6 ms·

Solar farms are an ecological disaster, deserts are complex ecosystems full of life.

oblio 5y ago
How do they impact deserts? Are there some species that can only thrive in the searing sun? Plus, to my untrained eye, what else, except for bacteria (and even that, in limited amounts) thrives in desert conditions? Everything I know about biology tells me that deserts are relatively bereft of life compared to temperate or tropical climates. Also, what alternative is less harmful to life, in general?
- mcny 5y ago
  You raise a good question. I wonder, just a thought experiment, if providing shade in a desert might create refuge for plants that can't survive directly in the desert sun...
  - Symbiote 5y ago
    Those would be different plants than the ones already living there (ones that can survive in direct sunlight). The usual aim is to preserve the full variety of the world's ecosystems, and encouraging or allowing non-native species into a desert works against that.
- evgen 5y ago
  Yes, there are some species that require desert conditions in order to live. They have adapted to this particular harsh environment and the conditions in these places help keep out competition for the scarce available resources. You really should do some basic research or at least watch an Attenborough documentary because "everything you know about biology" is apparently quite limited. Yes, deserts have less life and far less obvious signs of it given the lack of resources, but that also means that the web of life between the various organisms is far more fragile and takes a lot longer to recover from any injury or intrusion. A far better place to put solar panels are in places where we know the impact of people and machines will be barely noticed and where life will spring back quite quickly. Put them in the middle of farmland. We have far more arable land than we need to be using, taking it out of production for a decade or two will be good for the soil, and it will spring back to life within days of the construction machinery leaving.
  - patrickk 5y ago
    Deserts have been growing though, particularly the Sahara due to human activities like farming and grazing animals. So perhaps there’s opportunities to reduce deserification by combining solar and agriculture, and also provide power to poor regions. According to this link there is promising benefits: https://cleantechnica.com/2019/09/09/combining-solar-farming-benefits-both/ https://cleantechnica.com/2019/09/09/combining-solar-farming...
    - californical 5y ago
      The California desert is so different though - there is so much life everywhere. Spending nights camping out there, you just see so much. There are these really cute rat-looking things that eat bark and make a crazy scratching sound while you’re trying to sleep. There’s a huge variety of birds, some of which are brutal — they’ll pick up those rats and throw them at a cactus to impale them so they can be eaten more easily. Then there’s mice, ants, coyotes (woke up in the middle of the night to a big pack running by), tons of crazy plants. There’s even some spots with water & real oasis feeling - palm trees, frogs, insects, and running water - right in between some cliffs, tucked away, with no people around as far as you can see. I always thought the desert was just mostly sand and occasional cactus, but have been proven SO wrong after spending lots of time there.
  - oblio 5y ago
    > A far better place to put solar panels are in places where we know the impact of people and machines will be barely noticed and where life will spring back quite quickly. Put them in the middle of farmland. We have far more arable land than we need to be using, taking it out of production for a decade or two will be good for the soil, and it will spring back to life within days of the construction machinery leaving. "We need to be using" from a metric you just conjured, or we are actually using?
    - evgen 5y ago
      Using the US as an example, too much land is used for cereal grains like corn and wheat, to the point where it has become politically necessary to subsidize worthless and inefficient usages like ethanol just to get rid of the surplus. Ergo, I am making the assertion that if the US can afford to waste arable farmland growing corn that then needs to heavily subsidized to turn into ethanol and HFCS this arable land is being wasted and could be better served as space for solar panels. Taking land like this out of production will serve the purpose of supporting crop prices (limiting the political fallout of such a move) and it is well-established that modern farm practices have done significant damage to topsoil and that leaving land fallow or planting gaps between panels with prairie grasses will help build back some of the topsoil and soil nutrients. Do you have a counter-argument to refute my assertion?
- dubyah 5y ago
  It's not like the area is straight up (coarse and rough and irritating) sand. Tortoises, foxes, lizards, snakes, rodents, bats, birds, etc. Flora wise, it's going to be predominantly desert scrub bush and to a lesser degree, microphyll woodland. Even in the article photo, you can see desert scrub in the undeveloped portions. I think environmentalists that care about the desert would much prefer solar development to occur on already disturbed land.
  - oblio 5y ago
    > would much prefer solar development to occur on already disturbed land. Where? "Disturbed" land is taken.
    - ben_w 5y ago
      In fairness, plenty of rooftops still don’t have PV on them. We never did manage to get solar roadways strong enough to use and cheap enough to be economical; but I wonder, could we do better with solar between the rails of railway lines? Or high enough above them to enclose them and their trains?
      - javagram 5y ago
