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Comment by aeonfox | Hacker News Reader

> This is literally desert wasteland sitting alongside a freeway

"Desert wasteland" teems with life, just maybe not the kind that most people care about. Land use is one of the sticking points of the energy transition, both for agriculture and biodiversity.

One of the only plusses to nuclear power is reduced land use, though it has it's own water use and waste issues. Much better alternatives are rooftop solar and residential batteries, and grid scale batteries located closer to where they are needed for industry, commerce, and high-density housing. It really kills the need for these large scale deployments and the costly transmission lines to service them.

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We need both! rooftop solar alone is not going to solve our energy needs. If projects like this don't get built, the realistic alternative in the US these days is burning coal, which is both expensive and destructive to the ecology and to health.

About 3/4 of my rooftop solar goes back into the grid. A neighborhood grid-scale battery could sop that up while the market is cheap and dispatch it when the sun is down. Even if I had a battery, it would quickly saturate. Rooftop solar can deliver far more than most households can use. And let's not forget parking lots and commercial real estate. With enough incentive these places can become mini power plants of their own, and provide a nice little passive income for the land owner.

Whenever I look at rooftop solar (Denmark) 2/3 of the cost is easily installation. Add to that the risk that I'll have to replace the roof early.

Rooftop seems expensive, if not done as part of a roof replacement. And even then it's expensive.

If we had deserts that would be a great place to put up solar.

Yeah, there's probably a huge asterisk around the predominant roofing materials, latitude, and availability of tradespeople in a particular area. Certainly with the latter, there is downward pressure with greater demand enabling more people to take on installation work.

> If we had deserts that would be a great place to put up solar.

I guess the EU at least has some large projects in North Africa which is trying to combat desertification. Looks like a win-win, but I don't know much about it.

The longer term view is that climate change is a risk to biodiversity.

Taking any even longer term view, a much reduced human population could be a boon for biodiversity. Life will find a way, but billions of humans will die of hunger (and potentially wars over resources) in the meantime.

Corn fields have already killed biodiversity. Get rid of the ethanol mandate, replace gas cars with electric, replace corn fields with solar fields with an understory of native plants. The electrified car fleet will use no fossil fuels and about a third of the generated electricity.

https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2025/04/25/ethanol-corn-uses-far...

> U.S. corn growth for fuel – not food occupies 29.7 million acres. A study from Cornell University finds that corn grown for ethanol fuel requires 31 times as much land as solar per unit of energy.

> Moreover, the researchers found that if 46% of the land currently used to farm corn for ethanol was converted to solar, the projects would generate enough electricity for the United States to decarbonize its electricity system by its 2050 goal.

>replace corn fields with solar fields

This will never ever happen, farmers would simply switch to different crops. I'm 100% behind getting rid of the ethanol mandate, but that's because it's completely counterproductive to its stated goal of reducing pollution because it requires more energy to grow the corn, fertilize the corn, harvest the corn, and then process it into ethanol than simply pumping, transporting, and refining oil. Also, cars also get worse mileage on gasoline that has ethanol due to the lower energy content.

I can appreciate your appreciation for desert life, but this is a fairly small piece of land out of a region that has some of the least biomass per acre in the country. This is not going to displace and biodiversity than a truck stop in the same location would.

More to the point, if we can't build a solar plant here then we're never going to build one in this country, let alone the rare earth mines or anything else we would need for a green transition.

> This is not going to displace and biodiversity than a truck stop in the same location would.

You wildly underestimate what lives in an arid landscape. I don't blame you, because you can't really know unless you've spent time in these landscapes, and have the inclination to observe them.

> More to the point, if we can't build a solar plant here then we're never going to build one in this country

There's plenty of already disturbed land that can be used before decimating nature parks. Be it vacant agricultural land, decommissioned commercial real estate, etc. But like I said, roof-top solar and grid-scale batteries are still largely under-utilised and have the added benefit of not needing expensive transmission lines. This will become especially true as the cost of batteries continue to steeply decline.

> I don't blame you, because you can't really know unless you've spent time in these landscapes, and have the inclination to observe them.

I've actually spent a lot of time in Nevada and the SW. You're right that it's gorgeous and has its own ecology. But out of all the places that someone could say "not in my backyard", rural Nevada has probably some of the least claim as anywhere on this earth. It's vast, the wildlife is literally some of the most resilient on earth, and thanks to global warming, it's one of the few bioregions that's actually growing.

Also, BLM land is specifically not nature preserve. Public lands are set aside for everything from forestry to mining to military testing to 4x4 racing. These are not actually pristine wildernesses being destroyed.

According to the original article (looks like it's changed):

> But some conservationists alarmed by the proposed rollout of large solar projects in Nevada and other Western states celebrated the demise of Esmeralda 7, saying as designed it took up up far too much land.

> “Friends of Nevada Wilderness is thrilled that this poorly sited project is dead,” said Shaaron Netherton, the group’s executive director.

> “In the push to get this particular project through, the BLM ignored the importance of this region’s cultural significance, biological significance and the fact that it is one of the most intact landscapes remaining in Nevada,” Netherton added.

I have two conflicting opinions on the conservation value of the land. It might be that some significant part of it is worth saving, or perhaps FONW have become corrupt.

Also there is so much piblic land that has been totally stripped of all vegetation and life by grazing cattle.

That same land was once grazed by massive herds of buffalo. The native species need large animals grazing to stay healthy.

