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Comment by thethethethe | Hacker News Reader

Why would we destroy pristine desert, which is rapidly disappearing, when we could cover land that has already been disturbed, like parking lots, building roofs, and farmland? Deserts are important ecosystems regardless of their immediate utility to industrial society

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> Deserts are important ecosystem

Are you using "important" to say "have a function beyond being inert matter"? Then sure, but that information is already conveyed by saying "it's an ecosystem", adding that kind of "important" doesn't add information. If you mean "rank above many other things in a similar category" then I'm skeptical.

The first one isn't helpful in this context because we need to put PV somewhere, we might as well look for a place of less relative importance.

> The first one isn't helpful in this context because we need to put PV somewhere, we might as well look for a place of less relative importance.

Yes, like the places I mentioned in my comment

Installing in deserts means you need minimal mechanical support for the panels. Parking lots require raised ones. Individual roofs are small compared to large solar farms. Most farming isn't compatible with panels (think tractors and harvesters).

That it works for some fraction doesn't mean it's sufficient to get us the terawatts we need. And economics matter. If the installation is more expensive then it'll take longer for PV to replace existing plants.

So essentially you are saying we should destroy the environment because it appears to be cheaper in the short term? Sounds like a classic 20th century trapping that might not age so well when the externalities come back and demand repayment.

I wouldn't underestimate the power of distributed arrays either. There are estimates that if every house had rooftop solar, it would generate 30-40% of total power demand [0], and that is just residential.

Perhaps we cannot replace all power using brownfield PV but we shouldn't just disregard the desert or other pristine ecosystems without also utilizing other alternatives to minimize our impact.

[0] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.computerworld.com/article/3...

> So essentially you are saying we should destroy the environment because it appears to be cheaper in the short term?

"Destroy the environment" is not a binary variable. Decentralized installations could also result in more emissions from transportation to reach all the places, it could eat up more resources (steel) for the support structures. No action you take (or don't take) will have zero side-effects.

So, I'm saying pick the most lifeless places you can find that are still reasonably close to some power distribution infrastructure and put it there. But of course also put it on rooftops and industrial ruins where reasonable. It's not an either/or thing.

> but we shouldn't just disregard the desert or other pristine ecosystems without also utilizing other alternatives to minimize our impact.

It's not disregarding them, it's making tradeoffs. If we need some cheap, flat, unobstructed land to get PV deployed then some marginal desert can be a better choice than cutting down forests, draining swamps or covering arable land.

I agree that protecting desert ecosystems is important, but isn't desertification more of a problem than "rapidly disappearing" desert?

desertification is the destruction of arable land, not the expansion of healthy desert ecosystems. Healthy desert ecosystems are disappearing, not expanding

Deserts are rapidly disappearing?

Pristine deserts are. Invasive species, drought, and human development are all damaging desert ecosystems, which take much longer to recover than less arid biomes.

Just because deserts appear barren doesn't mean there isn't an ecosystem there that isn't important.

Makes sense.

It plain makes more sense to generate the power as close to use as possible

It doesn’t make that much sense. We can transmit power pretty long distances these days.

I don’t understand “don’t disturb the desert” - why? It’s not just useless to us… it’s useless to most living things.

> We can transmit power pretty long distances these days.

Engineering feasibility is not the same as economic viability.

Or political

I don't know where OP got that from, but we don't actually need to use it, an a lot of things live there. It isn't all just bare sun bleached rock and sand. https://www.desertmuseum.org/desert/sonora.php

"things live there" can also be true about gamma-ray sterilized canned food[0]. That doesn't mean it's important to the continued functioning of the ecosphere. Also, some deserts are more lifeless than others.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinococcus_radiodurans

I don't see what point you are making that contradict my original comment. Yes deserts are less important to the health of the planet than biodiversity hotspots, but why would we destroy them when we have other alternatives?

Hasn't area of desert increased a lot in recent years. We hear, for example, about increased desertification in Saharan Africa. If we reverse some of that desertification that would seem to help?

From my other comment:

desertification is the destruction of arable land, not the expansion of healthy desert ecosystems. Healthy desert ecosystems are disappearing, not expanding

Then they're orthogonal, and siting such projects on land that has become desert in the last century, say, will not harm these "healthy desert ecosystems" you speak of?

There will always be trade off no matter where we decide to put them. Either that or we return to living in villages and forget about modern civilization.

Not really sure how you went from not destroying the desert for PV to living in villages and forgetting modern civilization, seems like a big jump. There are other alternatives which I mentioned that we can utilize before we need to make the trade off that you're talking about.

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