        Solar roadways were always a terrible idea. Solar railways would have the same problem. Putting solar above parking lots and parking decks is a much more viable way to use vehicle-related infrastructure for solar. Using desert habitats are probably superior since we are in a climate emergency and need to build as much solar and wind as possible as fast as possible. Ground solar is cheaper than elevated solar as I understand it.
        ben_w 5y ago
        > Solar roadways were always a terrible idea. Solar railways would have the same problem. As I understand it, the problem was it was too expensive to make it sufficiently damage resistant, that damage being continuous wear from all the traffic. Just outside my window, there is a tram line. Grass grows in the spaces between the rails. I suspect you could put normal panels in those gaps where grass currently grows, and most of the panels would last just as long there as they would on a rooftop.
- Symbiote 5y ago
  There's a brief overview of the flora and fauna in this desert here [1], and much more detail on the "See also" pages. In particular, note the endemic flora — these species live _only_ in this desert. I don't know what impact this development will have, so I won't comment on that. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorado_Desert#Flora_and_fauna https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorado_Desert#Flora_and_faun...
  - nindalf 5y ago
    Going to guess limited impact. The Colarado Desert is 7 million acres. This project will use 2000 acres. That's 0.02%.
ovi256 5y ago
> Deserts are complex ecosystems full of life They are the least full of life of usual ecosystems, so if you want to minimize harm when building large infrastructure, they're the logical place to put the infrastructure. OTOH, you may be interested by the fact that nuclear plants have the best energy density per occupied land surface, if you care about reducing ecosystem impact. That allows minimizing used land.
- trhway 5y ago
  >nuclear plants have the best energy density per occupied land surface, if you care about reducing ecosystem impact. That allows minimizing used land. and when it blows it naturally provides for a huge blossoming ecosystem refuge guaranteed to be free of development for the centuries to come like the Chernobyl zone. Edit in response to the comment below: the false dichotomy. Basically the same old Big Energy tries to blackmail our civilization into nuclear using the threat of coal. No pasaran.
  - mcny 5y ago
    I used to think along the same lines until someone mentioned that we don't need nuclear energy to make large swaths of land uninhabitable. In fact, coal is the answer if you want to create large areas free of humans for a long time. Unlike nuclear, you don't even have to wait for a disaster to happen. It just does it normally.
  - sunshineforever 5y ago
    Why is nuclear energy so bad though? 99 percent of the plants dont blow. The waste fuel is miniscule in size and easy to contain compared amd fossil fuel, which cant be contained. Nuclear seems like a perfect solution to immediately reduce climate impact while we transition to proper renewables. It seems like the semi localized environmental damage of an occasional nuclear accident is far less bad than the constant global damage of carbon.
    - markvdb 5y ago
      > Why is nuclear energy so bad though? 99 percent of the plants dont blow. It's a better than 99%, but only slightly. Over 440 active reactors[1], we're at ~0.68% at INES [1] level 6. That is in a period of exceptional social stability though. We've arguably escaped some rather nasty accidents in the disintegrating USSR. One could also speculate that accidents might be more likely to happen near the end of the reactor's economic life, which for many reactors we haven't seen yet. > The waste fuel is miniscule in size and easy to contain compared amd fossil fuel, which cant be contained. It isn't easy to contain for the entire containment period. Humanity doesn't even have a solution for that yet. You're also neglecting other risks, like nuclear proliferation. > Nuclear seems like a perfect solution to immediately reduce climate impact while we transition to proper renewables. The median construction time for a nuclear reactor was 119 months in 2019.[2] It's not a fast transitional technology to renewables. It also doesn't complement renewables very well. There's its limited scaling up and down. There's also the inherent big size of the projects and the management and lobbying hydrocephalus that entials. > It seems like the semi localized environmental damage of an occasional nuclear accident is far less bad than the constant global damage of carbon. Maybe. What's certain is deploying renewables is certainly cheaper, easier, faster and safer than nuclear for at least 80% of the world's electric energy production right now. Chances are that with the incredibly quick development of storage technology, that number will soon get much closer to 100%. Another option would be to convince Americans, Canadians and Scandinavians to limit their electricity consumption patterns to that of the average western European.[3] [0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/267158/number-of-nuclear-reactors-in-operation-by-country/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/267158/number-of-nuclear... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Nuclear_Event_Scale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Nuclear_Event_Sc... [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/712841/median-construction-time-for-reactors-since-1981/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/712841/median-constructi... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electricity_consumption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electrici...
adrianN 5y ago
Almost every human activity is an ecological disaster. You need to provide less disastrous alternatives, ideally some that cost a comparable amount of money to implement.
swiley 5y ago
Probably less of a disaster than coal but it is good to acknowledge the environmental impacts of solar, I lot of people ignore them.

