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Comment by redwood | Hacker News Reader

Flying recently from Phoenix to San Jose I was amazed by the size of the solar arrays I saw in the desert. I wasn't sure that that was what they were; but I found some of them on Google maps satellite after and confirmed it (cool time we live it). Good news is that there's so much more room to build more!!!

Edit here if anyone's curious: https://goo.gl/maps/SjzWw9b2dSH2

Edit 2 - as an aside, when I first saw, I couldn't tell if it was solar or ag (e.g. here's what ag looks like - https://goo.gl/maps/AGvAxJ61BwB2 if you zoom out they look very similar!)

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Sadly, there appears to be many environmentalists and conservation people against large desert solar arrays claiming it threatens habitat of whatever lives there. It probably does have an impact but at this point unless population declines or energy use dramatically decreases I think we need to focus on minimizing human impact on the environment and not stopping everything that isn't completely harmless.

> Sadly, there appears to be many environmentalists and conservation people against large desert solar arrays claiming it threatens habitat of whatever lives there.

Can you cite a significant environmental group that completely opposes all large desert solar projects for this reason? Otherwise this reads like a rather unfair characterization.

In a recent case [1], the Sierra Club successfully argued that a planned solar array outside Hollister should be made smaller (by about either one half or two thirds, it's not clear why each successive cut was made), due to the potential threat to a handful of endangered species in the area. They also indicated unequivocal support for a similarly sized solar array in Imperial County.

Given how much undeveloped desert land exists in the US Southwest, it seems reasonable to build solar arrays first in areas that won't threaten the habitat of endangered species.

[1]: http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/07/21/giant-solar-project-re...

Endangered species need to go extinct. We are committing a high level universal crime by intervening in life's natural hygiene process.

That's just as unbalanced a view as "endangered species may never go extinct". The difference is whether they go extinct because of maladaptation to the natural environment or because of maladaptation to human influence on the natural environment. No reasonable person would argue against the first thing, but many argue against the second thing.

Are humans not part of the natural environment?

It's a bit disingenuous to call extinction caused by human activity "nature's hygiene process".

Do those same people get sad when they see arable land being used for food production or large cities from space? They probably need a reality check on their understanding of humanity. We have always been modifying the environment to suit our needs, every species does this.

>We have always been modifying the environment to suit our needs, every species does this.

Humans have only been farming for the past 11,500ish years, while Homo sapiens have been around for more than 200,000 years. Humans modifying the environment to a significant extent is rather new in our timeline.

I don't know about that. There's at least speculation that some percentage of animals that went extinct in North America were due to humans. Also in North America there was a lot of impact to ground cover by people before agriculure - i.e. burning down forests to make it easier to hunt game. It's hard to imagine those things only occurred in the Americas.

Yeah, but we are the first species to start modifying 100% of it in such a way that only corn and cows will be left.

Why is that sad? Are you more knowledgeable than said environmentalists, or do you simply assume that they are wrong?

Environmentalism is often just a stated preference. Like humans shouldn't disturb some thing.

So it isn't necessarily the case that you need to be more knowledgeable to challenge them. Availability of inexpensive energy without burning coal is another preference.

I certainly have reached the point where I think popular environmentalism is waaaaay too focused on static conservation.

That's a generic view which I might actually be inclined to agree with you on. I'm personally skeptical of the current climate change politics, for example.

But OP made a more specific claim about solar arrays in the desert. Seems like we should be able to debate that on its merits.

That alternative to putting them in the desert is putting them in some non-desert area or putting them nowhere. If these people are objecting to putting them in a desert, they'll object to putting them in a non-desert area too.

Making better use og roof-tops generally is a win as far as environmentalists are concerned; NIMBYs/BANANAs may complain however.

Not that I see any intrinsic beauty in concrete titles or roofing felt. Even clay tiles and slates I suspect are just something we have gotten used to.

In all cases they are a financial and embodied energy and financial cost as-is, and PV can turn them into something positive.

Ignorant people look at a desert and see lifeless desolation. When they educate themselves they come to see the desert as an very active environment with limited resources, and cut-throat competition for same, that makes human impact more pronounced. Better to put solar panels over scrubland or even farmland than into deserts.

Generally, it isn't really environmentalists exactly fighting these projects. Instead it's folks who don't want them near where they live or other powerful interests in the vicinity, who utilize existing environmental regulations to put these projects into analysis limbo for years on end. So there is a relationship in that the environmental laws are able to be abused to stop NIMBY projects. The same laws are now being used to stop High-Speed Rail.

