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It’s insane how these articles somehow conjure up some kind of nonsensical bad for environment arguments. Putting solar panels in the desert is good for the env
by whywhywhydude 4y ago
It’s insane how these articles somehow conjure up some kind of nonsensical bad for environment arguments. Putting solar panels in the desert is good for the environment. It reduces the ground temperatures and lets more plants and animals survive. It might also slow down further desertification.
- kinnth 4y agoThis!
- mohamedattahri 4y agoI see where you're coming from, and I agree that the arguments highlighted in the article are rather unconvincing, but messing up with ecosystems ALWAYS triggers unintended consequences. Some might be good, others terrible. I wouldn't be as definitive about the "good" in it as you make it sound.
- ajross 4y agoTo be fair, all industry is "messing with ecosystems", and in particular the energy industry is doing so with far more per-kWh impact, and globally. This is very much like the "birds vs. windmills" arguments. Yes, it's important to recognize externalities to any decision and have a plan for mitigation where needed. But at this scale, "look-here-is-a-problem" tunnel vision just creates paralysis.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- yamazakiwi 4y agoThere is a scale to influencing change in the environment. Any amount of change is not "messing up" with ecosystems, as you put it. Unintended consequences are possible/likely/imminent, but that doesn't mean they are always unexpected/uncontrollable/cataclysmic.
- mohamedattahri 4y agoI disagree, because I think the scale is relative to the size and complexity of the ecosystem you're touching, not the size of your influence. They're unpredictable and unexpected, and that's why we tend to refer to them as unknown unknowns. But like you said, they're not necessarily catastrophic or cataclysmic. Back to the context, I just don't think someone can say for sure that changing the very nature of a thousand square miles piece of land in the middle of some of the least studied terrain types will be great and won't have any bad consequences.
- yamazakiwi 4y agoI didn't say that the scale wasn't relative to the size or complexity. I'm saying that any amount of change in an ecosystem isn't necessarily "bad". Contextually, I can see why you're a skeptic of this amount of land changing having an undeniable "good" influence, but the size could absolutely not be a factor at all. I'll use your words but change the last part to illustrate better what I'm saying: "I just don't think someone can say for sure that changing the very nature of a thousand square miles piece of land in the middle of some of the least studied terrain types will be good because...It sounds right and I'll choose that answer even though I don't actually know." Also saying "changing the very nature of" is quite dramatic.
- anigbrowl 4y agoThis is valid, but have to use some sort of heuristic or things will continue to get worse as we struggle to assign probabilities to the manifold possibilities.
- WithinReason 4y agoSure, but will the unintended consequences be worse than not importing 8% of UK energy from North Africa? Because that will have consequences too.
- mrtweetyhack 4y ago[dead]
- coldtea 4y agoHow about cutting down UK energy consumption by 20-30%?
- notJim 4y agoUK per capita energy consumption has been declining for a while. This is pretty typical in the developed world, largely driven by efficiency gains.
- johngalt_ 4y agoHow could that be done?
- TapWaterBandit 4y agoLots of comments on hackernews/reddit appears to be the go-to method thus far.
- grey-area 4y agoInsulating houses and offices (windows, roofs, walls). Imposing more stringent insulation and energy requirements on new builds. The UK housing stock is very badly insulated.
- ArchitectAnon 4y agoYes, insulate as well. But a person living in a single glazed warehouse conversion with no insulation but next to a tube stop and a food shop will use quite a bit less energy overall than a person who lives in a passive house but has to drive 10miles to work. Restoring walkable town centres and discouraging car use in towns and cities that worked fine before cars would save more energy and would be quicker and less disruptive than trying to insulate every old victorian house. Insulating old houses is technically hard to do right and different houses need different solutions. If it’s done badly it will cause health problems from black mould and structural problems from condensation causing timber joists and rafters to rot where they pass through the insulation into the masonry walls.
- threeseed 4y agoTheir arguments really are ridiculous. It ignores the fact that climate change is disproportionally going to affect Africa and that doing nothing does not mean the status quo remains for nomadic tribes. It means more desertification, less grazing area and greater poverty.
