this post was submitted on 05 Dec 2023
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Please be careful with terms like "unused desert". Whatever "green" developers call unused land is usually some kind of ecosystem with an established community of human and non-human inhabitants. They are forced out and big "green" money moved in, with their hydro, wind, solar, lithium mining ...
Forest mountain landscape not far from here will be torn up for another green tech, lithium, because those who can afford it want to get to nice forest mountain landscapes in their eco cars, for their eco holidays. Pasture lands not far from here are now filled with the stupidest of solar installations: nothing but panels. They could have the same old herds of before clean the land between the panels, but instead its all fenced off and probably treated with roundup, or motorized machines. And people want more cars, more air conditioning because every summer it gets hotter, and the spiral of "ever more" continues.
Calling arid or not obviously landscaped spaces far away from you "unused" is dangerous and will expose the last wild landscapes of earth to abuse. It's bad enough as it is.
Well I was thinking of the central Sahara, and parts of Arabia etc., these areas really are vast. Sure it would change the landscape, but not so much life. It may be better to make cheap (the op is about low-tech) electricity there, than for example get to 1.5ºC pathways by BECCS (generate electricity with biofuel from plantations, then pump CO2 underground) which is much worse for biodiversity. Your examples - forest mountain, pasture - wouldn't be called desert - at least not in english (the interpretation may vary with language), it's a more extreme term than arid.
If solar energy is collected from such remote areas, is there perhaps a show-stopping problem of transmitting that power out to city? Transmission has huge losses over great distances.
There was a recent proposal to cover train tracks and (I think) some segments of rivers with solar panels. One of the problems IIRC was transmitting the power. My memory is a bit fuzzy on it.. not sure why they couldn’t just directly power the electric train that runs below them.. but whatever the issue was, it might be the same issue as the desert would have.
You can’t really trust layperson’s common English here. There are vast forests which are not being tagged as “forest” because a majority of trees don’t reach a certain defined height. These non-forests are useful for decarbonization but they’re being cleared on the basis that they are not technically a “forest”. So now there is a movement to protect these non-forests.
Re transmission - yes there are increasing losses - but the OP is about cheap panels, so cheap electricity. It doesn't have to go so far, for example I'm thinking that the population in the Sahel is projected to increase a lot - that highest fertility in the world, as these regions develop they'll need electricity.
As for your non-forest, I'd call that scrubland, certainly not desert - which implies to me sand or bare stones, deserted by almost all life not just by people. Of course flowers can bloom even in the desert on occasional years after rains. Indeed the whole Sahara was much greener, only a few thousand years ago, and maybe could be again if we could work out the secret. But that's still a perturbation, and even with solar panels, there'd be plenty space left.
Transmission does not have excessive losses. They're typically well under 5%. Even in grids with lots of long distance transmission (NZ has lots of generation in the south island, demand in the north island), the last-50-km losses are higher than the long-distance losses.
Rail current draw tends to be very bursty including both consumption and regen, with capacity that is quite limited on longer lines. The amount of power that can be connected isn't very large, and because it's a very long, narrow corridor, the average distance from a panel to an inverter is going to be large, or the inverters are going to be small.
Railways also like to regularly shut off the power to make maintenance safer and faster, and just use other tracks or diesel trains. This would interrupt the generation.
Mechanical mounting and windage concerns could also be present; a structure overhead could affect the aerodynamics of particularly high-speed trains, and the roof could funnel crosswinds into the train rather than over the top.
I'm not sure it's impossible, it's just that there are still much better places to put panels.
Some species are winners and some are losers when people tamper with the environment. You make it sound like there are only losers. Maybe the shade of panels would help some plant and animal species thrive that would enrich the ecosystem. It would of course need careful analysis to avoid disaster.
Ben’s idea is in the very early brainstorming phase so shouldn’t be cancelled on the off-the-cuff assumption that an intervention would necessarily be reckless.