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The argument for Solar always sounds a lot like terra nullius, that was used to dispossess indigenous Australians of their land, and later their land rights. A

The argument for Solar always sounds a lot like terra nullius, that was used to dispossess indigenous Australians of their land, and later their land rights. Australia is a MASSIVE country, that is largely uninhabitable by humans. It is estimated that 75% of the species on the continent are undiscovered: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-09-07/75-per-cent-of-species-unknown-fact-check/5649858 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-09-07/75-per-cent-of-specie... Large scale solar is likely to cause problems for large numbers of native species. YMMV in how important you find that, but to me personally it is a huge issue.

perfunctory 7y ago
> Large scale solar is likely to cause problems for large numbers of native species. Bigger problem then coal mines?
isostatic 7y ago
1sqkm is 300GWh a year at 20% A patch of land 20 miles by 20 miles generates enough electricity for the entire Aus requirements. That’s an order of magnitude less than area taken by austrailia’s roads.
- bigiain 7y ago
  I reckon I've seen a single open cut coal mine that's probably 10% of that size... Leigh Creek in SA. Actually, I just looked it up on GoogleMaps. It's "only" about 8km x 3km or so, or 2.5%. I still wonder how much electricity we could generate if we covered every coal mine in Australia with solar panels?
  - isostatic 7y ago
    Carmichael coal mine is planned to be 447 square km [0], over half being "surface disturbance area" Insolation at that location is about 2.1MWh per square metre per year, or 2100GWh per square km per year. [1] Solar panels are around 20% efficiency, so lets call it 15% to include things like support areas. The area used by that coal mine could generate 2100 x .15 x 447 = 140TWh per year Austrailia currently uses 190TWh/year [2], so an area the size of that one mine could generate the majority of Austrailia's electrical requirements. That's just back of envelope numbers, if we look at existing solar plants though, Solar Star in California generates [3] 526MWh/acre, or 130GWh/sqkm -- so this plant would generate 58TWh a year, still over 25% of requirements There are many problems with solar power, but space use in Australia is not one. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmichael_coal_mine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmichael_coal_mine [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_Australia#/media/File:SolarGIS-Solar-map-Australia-en.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_Australia#/medi... [2] https://www.aer.gov.au/wholesale-markets/wholesale-statistics/annual-electricity-consumption-nem https://www.aer.gov.au/wholesale-markets/wholesale-statistic... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Star https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Star
ltbarcly3 7y ago
Why would 'large scale solar' cause an issue for native species? Even if 100% of Australian power were generated by solar, what percentage of the total land area would be used? Well, lets check! The total power generating capacity of Australia is about 66GW, but about 18 is already hydro, wind, or solar. So we need to come up with about 48GW. Lets take a fairly moderate estimate of 4 acres per MW (4000 acres per GW). It may be more or less than this, but in the long run this is not a terrible estimate. So we need to come up with about 50 * 4000 == 200,000 acres of land. South Australia by itself is 243,000,000 acres, we need about 200k, so this is about .8% of the total land area. This seems like a lot! However, the total number of dwellings in South Australia is about 768,000. The average size of a roof, according to google, is about .03 acres. So just putting photovoltaics on 1/2 of the roof area (meh, I don't know how to estimate usable roof area with a random direction and I don't know whether roofs in Australia are flat, so lets take 1/2) would get you 11.5k acres. So 5% of the total power usage of all of Australia could be provided just by putting solar panels on the roofs of houses in South Australia. Seems like a good deal for endangered species. What about the other 95%? Well, again, you would only need 0.8% of South Australia to supply the energy needs of all of Australia. Like you said, Australia is a MASSIVE country, and has extremely low population density and an almost perfect climate for solar power production. So what is your point exactly? That if they took less than 1% of the land of one part of the country and converted to 100% renewable energy some lizard which is only 'unique' by an arbitrary human criterion might have too much shade?
- isostatic 7y ago
  Cover every roof in Austrailia with a solar panel and you're pretty much set. No extra land use needed. https://www.pv-magazine-australia.com/2019/06/13/australia-could-install-179-gw-of-rooftop-solar/ https://www.pv-magazine-australia.com/2019/06/13/australia-c...
adrianN 7y ago
Guess what else will cause problems for native species? Climate change.
- blaser-waffle 7y ago
  e.g. gigantic fires that eradicate whole areas. Did you see the photos of the lightly-charred koalas?
roenxi 7y ago
Terra nullius is a bit suspect as legal doctorines go, I haven't seen a reference that it was a used before it was created to be rejected when granting the Aboriginals land rights. The 'legal' justification for considering Australia uninhabited was basically (1) Australia was reachable by the British Navy and (2) the inhabitants didn't have a standing army that could inconvenience the British Navy. The matter was that the High Court recognised that Aboriginals had every right to be part of Australian society & had a pretty solid claim to be the effective owners of the land. That is to say, 'terra nullius' was more about racism and culture than about facts and technicalities. It seems comparatively unlikely that we are going to recognise 75% of the species in Australia as being property-owning members of society.
- larnmar 7y ago
  You’ve described the legal basis for British sovereignty over Australia, but ownership and sovereignty are different and independent (eg my backyard is the sovereign territory of Australia but the property of me). The legal basis for considering Australian territory to be the property of no-one was that the Aborigines appeared to have no concept of landownership; they were nomadic, didn’t build and permanent structures, didn’t farm, didn’t have any concept of which bits of land belong to whom. Without that, it’s difficult to say that anyone actually owns any piece of land in particular.
  - 205guy 7y ago
    That air around you, it's difficult for me to see how you've claimed it. I'm officially claiming it can be claimed, and it's mine now.
    - larnmar 7y ago
      Yes, that would be the downside of that. On the other hand, suppose aliens land on Earth and quietly blorple all the fuzzbars between our atoms. We can’t possibly understand the blorpling but it doesn’t seem to be doing any harm so we leave it be. A couple of centuries later we realise that if we’d blorple our own fuzzbars we’d be rich by now. But let’s face it, we were probably never going to develop blorpling technology on our own.
marcus_holmes 7y ago
They did the analysis for the Square Kilometer Array. WA came up as the perfect place for this kind of construction because of the lack of ecosystem to interfere with. Politics then moved half of it to Africa sigh. If you had to pick somewhere in the world to build enough solar arrays to power the entire planet, WA is the perfect spot for it.
- close04 7y ago
  > solar arrays to power the entire planet Generation is probably less than half the problem. The infrastructure to transport it everywhere is. So even if there's a goldmine of free electricity there getting it to the places that need it is a challenge.
  - marcus_holmes 7y ago
    yeah, I wasn't proposing that we actually do it. I was just making the point that if we did, WA is the perfect place for it.
- SiempreViernes 7y ago
  Actually, politics moved half of SKA to Australia, South Africa won the initial site selection (https://www.nature.com/news/south-africa-wins-science-panel-s-backing-to-host-ska-telescope-1.10205 https://www.nature.com/news/south-africa-wins-science-panel-...). The site evaluation itself states both sites are about the same, and I think I've read that the eventual political compromise means there will be less RFI overall, at the unspoken cost of some simultaneous coverage of the targets.
  - marcus_holmes 7y ago
    interesting. That's not the version of events I heard from some of the people involved ;) But I heard it in WA, so they may have been audience-pleasing
    - SiempreViernes 7y ago
paranoidrobot 7y ago
Solar can be deployed on land that's already being used for other purposes. For example on top of houses and shopping centres. While we're also looking at shopping centres - there's a huge amount of unroofed parking, throw up some basic shelter to put the solar panels on and you get the dual-benefit of energy generation, and keeping the cars cooler.

