The Missing Sanity Check

I was reading an article in the New York Times about rooftop solar installations in California, when I came across this paragraph (bold mine).

Some energy experts say utilities would not be able to produce or buy enough renewable energy to replace what would be lost from the decline in rooftop solar panels — which supplied 9 percent of the state’s electricity in 2020, more than nuclear and coal put together. California would need to set aside about a quarter of its land for renewable energy to meet its climate goals without expanding rooftop solar, said Mark Z. Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental energy at Stanford. 

The statement in bold set off alarms off in my head. Not that it’s worrisome, but that, intuitively, it just seems wrong. And thinking about it for a few seconds makes it even more obviously wrong. California is huge, and buildings make up a small percentage of that area: less than one percent. How could taking away solar from one percent of the land require you to use 25 percent to make up for it? Doesn’t make any sense.

Clearly, either Jacobson misspoke, or the NY Times reporter misunderstood something he said. Jacobson later tweeted a correction:

It’s a complicated subject, and there are lots of facts and claims flying around by the various factions. But, somewhere along the publishing chain at the Times, from the reporter to the editors, there has to be a sanity check. Someone should have read that and said “wait a minute, that doesn’t make sense”.

I suppose you could argue that, to people who live and work in New York city, it’s hard to grasp the concept of a region where 99.2% of the area is not covered by buildings. But really, that’s part of their job.