Solar farms took over California desert: ‘An oasis has become a dead sea’ | Hacker News Reader

Solar farms took over California desert: ‘An oasis has become a dead sea’

theguardian.com

19 pointspseudolus21 comments

Copying my comment from the dupe:

Checking the area out on Google Maps is instructive.

https://goo.gl/maps/ToPPHx2Jjdz8rj5E7?coh=178572&entry=tt

The above takes you to the Ivanpah Concentrating Solar plant. You can also see the golf course that someone built in the desert next to it for scale.

https://www.google.com/maps/@33.7410557,-115.3975396,138227m...

The largest solar installation in the world, it's truly mind bending in size when you zoom in.

But, if I was angry about my well running dry in the desert, I'd start with the golf courses and farmers rather than the solar farms.

Wow, there's a lake in the golf course. The evaporation must be enormous.

Badhla Solar Park in India is the biggest now, I think. 2.24 GW

https://goo.gl/maps/LUXNbviB7GuZ8Vup6

The time for careful consideration was maybe 20 or 40 years ago. Now we've blown past all emission targets, and it's too late for articles how passengers of the Titanic would be inconvenienced by a change of course.

Sorry a well in your desert property is drying up, but if we fuck up ocean currents there will be a lot more ruined properties and disrupted habitats. If heatwaves and wildfires continue to increase, there will be a lot more dust and devalued land.

Each one of these panels provides a very valuable thing in a desert - shaded area. All manner of insects, lizards are given some shade. I wonder if an ecological survey has been done on that aspect? I note that farm grass also grows well in this shade as the solar angle variance allows grass growth (as long as rain or hose irrigation is present). Poles are high enough for cows beneath and strong enough to tolerate cows 'scritching', just like cats = they love it.https://www.agproud.com/articles/53536-solar-panel-shade-for... In fact live stock farms have electric scratchers.Some amazing videos https://www.google.com/search?q=cow+scratcher&rlz=1C1CHBF_en...

It seems like we just can't have a break, can we? Any technology that looks cleaner than the previous one (solar panels vs coal burning, electric cars vs petrol exhaust, ...) seems to have its own way of ruining the environment anyway

Putting all this solar on roofs and over parking lots is the free meal.

Yes!

Better than free - it keeps the sun off the rooves and thus the homes and cars require less cooling. I installed solar last year, and have not turned on the air conditioning since. Amazing difference, and I imagine for parked cars the shade savings may be even more profound.

The problem is everyone wants power but no one wants to live next to power generation.

Look at people complaining about offshore wind ruining their views (but attributing other "environmental concerns" as the real reason they are unhappy).

Arguably living next to solar/wind has to be better than living next to oil/coal/gas plants..

This right here. Not just Wind/Solar either. We have a community that was built right next to a coal fire power plant that's been there since the 70s (the neighborhood was built in 2005) and people are trying to work to get that power plant shut down because they don't like it's smokestacks and how much it lowers their land values. If we were to shut down that plant, we'd drop 1/3rd of the power generation in our area. If that plant were to actually shut down they'd lose their collective crap because of blackouts.

So basically their argument is "We want that power plant gone but we don't want to feel the effects of that power plant being gone. FIX IT NOW!!1!!11one!!11". Maybe they shouldn't have moved right next to a freakin power plant?

Maybe they should also have bought all of the surrounding land within sight in every direction. I moved to a remote rural area very particularly because of the dark skies, for my joy of it and an astronomy hobby. A decade later they built a large wind farm a few miles away, with blinking red lights on top of each turbine. It sucks and there's not a damn thing I can do about it other than leave.

Yeah, real estate development is sort of like traffic. People develop some land / drive somewhere, and then get irrationally upset that others do the same.

Everything everywhere is always moving forever.

You see the similar with transportation too. People live on a major avenue or thru street in Manhattan and then protest against express bus lanes, lol.

People are completely irrational on green/climate stuff. Some of my leftiest friends on climate all drive midsize gas SUVs. Or the ones that pride themselves on not owning a car (Uber black rides don't count) and take 4+ trips by jet per year, lol.

Habitat destruction not withstanding, companies in the solar industry will gravitate towards highest margins. If we want to take on the hard task of building on many private properties, then we need an incentive to make up for the difference in profit. Perhaps aggressive tax credits such that consumers drive demand? Even with that, it seems hard to imagine rooftop solar competing with ground solar farms of scale.

What made these decisions seems so poor? Is it a lack of thought about secondary, tertiary, n-ary effects?

I guess the easier access places are that and so BLM can give those out more quickly? That harder areas would require more work to prepare for construction?

...but nuclear bad and solar good.

You're pretending that uranium mines don't disturb any habitats. And maybe that nuclear power can avoid being overpriced.

(BTW, one of the major cost rises for nuclear power also happened in California, when the risk models were extended to cover seismic activity. Nuclear power was cheaper back when it was legal to disregard most risks.)

Good thing solar panels appear out of thin air and don't need any mining to be manufactured.

Well, if you want to go into that: Building a solar panel needs mining, rather like how building a nuclear power station does. Once the solar is there, the sun supplies the fuel, not a mining process.

If you're a programmer, you might say that solar has O(1) mining while nuclear has O(n).

Let's not do the whole wedge between renewables and nuclear. Both are good, end of discussion.

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