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Spoken like someone who has never visited a desert. As a Southern California native, I am intimately familiar with the Mojave, Anza Borrego, and Sonora deserts
by scriptkiddy 9y ago
Spoken like someone who has never visited a desert.
As a Southern California native, I am intimately familiar with the Mojave, Anza Borrego, and Sonora deserts. I will tell you that these deserts are far from "crappy land that nothing can grow on" as you put it.
The North American deserts are areas of huge ecological and geological diversity. They are also some of the most beautiful and awe-inspiring landscapes that exist on this planet.
We do utilize a lot of area in the Western Mojave for solar and wind power. For instance, there is a HUGE field of wind turbines in the San Gorgonio pass near Palm Springs at the intersection of the 10 and the 62.
That said, I am no way in favor of scarring any more of our deserts by covering "a fifth to a tenth" of them in solar panels. However, I am not against concentrated solar facilities several square miles in area as long as they remain contained.
I have thought about how we can "disperse" a solar panel network into a system of smaller panels and batteries and the best idea I can come up with is requiring all commercial buildings to cover their roofs in solar panels and maintain on-site battery banks. Also requiring all homes and apartment buildings to have at least one solar panel per household. These ideas come with their own trade-offs although.
- Robotbeat 9y agoI said a fifth or a tenth of the land in the US used for ethanol production. NOT a fifth or a tenth of our deserts. More like 1%. And my point is we can install solar on land that has no other use. Like land contaminated by industrial waste, etc.
- scriptkiddy 9y agoAh. My misunderstanding.
- dkirtley 9y ago1% of all deserts is only correct if you are talking about only today's electricity use. Even moderate growth and actually solving energy, not just the electricity subset drives these percentages much higher. To get US centric again, NREL published an optimistic 2016 report suggesting that the maximum rooftop solar capability could ever meet is 40% of electricity. That's 15% of today's energy use in an electricity heavy country.
- desdiv 9y ago>1% of all deserts is only correct if you are talking about only today's electricity use. Even moderate growth and actually solving energy, not just the electricity subset drives these percentages much higher. U.S. electricity usage has been flat for the past 10 years[0] despite a cumulative GDP growth of 34% over the same period. I'm not saying the same trend will continue to hold, but you are overestimating future electricity usage growth. [0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/201794/us-electricity-consumption-since-1975/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/201794/us-electricity-co...
- sbierwagen 9y agoThat said, I am no way in favor of scarring any more of our deserts by covering "a fifth to a tenth" of them in solar panels. Tough luck. We live in a democracy. When we run out of oil, the number of people who want electricity are going to outnumber the number of people who want to look at dirt.
- rtx 9y agoThanks for writing this. I am not sure from where this solar lobby sprung up suddenly. If people are so eco conscious, that they support solar. I am not sure how they are ok with have huge parcels of land be covered with panels. We are not even talking about pollution from storage technologies.
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