I'm guessing theyre sad because they don't value desert habitats highly nor appreciate them and are probably raised to think deserts are "empty" when thats far from the truth.

I think some reference is useful, here.

Agriculture is and will be much more land-intensive than solar.

I once calculated that the US could switch entirely to solar just on a fraction of the land that is currently used for ethanol production alone.

And what is a better place to put solar panels? In the desert or fertile arable land? Deserts contain life, of course, but the density of life and biodiversity per unit area is much smaller. Additionally, solar panels provide shade and, unlike agriculture, don't require intensive tilling, harvesting, irrigation, spreading of pesticides (natural or otherwise) or fertilizer and the runoff that causes. They mostly just sit there, maybe getting a cleaning every once in a while (but unlike concentrating/thermal solar, don't need to be cleaned super often).

Once the panels are placed, your desert tortoise can nestle in the convenient shade they provide.

We'll destroy habitats anyway. But stopping/slowing down climate change by reducing the habitat of some species will still be beneficial for global diversity of species. I find it hard to believe that warming oceans would kill less species than solar panels in the desert. And even for 100% renewable energies, only small parts would have to be used for production.

There are circular-ish arrays of mirrors which reflect light to a tower with a water tank. The water turns to steam which turns a generator. There's at least one of these on the flight path from phoenix to SF somewhere.

Anyway, I read that this instantly incinerates any birds flying near the focal volume and you get these little puffs of vaporized bird every few minutes.

reference?

The incinerated birds are called streamers. Here's a reference. [0]

[0] https://www.sciencealert.com/this-solar-plant-accidentally-i...

And then it was adjusted and no birds have died since https://cleantechnica.com/2015/04/16/one-weird-trick-prevent...

The fix described in that article was for the standby position. It doesn't explain why there would be zero bird mortality when power is being generated.

Very interesting, but it'd be nice if they'd mention that many thousands of times more are killed each year by building windows, and pet cats, to put things in perspective for people.

The bird deaths are mostly used by people who are against solar power (or this particular implementation of it) to begin with. Even if the article mentioned it but it would not change many minds.

Sad.

I would replace "many" with "some". The problem we have is that there are many types of environmentalists, each with their own agenda. Just because a faction of environmentalists consider the desert solar array bad, doesn't mean that all do. In fact I would wager a guess that most think that it's worth it, considering how much pollution it's saving.

Very true, but this tends to be an issue mostly in California. That's why it's quite surprising that states like Arizona, Nevada, Utah, NM and Texas haven't started getting into this in a big way. I think it's just a matter of time. Especially since they can sell their power to California for a big profit.

We (Arizona) are getting "into this in a big way."

Existing AZ Solar:

- Agua Caliente (~400MW)

- Arlington Valley (300MW)

- Solana (280MW)

- Mesquite (150MW)

Future AZ Solar:

- Sterling (1200MW)

- Hualapai (340MW)

- Hyder Valley (325MW)

- Sonoran Solar (300MW)

- Crossroads (215MW)

- Quartzsite (100MW) [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_Arizona#Large_p...

Deserts are abandunt- in fact they are the default ecology on all planets.

https://www.bnl.gov/pv/files/pdf/229_RSER_WildLife_2011.pdf

If solar panels could be modified to create substained microclimates below that would be awesome. After all, there is still enough straylight getting below, to allow for a average forrestplant to exist.

Speaking of which, they also could be used to condense the (low) air humidity and channel it into the ground, so the possibility to create a micro ecology system is even more higher. Water immediately attracts life.

There was a small project where somebody used a hygroscopic substance (Silicagel) to collect water in the atmosphere in the desert and freed it with concentrated sunlight, and then condensed it.

http://perkscience.com/harvest-water-desert-air/

There are studies that have found that the net carbon impact of such desert solar arrays can actually be detrimental -- that is, installing the solar arrays in the desert causes an imbalance in desert soil ecology causing a release of soil carbon that exceeds the carbon benefit of the solar array. Here's one article on it, but I'm sure you can find others:

http://www.sfgate.com/science/article/California-solar-proje...

That article has all the standard petroleum industry claims: bird deaths (cats kill more birds by a factor of 100x), Native American tribal opposition, and whole lot of data meant to fit a narrative.

The US can't quit coal/oil - because the alternatives along with advanced batteries would sideline petroleum. And we certainly can't have that.

ag = agriculture ... took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out it wasn't a technical term for something.

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