perfunctory 7y ago

> Large scale solar is likely to cause problems for large numbers of native species. Bigger problem then coal mines?

isostatic 7y ago

1sqkm is 300GWh a year at 20% A patch of land 20 miles by 20 miles generates enough electricity for the entire Aus requirements. That’s an order of magnitude less than area taken by austrailia’s roads.

bigiain 7y ago
I reckon I've seen a single open cut coal mine that's probably 10% of that size... Leigh Creek in SA. Actually, I just looked it up on GoogleMaps. It's "only" about 8km x 3km or so, or 2.5%. I still wonder how much electricity we could generate if we covered every coal mine in Australia with solar panels?
- isostatic 7y ago
  Carmichael coal mine is planned to be 447 square km [0], over half being "surface disturbance area" Insolation at that location is about 2.1MWh per square metre per year, or 2100GWh per square km per year. [1] Solar panels are around 20% efficiency, so lets call it 15% to include things like support areas. The area used by that coal mine could generate 2100 x .15 x 447 = 140TWh per year Austrailia currently uses 190TWh/year [2], so an area the size of that one mine could generate the majority of Austrailia's electrical requirements. That's just back of envelope numbers, if we look at existing solar plants though, Solar Star in California generates [3] 526MWh/acre, or 130GWh/sqkm -- so this plant would generate 58TWh a year, still over 25% of requirements There are many problems with solar power, but space use in Australia is not one. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmichael_coal_mine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmichael_coal_mine [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_Australia#/media/File:SolarGIS-Solar-map-Australia-en.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_Australia#/medi... [2] https://www.aer.gov.au/wholesale-markets/wholesale-statistics/annual-electricity-consumption-nem https://www.aer.gov.au/wholesale-markets/wholesale-statistic... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Star https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Star

