Using solar farms to generate fresh desert soil crust
phys.org
phys.org
I'm glad this is getting some attention. I live in the desert and often I hear from people who don't live here the sentiment that it's useless, dead land, but the opposite is true. The deserts in the southwest US are alive with all sorts of interesting and beautiful plants and animals.
As a data point, there is ongoing development of the "flat slab on the ground" type of approach too.
eg:
https://electrek.co/2022/12/12/texas-solar-farm-flat-on-the-...
Bonus points if no children were compelled to mine or manufacture the material.
They do contain heavy metals and toxic substances. As do the batteries.
Looking it up, it appears that the contamination occurs during disposal so it's not a good idea to dispose of these in the kind of landfill where they can get into the water table, and it's preferable to recycle them.
It appears that mining these materials in formalized industrial mines has no child labour according to Human Rights Watch. It's artisanal independent mines that are risky from this perspective.
Overall, the technology seems safe.
Let to rot after funding is depleted is a recipe for disaster. Consider the original decommissioning plan for San Onofre nuclear power plant: https://sanonofresafety.org/nuclear-waste/
Even pig farms cause runoff of manure and fertiliser into rivers, where they cause Eutrophication - massive algae blooms that consume all oxygen in the water, killing all the local fish and fauna and producing massive swaths of hte ocean where the only living thing is Jellyfish.
Sounds a bit off, but consider the effect of having the glass thrown into a landfill where it will be bulldozed, day after day, for several years. It is just jumping to the end of what would be the eventual outcome after a few decades of disposal.
I don't find that to be an arguable study design.
"Anti-renewable propoganda" is certainly a thing, but it's also true that many champions of renewables keep their blinders on when it comes to making assessments.
Solar and nuclear are the demonstrably effective means of producing large scale power, but they don't provide portable energy density (the kind we demand). Battery technology has finally come into the realm of competition, but that has been with extensive and persistent research for decades.
The fact is that PV panel economic lifetime is way, way longer than reactionary renewable opponents want you to believe. It is not 15 years, or 25 years, it is more like 100-400 years. Nobody needs to decommission them en masse, yet. And even if they suddenly did, it still does not present a disposal issue. Suppose there are 100 million PV panels in California. This is the right order of magnitude for our peak generating capacity. If you took every PV assembly in the entire state, stacked them 50 deep so they were about as high as a man, and just put them in a field, they would not even cover 500 acres. That's less than a square mile. Total non-issue.
The problem is there are studies that show heavy metals polluting the water table. That is what has been observed. I'm of the mindset that not all toxic events are observed, less are documented, & even less are expressed to the public.
Also the toxins released & human rights issues in the supply side have not been addressed in this thread.
It would be great to have better options for energy production, but we have observed some implications of solar cells as the 1st generations reach end of life & the impacts of in field breakages. There is enough of a history to take a sober look at what needs to be improved. Saying it's a "non issue" is frankly an irresponsible approach & makes me question if these issues are taken seriously. Claiming that everyone who brings up issues is anti renewable or an oil shill is also the wrong approach. Is there even proper risk assessment or is this the wild west?
That's why invoking toxicity of PV panels is just pure anti-renewable propaganda.
However, I think the idea of the "anti-renewablist" is misguided. There are sceptics who fear advancements for the sake of advancement alone. Plastics are one perfect example (PFAS, PBA, etc). We are only beginning to understand how horribly these things disrupt organic chemical & hormonal balance. Scepticism is not your enemy.
Example. Almost half of all Japanese people I meet say something along the lines "poor car shops who will be put out of business because of EVs", and will find many critics against renewables (including, most of the time, conspiracy theories, e.g. the West wants to eliminate Japan advance) just because they are sympathetic to the ICE cars industry.
And, last but not least, all the Russian trolls, as well as all the people who are unknowingly repeating them or influenced by them, will disseminate all kind of doubts and skepticism about renewables. Because fossil fuels is something they don't want to see replaced anytime soon.
There are incentives as well, for example:
>Haryana solar power policy announced in 2016 offers 90% subsidy to farmers for the solar powered water pumps, which also offers subsidy for the solar street lighting, home lighting solutions, solar water heating schemes, solar cooker schemes. It is mandatory for new residential buildings larger than 500 square yards (420 m2) to install 3% to 5% solar capacity for no building plan sanctioning is required, and a loan of up to ₹1 million is made available to the residential property owners. Haryana provides 100% waiver of electricity taxes, cess, electricity duty, wheeling charges, cross subsidy charges, transmission and distribution charges, etc. for rooftop solar projects
I wonder why it's 'rooftop solar projects' specifically and not also inclusive of on-the-ground solar projects.
Most people hear "desert" and probably think of the Sahara and Arabian deserts, but the classification includes much less extreme areas as well.
Just for a sense of scale, the US has 158 million hectares of arable land (and arable land is just a subset of agricultural land) [1].
[1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/arable-la...
But articles are trying to always show big numbers, and without context it is hard to know what these numbers mean. 70k hectares is not that much. A better way to play the area angle is, in my opinion, this: if we properly electrify the US, we can stop making bio-ethanol. The US is using 12 million hectares of arable land for that; that can be put to better use.
Yes, but they were only looking at biocrust potential from the three largest solar farms in that particular county.
Obviously if you wanted to help soil nationwide you'd also need to target solar farms nationwide. Plus, in the future we can expect more solar farms than we have currently, it's only quite recently that solar has started to become a non-trivial amount of energy generation in the US, as you can see in this chart: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:USA_electricity_productio...
Subsidy to set food production at odds with energy is a colossal error
Besides, I'd imagine that the corn used for ethanol production could easily be turned in to food should that need ever arise.
I should hope they just keep it food. ;
I was commenting more on the uses of government subsidy. Unless things changed significantly in more recent years, ethanol was never all that affordable.
To wit:
"...53,956 BTUs per gallon to manufacture ethanol. The best existing plants use 37,883 BTUs per gallon" (1)
The manufacture of ethanol is both subsidized directly and subsidized indirectly through the use of fossil fuels to provide the energy of production. It is generally the case that ethanol cannot be made feasibly (cost) by burning ethanol.
1. http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2014/ph240/dikeou1/docs/et...
If agriculture as a whole were actually sustainable there would be a good shortage, or at least much less of an excess than we have now.
I wonder why these studies don't focus more attention on current infrastructure though.
Urban buildings have equally massive footprints and are already on the grid.
The entire urban highway system of blacktop is tied to the grid and acts as a thermal mass, increasing ground temperatures and contributing to the heat island effect. Why not cover it?
We are creating a shaded microclimate underneath a field of solar panels, which apparently can be harvested to meaningfully impact a larger area with a different climate.
I wish they'd given figures on the expansion factor: one hectare of solar farm is enough to seed X hectares of desert.
It reminds me of how the Amazon rainforest is fed in great part by a single small area in the Sahara (the Bodélé Depression in Chad). The area is 150km × 500km, but it seems like the relevant area (the winds have to exceed 36km/h to pick up enough dust to matter) may be smaller?
They would look pretty funny from altitude. With alternating black solar panels and white radiator panels would they average out to gray? Tweak the pigment mix slightly so they end up a tan-ish resembling the dirt they cover?
I lived in a high desert environment in central New Mexico for 10 years. You can see where the tracks of off road vehicles can stay in place for ten years. It takes a long time to regenerate the kind of ground that may eventually give way to grasses . Very slow process.