How do they impact deserts? Are there some species that can only thrive in the searing sun? Plus, to my untrained eye, what else, except for bacteria (and even that, in limited amounts) thrives in desert conditions? Everything I know about biology tells me that deserts are relatively bereft of life compared to temperate or tropical climates. Also, what alternative is less harmful to life, in general?

mcny 5y ago
You raise a good question. I wonder, just a thought experiment, if providing shade in a desert might create refuge for plants that can't survive directly in the desert sun...
- Symbiote 5y ago
  Those would be different plants than the ones already living there (ones that can survive in direct sunlight). The usual aim is to preserve the full variety of the world's ecosystems, and encouraging or allowing non-native species into a desert works against that.
evgen 5y ago
Yes, there are some species that require desert conditions in order to live. They have adapted to this particular harsh environment and the conditions in these places help keep out competition for the scarce available resources. You really should do some basic research or at least watch an Attenborough documentary because "everything you know about biology" is apparently quite limited. Yes, deserts have less life and far less obvious signs of it given the lack of resources, but that also means that the web of life between the various organisms is far more fragile and takes a lot longer to recover from any injury or intrusion. A far better place to put solar panels are in places where we know the impact of people and machines will be barely noticed and where life will spring back quite quickly. Put them in the middle of farmland. We have far more arable land than we need to be using, taking it out of production for a decade or two will be good for the soil, and it will spring back to life within days of the construction machinery leaving.
- patrickk 5y ago
  Deserts have been growing though, particularly the Sahara due to human activities like farming and grazing animals. So perhaps there’s opportunities to reduce deserification by combining solar and agriculture, and also provide power to poor regions. According to this link there is promising benefits: https://cleantechnica.com/2019/09/09/combining-solar-farming-benefits-both/ https://cleantechnica.com/2019/09/09/combining-solar-farming...
  - californical 5y ago
    The California desert is so different though - there is so much life everywhere. Spending nights camping out there, you just see so much. There are these really cute rat-looking things that eat bark and make a crazy scratching sound while you’re trying to sleep. There’s a huge variety of birds, some of which are brutal — they’ll pick up those rats and throw them at a cactus to impale them so they can be eaten more easily. Then there’s mice, ants, coyotes (woke up in the middle of the night to a big pack running by), tons of crazy plants. There’s even some spots with water & real oasis feeling - palm trees, frogs, insects, and running water - right in between some cliffs, tucked away, with no people around as far as you can see. I always thought the desert was just mostly sand and occasional cactus, but have been proven SO wrong after spending lots of time there.
- oblio 5y ago
  > A far better place to put solar panels are in places where we know the impact of people and machines will be barely noticed and where life will spring back quite quickly. Put them in the middle of farmland. We have far more arable land than we need to be using, taking it out of production for a decade or two will be good for the soil, and it will spring back to life within days of the construction machinery leaving. "We need to be using" from a metric you just conjured, or we are actually using?
  - evgen 5y ago
    Using the US as an example, too much land is used for cereal grains like corn and wheat, to the point where it has become politically necessary to subsidize worthless and inefficient usages like ethanol just to get rid of the surplus. Ergo, I am making the assertion that if the US can afford to waste arable farmland growing corn that then needs to heavily subsidized to turn into ethanol and HFCS this arable land is being wasted and could be better served as space for solar panels. Taking land like this out of production will serve the purpose of supporting crop prices (limiting the political fallout of such a move) and it is well-established that modern farm practices have done significant damage to topsoil and that leaving land fallow or planting gaps between panels with prairie grasses will help build back some of the topsoil and soil nutrients. Do you have a counter-argument to refute my assertion?
dubyah 5y ago
It's not like the area is straight up (coarse and rough and irritating) sand. Tortoises, foxes, lizards, snakes, rodents, bats, birds, etc. Flora wise, it's going to be predominantly desert scrub bush and to a lesser degree, microphyll woodland. Even in the article photo, you can see desert scrub in the undeveloped portions. I think environmentalists that care about the desert would much prefer solar development to occur on already disturbed land.
- oblio 5y ago
  > would much prefer solar development to occur on already disturbed land. Where? "Disturbed" land is taken.
  - ben_w 5y ago
    In fairness, plenty of rooftops still don’t have PV on them. We never did manage to get solar roadways strong enough to use and cheap enough to be economical; but I wonder, could we do better with solar between the rails of railway lines? Or high enough above them to enclose them and their trains?
    - javagram 5y ago
      Solar roadways were always a terrible idea. Solar railways would have the same problem. Putting solar above parking lots and parking decks is a much more viable way to use vehicle-related infrastructure for solar. Using desert habitats are probably superior since we are in a climate emergency and need to build as much solar and wind as possible as fast as possible. Ground solar is cheaper than elevated solar as I understand it.
      - ben_w 5y ago
        > Solar roadways were always a terrible idea. Solar railways would have the same problem. As I understand it, the problem was it was too expensive to make it sufficiently damage resistant, that damage being continuous wear from all the traffic. Just outside my window, there is a tram line. Grass grows in the spaces between the rails. I suspect you could put normal panels in those gaps where grass currently grows, and most of the panels would last just as long there as they would on a rooftop.
Symbiote 5y ago
There's a brief overview of the flora and fauna in this desert here [1], and much more detail on the "See also" pages. In particular, note the endemic flora — these species live _only_ in this desert. I don't know what impact this development will have, so I won't comment on that. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorado_Desert#Flora_and_fauna https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorado_Desert#Flora_and_faun...
- nindalf 5y ago
  Going to guess limited impact. The Colarado Desert is 7 million acres. This project will use 2000 acres. That's 0.02%.

