homes built in the 1970s, ‘80s, ‘90s will need to be upgraded; and the change in climate will be so drastic we'll have start growing crops compatible with what is found in the Yucatan today.

That is a pretty big deal.

So yes — we have to transition away from carbon-based energy, quite fast. We need a plan on how we are going to manage all that — because not only is the technology new, so are the social, economic and environmental side effects.

Take solar, for example. More and more people are buying it to create energy at home, and because of that, our local utility, Gainesville Regional Utilities, is making less money.

This in turn means that GRU has to raise its rates to maintain the power lines, transformers and pay the humans that manage the system.

Ironically and totally unintended, well-meaning white guys, who are helping the climate by going solar, are making GRU raise the rates — and causing less well-off Black guys to pay more for their light bill. That has a real social impact, growing larger year by year.

Then there are environmental impacts. Nobody really recycles solar panels, because it is not cost effective, so they often end up in a landfill. Solar panels also need a lot of physical space to do their thing.

A project recently proposed in Archer was going to take up 640 acres, yet would only supply one-tenth of GRU’s daytime electric needs. So you actually would need 6,400 acres of solar panels to replace the carbon energy that powers Gainesville today.

And that is only when the sun shines — which it doesn't at night. So now you need to place five times more solar panels for the night time hours and for the times in which you don't see the sun three days in a row.

You also need to plan for batteries. Lots of them. The largest battery on planet Earth today is a 300 MW lithium-ion facility in California, which takes up four acres. We would need seven of those.

Lithium-ion is toxic, flammable and can explode, so we'd have to fence off those four-acre spots, and guard them just in case of any shenanigans.

So who wants to live next to the four-acre hazardous battery plant — you?

Before we dive deep into the "clean energy" thing, it is not unreasonable to hit the pause button for a year or two — and plan out exactly where all we are going to put this stuff, who is going to live next to it and how to equitably share the cost of this huge but essential transition.

Alachua County also grew seven-fold in the last 80 years. If that trend continues, there will be 1.9 million people living here in 2100, 1.4 million of whom would be in Gainesville itself.

With the Gainesville City Commission's goal of 100% renewables by 2045, that means we have to set aside 317,000 acres for solar panels and battery locations, equivalent to half of Alachua County. Unless, of course, we manage to cut consumption in half, then we'd only need 150,000 acres.

Much like the global community gathered in Glasgow this month to figure out the best energy trajectory for our planet, now is absolutely the right time for the City Commission, the County Commission, Strategic Planning, Hazardous Waste and other local agencies to plan a retreat somewhere and start to hash the details out.

The organizers could also invite the University of Florida’s Center for Landscape Conservation Planning, the Citizens Climate Advisory Committee, as well as the NAACP — because Black and brown people are going to be doing a major part of the heavy lifting, the way the financial model is set up today.

When the Wright brothers took their first flight in 1903 and Ford went into production in 1908, there wasn't really a plan for what all would happen next. This time around, however, the choices we make about energy, transportation and resource consumption are not only about our own survival, but that of many other species as well. We had better get it right.

Noble intentions aside, let's do the smart thing, step back for a bit and actually plan the whole transition to renewables out.

Mark van Soestbergen is director of CarbonSolutions, a Gainesville-based firm specializing in carbon accounting and management.

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This article originally appeared on The Gainesville Sun: Mark van Soestbergen: Transition to renewables requires planning