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Comment by mikemotherwell | Hacker News Reader

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-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.

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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.

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?

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

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_Australia#/medi...

[2] https://www.aer.gov.au/wholesale-markets/wholesale-statistic...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Star

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?

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-c...

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.

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.

First paragraph - absolutely.

Second paragraph is half based on commonly-held misconceptions that are partially the result of early colonial propaganda: indigenous Australians did indeed have strong traditions of land occupation and diplomacy and knew exactly which land “belonged” to which tribe. They farmed extensively (research Wollombi as an example - yams from horizon to horizon according to white explorers recorded notes).

Of course, all nations are based upon the power to take or prevent what you have from being taken, and in that regard it’s no different from anywhere else in the world.

Ownership and sovereignty are different, but very much dependent on each other. Sovereignty literally means the ability to unilaterally determine what rules and rights shall apply and what rights won't, to define what's legal for that land and people.

You have rights to property, life and liberty essentially because the local constitutional law asserts that these rights are the law of the land - and it's worth to note that the basic set of unalienable constitutional rights is quite different in different sovereign countries, some things are almost universal, but there's a lot of differences. If sovereignty changes hands (e.g. if Australia would be conquered by USSR in a weird alternate history), then it's perfectly plausible for the new sovereign to assert that people like larnmar can't have any property rights, and all real estate is now the property of someone else - and that would be entirely legal, because they get to define legality.

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.

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.

Might is right. If you can forcibly take my air then, yes, it is yours.

> Large scale solar is likely to cause problems for large numbers of native species.

Bigger problem then coal mines?

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.

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

e.g. gigantic fires that eradicate whole areas.

Did you see the photos of the lightly-charred koalas?

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.

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-...).

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.

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

On just merit it seems to have been a rather close thing (though South Africa was the better site), which I think was known in advance. So the entire process was pretty highly politicised; you can find much more information here: https://www.skatelescope.org/site-documentation/ though there is quite a bit of reading between the lines.

Of note to the sort of sociological questions we are discussing here, I note not only is the Site selection report ~200 pages, but also fairly interesting is a 16 page "Report on Validation of the SKA Site Selection Process". This comes with a lot of other documents as appendices, but also lays allows one to make out the timeline a bit more.

The final site report is from February 2012, while an "evaluation plan" was set in November 2011, and a "Revised Plan for SKA Site Selection" approved in May 2011. The Siting Group was created in 2010, to help with the "final" site selection. All this paints a picture of a somewhat fluid process.

> 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.

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.

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