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Comment by jokoon | Hacker News Reader

the damage done by building so many panels is greater than the benefits of putting those panels in the desert

panels don't produce that much power, you need a lot of them

One of the pictures in the article shows one of those giant mirror arrays. They have one in the Eastern CA desert near Vegas. They reflect all the energy in a big circle into a single point, which when you look at it is at like, a near-sun-level of brilliance, where it (presumably) boils lots of water to run turbines or whatever.

Perhaps they're going to use those instead of all the rare earth complexity that is photovoltaics.

Those designs do 'eventually' use water to run turbines, but the primary thing that gets heated and has that heat harvested (to boil water) is sodium.

> Perhaps they're going to use those instead of all the rare earth complexity that is photovoltaics.

Photovoltaics (aka Solar panels) do not use a lot of rare earth materials.

From one of the links below:

> Unlike the wind power and EV sectors, the solar PV industry isn’t reliant on rare earth materials. Instead, solar cells use a range of minor metals including silicon, indium, gallium, selenium, cadmium, and tellurium.

https://www.pv-magazine.com/2019/11/28/are-rare-earths-used-...

https://ratedpower.com/blog/rare-metals-photovoltaic/

those mirror things use natural gas to start up, so not very green

15 years ago it looked like solar thermal might be the way to go. But it turns out that, once people started manufacturing a lot of solar PV panels, they got really good at it. Solar PV costs dropped 90% in a decade.

At this point, in most cases, it would probably be foolish to build a non-PV solar power plant.

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