ltbarcly3 7y ago

Why would 'large scale solar' cause an issue for native species? Even if 100% of Australian power were generated by solar, what percentage of the total land area would be used? Well, lets check! The total power generating capacity of Australia is about 66GW, but about 18 is already hydro, wind, or solar. So we need to come up with about 48GW. Lets take a fairly moderate estimate of 4 acres per MW (4000 acres per GW). It may be more or less than this, but in the long run this is not a terrible estimate. So we need to come up with about 50 * 4000 == 200,000 acres of land. South Australia by itself is 243,000,000 acres, we need about 200k, so this is about .8% of the total land area. This seems like a lot! However, the total number of dwellings in South Australia is about 768,000. The average size of a roof, according to google, is about .03 acres. So just putting photovoltaics on 1/2 of the roof area (meh, I don't know how to estimate usable roof area with a random direction and I don't know whether roofs in Australia are flat, so lets take 1/2) would get you 11.5k acres. So 5% of the total power usage of all of Australia could be provided just by putting solar panels on the roofs of houses in South Australia. Seems like a good deal for endangered species. What about the other 95%? Well, again, you would only need 0.8% of South Australia to supply the energy needs of all of Australia. Like you said, Australia is a MASSIVE country, and has extremely low population density and an almost perfect climate for solar power production. So what is your point exactly? That if they took less than 1% of the land of one part of the country and converted to 100% renewable energy some lizard which is only 'unique' by an arbitrary human criterion might have too much shade?

isostatic 7y ago
Cover every roof in Austrailia with a solar panel and you're pretty much set. No extra land use needed. https://www.pv-magazine-australia.com/2019/06/13/australia-could-install-179-gw-of-rooftop-solar/ https://www.pv-magazine-australia.com/2019/06/13/australia-c...

adrianN 7y ago

Guess what else will cause problems for native species? Climate change.

blaser-waffle 7y ago
e.g. gigantic fires that eradicate whole areas. Did you see the photos of the lightly-charred koalas?

roenxi 7y ago

Terra nullius is a bit suspect as legal doctorines go, I haven't seen a reference that it was a used before it was created to be rejected when granting the Aboriginals land rights. The 'legal' justification for considering Australia uninhabited was basically (1) Australia was reachable by the British Navy and (2) the inhabitants didn't have a standing army that could inconvenience the British Navy. The matter was that the High Court recognised that Aboriginals had every right to be part of Australian society & had a pretty solid claim to be the effective owners of the land. That is to say, 'terra nullius' was more about racism and culture than about facts and technicalities. It seems comparatively unlikely that we are going to recognise 75% of the species in Australia as being property-owning members of society.

larnmar 7y ago
You’ve described the legal basis for British sovereignty over Australia, but ownership and sovereignty are different and independent (eg my backyard is the sovereign territory of Australia but the property of me). The legal basis for considering Australian territory to be the property of no-one was that the Aborigines appeared to have no concept of landownership; they were nomadic, didn’t build and permanent structures, didn’t farm, didn’t have any concept of which bits of land belong to whom. Without that, it’s difficult to say that anyone actually owns any piece of land in particular.
- 205guy 7y ago
  That air around you, it's difficult for me to see how you've claimed it. I'm officially claiming it can be claimed, and it's mine now.
  - larnmar 7y ago
    Yes, that would be the downside of that. On the other hand, suppose aliens land on Earth and quietly blorple all the fuzzbars between our atoms. We can’t possibly understand the blorpling but it doesn’t seem to be doing any harm so we leave it be. A couple of centuries later we realise that if we’d blorple our own fuzzbars we’d be rich by now. But let’s face it, we were probably never going to develop blorpling technology on our own.

marcus_holmes 7y ago

They did the analysis for the Square Kilometer Array. WA came up as the perfect place for this kind of construction because of the lack of ecosystem to interfere with. Politics then moved half of it to Africa sigh. If you had to pick somewhere in the world to build enough solar arrays to power the entire planet, WA is the perfect spot for it.

close04 7y ago
> solar arrays to power the entire planet Generation is probably less than half the problem. The infrastructure to transport it everywhere is. So even if there's a goldmine of free electricity there getting it to the places that need it is a challenge.
- marcus_holmes 7y ago
  yeah, I wasn't proposing that we actually do it. I was just making the point that if we did, WA is the perfect place for it.
SiempreViernes 7y ago
Actually, politics moved half of SKA to Australia, South Africa won the initial site selection (https://www.nature.com/news/south-africa-wins-science-panel-s-backing-to-host-ska-telescope-1.10205 https://www.nature.com/news/south-africa-wins-science-panel-...). The site evaluation itself states both sites are about the same, and I think I've read that the eventual political compromise means there will be less RFI overall, at the unspoken cost of some simultaneous coverage of the targets.
- marcus_holmes 7y ago
  interesting. That's not the version of events I heard from some of the people involved ;) But I heard it in WA, so they may have been audience-pleasing
  - SiempreViernes 7y ago

paranoidrobot 7y ago

Solar can be deployed on land that's already being used for other purposes. For example on top of houses and shopping centres. While we're also looking at shopping centres - there's a huge amount of unroofed parking, throw up some basic shelter to put the solar panels on and you get the dual-benefit of energy generation, and keeping the cars cooler.