> Solar takes 10X the land and 15x the material with no plan to deal with it after it has reached the end of life.
Where solar in this case is photovoltaics/li-ion batteries and not CSP/molten salt?
edit: nvm see what they say here, not really impressed with a few of their assumptions of a optimal system, and using SEGS[0] is probably the worst one they could consider. Doesn't help that CSP tech is still in it's nascent stages compared to Nuclear,Hydro, Coal, and alot of system assumtioms for transmission are applied to CSP from them where CSP has other ways it can achieve even higher efficiencies with lower line losses (i.e. vacuum storage of molten salts and moving that to local grids to use in DSG systems) as well as being from 2013 (a lot more efficient systems have come online and global CSP capacity has doubled from 2013 to 2019).
"Only one work [30] has been found that provides values for invested energy and materials for different CSP technologies in a sufficient manner. The study which is part of a report from the German Centre for Aerospace (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt) is a life cycle assessment for a hypothetical plant called “Sokrates”. Three different techniques were analyzed: Parabolic through with phenyl (SEGS) or steam (DSG) as coolant and a steamcooled Fresnel power plant, whose plane mirrors are roughly arranged to big parabolic mirrors. Plane mirrors are easier to manufacture and maintain, but have a lower concentration capability compared to parabolic mirrors, reducing the plant’s efficiency. Extremely high temperatures will reduce heat transportation, which also reduces the efficiency.
To achieve the high solar concentration, relatively big parts (mirrors) are necessary which are only usable in big plants. Therefore, due to economical aspects small or even individual plants are never considered. It should further be mentioned that, contrary to photovoltaics, the output of a CSP plant is not a linear function of the solar radiation intensity, so that only a deployment in sunbelt regions is in an economical scope. For regions with lower solar radiation like Germany this means additional power trans- portation energy demands and energy losses.
The results shown in Table 4 are only for SEGS and Fresnel type technique, DSG is not tested yet. The location was assumed to be Ain Beni Mathar (Marocco, 34.17 N, 2.12 W) with a solar radiation constant of 2340 kWh/m2. The plant size is scaled to an annual output of 145 GWh (525 TJ), or 15,660 TJ over its adopted 30 year lifetime.
The higher demand for maintaining SEGS is caused by coolant losses due to the dominant phenyl energy inventory. The energy demand does not include the efforts for daily energy storage to provide electricity in the night hours, which is not possible with steam coolant as used by SEGS. The estimations for mirror replacements are very optimistic, doubling this rate will reduce the EROI by 20%, so the given values are the upper limit. Another significant reduction of roughly 30% (buffered) occurs when connecting this CSP plant to the European grid instead of using the output nearby the plant due to the very large copper demand.
It should be mentioned that the authors of the report [30] subtracted the phenyl maintaining demand from the output rather than adding it to the demand which can only be done if the used phenyls are directly produced by the CSP plant, on its site (see Sec. 5). This is not possible with the described CSP plant and would lead to wrong EROIs, making it infinite if all energy inputs are subtracted. Further corrections due to material inventory corrections lead to EROIs given in Table 4."[1]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Energy_Generating_System...
[1] https://sci-hub.uno/10.1016/j.energy.2013.01.029