Sure, there's overgrazing in places, but that's a matter of degree. The fact remains that cattle grazing is a necessary step to replace what was lost, if preservation of what remains of native species is desired.

Desert solar installations have been shown to increase biodiversity, particularly in places which have spreading deserts. The shading panels moderate the high and low daily temperatures increasing moisture retention and helping plant life take hold.

Remediation of desertified and degraded land makes total sense, but I think the objection here was that the land is already bio-diverse, just in a way that many people might overlook.

>Land use is one of the sticking points of the energy transition, both for agriculture and biodiversity.

it may be a plus for solar if it can be shown that the shadow from the panels is a good thing in those cases

There is also probably enough toxic/polluted wasteland around so that solar can be built there without taking "good" lands.

It may be that AI will happen to be the savior of this planet - by creating huge demand for energy it will allow the cheapest - i.e. renewables - to get into dominating market position, and may be Big Tech would even get into and productize the fusion.

> There is also probably enough toxic/polluted wasteland around so that solar can be built there without taking "good" lands.

Agreed.

I think solar installations would make more sense for remediation of desertified or polluted land instead of disrupting existing nature reserves.

> "Desert wasteland" teems with life, just maybe not the kind that most people care about.

As somebody who lives in the Southwest US, thank you. There are so many people on HN who think the desert is just Martian dunes to be paved over like a Civ tile.

Just in the hills around me there are 30 species of plant, century-old trees, snakes, lizards, horny toads, bobcats, coyotes, hare, quail, multitudes of ants, the incredible red velvet mite, roadrunners (yes they’re real), flies, wasps, native bumblebees, mice, god it goes on and on. And the soil is encrusted, literally, with countless microbiota. In fact a single vehicle smashing it can damage that crust for years.

I know we need renewables, and yes, the Southwest is a great place for solar. But there is real ecological damage to some of the most pristine places left in America involved in developing unused land.

I take no position on the development which is under discussion here, or whether the cancellation was fair. I haven’t researched it, and probably never will. I’m just sick of the “it’s just desert, who cares, paint it with solar/oil fields/asphalt” attitude that’s everywhere.

Hard agree. Some of my favorite birding spots are in grasslands and wetlands sitting next to highways. Places that would be overlooked by most people.

That’s fair, it’s not ok to pretend desert has no life worth protecting.

However, there is a lot of it, and as far as impacted animals per acre, it’s got to be near the bottom. Thus of all the places to locate big solar projects, huge expanses of low life density flat land with lots have sun seems like it would minimize the harm.

Yes, and deserts are just as susceptible to the effects of climate change as everywhere else. You have to build solar somewhere or they’re all doomed too.

As the article states, there's plenty of already disturbed land that can be used, instead of nature parks that harbor fragile ecosystems.

Also what people call "desert" isn't, like, the Sahara. There are many kinds of arid and semi-arid landscapes that people tend to underestimate because they aren't really habitable by humans or suitable for growing agricultural crops. The kinds of landscapes I'm referring are highlighted on the Friends of Nevada Wilderness website:

https://www.nevadawilderness.org/

It's not a flat plane with a few rocks and a lone cactus on it. That's just the cartoon characterisation that springs to mind when we think "desert".

> I’m just sick of the “it’s just desert, who cares, paint it with solar/oil fields/asphalt” attitude that’s everywhere.

There is plentiful desert to expand upon and plenty of expansion coming due to ongoing climate impact. Desert fauna is not in danger, at any almost any rate.

I think Nuclear power definitely needs to be a big part of the energy mix - it just has so many benefits.

I think rooftop solar is also excellent, but only in theory. In practice, I feel like rooftop solar allows public utilities to abdicate their responsibility. It diminishes the affect of collective pressure on major energy producers to hold up their end of the bargain to invest in clean energy because it shifts costs to homeowners and effectively makes them a very weak competitor to big energy producers. A power grid full of smart systems and robust transmission lines is an amazing resource - but it is very capital intensive. How do we replace that with rooftop solar that many homeowners seek loans to install? How does that incentivize power companies, who are allowed to operate monopolies, to invest in clean energy infrastructure?

> How do we replace that with rooftop solar that many homeowners seek loans to install?

Australia has managed to do it. Installers are tripping over each other to put solar on roofs here.

> How does that incentivize power companies, who are allowed to operate monopolies, to invest in clean energy infrastructure?

Arbitrage. If every house has solar and battery, that's a huge load off the grid, but there's still apartments, businesses, and industry that need power, especially at night. Grid-scale batteries take the excess from households, and distribute to those that need power. There would still be need for grid-scale renewable generation, just hopefully not built on existing nature reserves.

As a new homeowner I enjoy having solar on the roof. Coming from being an apartment owner... apartment owners are generally fucked when it comes to this stuff. Even if you want it, convincing a board of "gimme rent" landlords to spend money on solar they won't benefit from generally kills it.

This is why I'd rather a rule like "you must have enough solar to cover your aircon power over a hot summer" and then gridscale the rest.

Instead, I too will enjoy my almost-aristocratic landowner status and will be upgrading my solar setup in the near future.

Most rooftops generate more power than the household consumes. The vast amount of air-conditioning for apartments is likely already accounted for by rooftop generation. An easy way to gridscale that is to have batteries closer to the rooftops that re-distribute that rooftop power when the sun goes down. Incentives can be given so that home owners over-provision their solar with bigger arrays and inverters, and to turn their home batteries into VPPs.

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