They should just pave the mojave with solar panels. Nearly no one lives there and no one wants to live there and it is dead center to western states.
If China can pave mountains, a little desert with caliche should be easy
If China can pave mountains, a little desert with caliche should be easy
Electrical signal attenuation increases with the square of the distance, so you'll lose ~95% of the power to heat loss in the wires if you try to power Seattle from solar in Nevada -- not very eco-friendly, you'd agree? Also the extreme heat destroys solar panels. Also, dust. Also the permitting of stuff across state lines is so time-consuming it's effectively illegal.
There are a lot of very good reasons why we haven't covered the desert in solar panels.
not true. in standard HV-AC lines, power losses are ~10% per megameter. HVDC gets to 3-5%. So Nevada to Seattle would be at most 20% loss, and in practice 15%, and with HVDC closer to 7%.
https://www.nationalgrid.com/sites/default/files/documents/1...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverse-square_law
This is where you picture an expanding wireless sphere of transmission from a point source and since the surface area of this sphere grows by the square of the distance you get this "power attenuates by the square of the distance" rule.
This of course doesn't apply to power over a 2D cable.
My point of view with Tesla vs Edison is that they were both right and wrong under select circumstances.
Power transmission lines at 60Hz primarily have ohmic losses, which are linear with length of the conductor.
Interesting fact - Power transmission lines are long enough that the capacitive and inductive effects do matter a little bit, even though it's only 60Hz. That's why spacing between conductors is important. 3-phase lines will also rotate the order of conductors every so often to keep the average spacing between all pairs of lines similar.
Strongly agreed.
> Electrical signal attenuation increases with the square of the distance, so you'll lose ~95% of the power to heat loss in the wires if you try to power Seattle from solar in Nevada
What? HVDC lines are usually estimated to have 3.5% power loss per 1000 km. Since power transmission is done using power lines, the inverse square law doesn't really apply here.
> There are a lot of very good reasons why we haven't covered the desert in solar panels.
That does remain true however. Cost concerns, grid access concerns, environmental concerns are all good reasons.
I think you can also reduce heat loss by cranking the voltage up, right? I imagine that's how current interstate/cross-country power deals work
> Also the permitting of stuff across state lines is so time-consuming it's effectively illegal.
This is true in general, but in this specific case, there are a lot of obvious ways to get around the problem, because Nevada is a moth-eaten shirt of federal land reservations — Nevada-the-political-entity only owns/regulates ~15% of the land of Nevada-the-geographic-territory.
With the current state of the US federal government, lobbying to privately use one of those federal reservations would be a walk in the park; and once you're going "California -> federal land" instead of "Calfornia -> Nevada", regulation gets a lot simpler.
Fun fact: there's a National Forest in Nye County (bordering California) that runs right up to the edge of the DoE-reserved area where they did the nuke tests. The feds are fine with running HVDC lines through National Forests (they're not Parks, after all), and "repurposing nuked ground for solar" is actually an easy-to-sell narrative at all levels. You could build solar there and backhaul it to California without ever touching land regulated by Nevada-the-political-entity.
You can't cite efficiency percentages in a vacuum to imply they are a better or worse than alternatives, because those aren't percentages of the same kinds of things, and they don't tell you about the economics, production in absolute terms or EROEI.
Generating solar energy in deserts is often done with a mirror based heating system for this reason.
PV are designed to account for heat and "less efficiency" means they risk performing at 17-18% instead of 20%. And it's actually generating more total energy at 18% because more total sunlight is hitting it, an advantage in desserts.
I was thinking more long term though, deserts see much faster yearly degradation than places with more normal temps. (up to 2-3% compared to the standard 0.5-0.8%)
That's just an economic factor rather than a blocker. PVs are cheap as right now, and could be even cheaper if they weren't tariffed. I wouldn't be surprised if PVs in the desert is nonetheless the right approach right now, and not concentrators.
Coal starts with pulling down entire mountains to get to the coal. The whole process starts with environmental destruction and that's how it ends.
The thermal mass of the panels is no where near significant. Especially compared to a run away greenhouse effect we know coal to cause.
[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-024-01619-w.pdf
[1] https://acs.figshare.com/articles/journal_contribution/Net_Radiative_Forcing_from_Widespread_Deployment_of_Photovoltaics/2871685With proper site selection and albedo managed via density and bright ground treatment, you can expect net neutral local heat impact.