ovi256 5y ago

> Deserts are complex ecosystems full of life They are the least full of life of usual ecosystems, so if you want to minimize harm when building large infrastructure, they're the logical place to put the infrastructure. OTOH, you may be interested by the fact that nuclear plants have the best energy density per occupied land surface, if you care about reducing ecosystem impact. That allows minimizing used land.

trhway 5y ago
>nuclear plants have the best energy density per occupied land surface, if you care about reducing ecosystem impact. That allows minimizing used land. and when it blows it naturally provides for a huge blossoming ecosystem refuge guaranteed to be free of development for the centuries to come like the Chernobyl zone. Edit in response to the comment below: the false dichotomy. Basically the same old Big Energy tries to blackmail our civilization into nuclear using the threat of coal. No pasaran.
- mcny 5y ago
  I used to think along the same lines until someone mentioned that we don't need nuclear energy to make large swaths of land uninhabitable. In fact, coal is the answer if you want to create large areas free of humans for a long time. Unlike nuclear, you don't even have to wait for a disaster to happen. It just does it normally.
- sunshineforever 5y ago
  Why is nuclear energy so bad though? 99 percent of the plants dont blow. The waste fuel is miniscule in size and easy to contain compared amd fossil fuel, which cant be contained. Nuclear seems like a perfect solution to immediately reduce climate impact while we transition to proper renewables. It seems like the semi localized environmental damage of an occasional nuclear accident is far less bad than the constant global damage of carbon.
  - markvdb 5y ago
    > Why is nuclear energy so bad though? 99 percent of the plants dont blow. It's a better than 99%, but only slightly. Over 440 active reactors[1], we're at ~0.68% at INES [1] level 6. That is in a period of exceptional social stability though. We've arguably escaped some rather nasty accidents in the disintegrating USSR. One could also speculate that accidents might be more likely to happen near the end of the reactor's economic life, which for many reactors we haven't seen yet. > The waste fuel is miniscule in size and easy to contain compared amd fossil fuel, which cant be contained. It isn't easy to contain for the entire containment period. Humanity doesn't even have a solution for that yet. You're also neglecting other risks, like nuclear proliferation. > Nuclear seems like a perfect solution to immediately reduce climate impact while we transition to proper renewables. The median construction time for a nuclear reactor was 119 months in 2019.[2] It's not a fast transitional technology to renewables. It also doesn't complement renewables very well. There's its limited scaling up and down. There's also the inherent big size of the projects and the management and lobbying hydrocephalus that entials. > It seems like the semi localized environmental damage of an occasional nuclear accident is far less bad than the constant global damage of carbon. Maybe. What's certain is deploying renewables is certainly cheaper, easier, faster and safer than nuclear for at least 80% of the world's electric energy production right now. Chances are that with the incredibly quick development of storage technology, that number will soon get much closer to 100%. Another option would be to convince Americans, Canadians and Scandinavians to limit their electricity consumption patterns to that of the average western European.[3] [0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/267158/number-of-nuclear-reactors-in-operation-by-country/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/267158/number-of-nuclear... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Nuclear_Event_Scale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Nuclear_Event_Sc... [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/712841/median-construction-time-for-reactors-since-1981/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/712841/median-constructi... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electricity_consumption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electrici...

adrianN 5y ago

Almost every human activity is an ecological disaster. You need to provide less disastrous alternatives, ideally some that cost a comparable amount of money to implement.

swiley 5y ago

Probably less of a disaster than coal but it is good to acknowledge the environmental impacts of solar, I lot of people ignore them.