- DrThunder 4y agoSources please. AFIK there is no conclusive data out there backing the idea Africa will just turn into MORE desert from climate change. I'd also like you to provide data showing green energy initiatives will reverse this trend anytime in the near future. Africa is an already impoverished nation, how does greater grazing area help them? Are they going to use it for large amounts of livestock they can sell/slaughter? Is that making them less impoverished right now? What will make Africa less poor is a lot of infrastructure, likely built off the back of fossil fuels. You know.. they same way all western nations industrialized and got to the point they could sit around worrying about whether they were hurting the environment instead of worrying about whether they have enough dung to burn so they can keep warm.
- ta1243 4y ago> Africa is an already impoverished nation I have no idea what you're on about. Africa isn't an impoverished nation, nor is it a wealthy nation. The nations in Africa have a GDP per capita ranging from about $1k (way less than Haiti and Afghanistan) to nearly $40k (similar to Croatia and Greece)
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- twelve40 4y agoI think they are referring specifically to the local tribes, for whom yes it might be a problem.
- DrThunder 4y ago
- Retric 4y agoIt’s different, but hard to say if it’s better or worse globally. Dust from the Sahara plays a major role in cloud formation and transporting nutrients to the Amazon basin. I doubt it would be significant for the Amazon in the short term, but it could mean less frequent but larger tropical storms in the mid Atlantic which then pound the east coast. Perhaps it’s a net good globally and just bad for America and the Caribbean, I don’t actually know. However, these plans don’t actually involve that much land so the net effect is probably minimal compared to the gain from reducing natural gas useage.
- h0l0cube 4y ago> Putting solar panels in the desert is good for the environment Instead of altering unique grassland and desert ecosystems, and displacing nomadic tribes, the better option for 'the environment' and its peoples would be to build nuclear power plants.
- desro 4y agoYou're not wrong, and I'm as pro-nuclear as it gets (would love to see moonshot-scale projects to fully nuclearize as much of the globe as possible), but... we can have both. If large scale solar deployments in the sunniest, most hostile parts of the planet are available sooner than our nuclear dreams could come true, then I say hurrah.
- konfusinomicon 4y agonuclearize the moon! Tether it with a giant space cable, made of sustainable materials of course. then watch all the pro mooninite folks come out of the woodwork and defend the hunting grounds of the moon master and his inalienable(pun intended) rights to all things moon.
- h0l0cube 4y ago> most hostile parts of the planet It seems like you missed the point of my comment, and maybe didn’t read the article very closely. Whether one leans towards conservation of culture and ecology or not, it’s fair to say that reducing land use is important for said conservation. Even if you don’t hold such concerns, that doesn’t change the validity of the argument.
- unity1001 4y agoDeserts and nomadism are romantic in literature and movies only. In real life, deserts grow. https://www.google.com/search?q=desertification&oq=desertification&aqs=chrome..69i57.1804j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 https://www.google.com/search?q=desertification&oq=desertifi... Desertification destroys formerly fertile ecosystems. People die. The few extra-adapted species and the few people that remain are not an argument for protecting deserts.
- jokoon 4y agothe damage done by building so many panels is greater than the benefits of putting those panels in the desert panels don't produce that much power, you need a lot of them
- xp84 4y agoOne of the pictures in the article shows one of those giant mirror arrays. They have one in the Eastern CA desert near Vegas. They reflect all the energy in a big circle into a single point, which when you look at it is at like, a near-sun-level of brilliance, where it (presumably) boils lots of water to run turbines or whatever. Perhaps they're going to use those instead of all the rare earth complexity that is photovoltaics.
- depereo 4y agoThose designs do 'eventually' use water to run turbines, but the primary thing that gets heated and has that heat harvested (to boil water) is sodium.
- zizee 4y ago> Perhaps they're going to use those instead of all the rare earth complexity that is photovoltaics. Photovoltaics (aka Solar panels) do not use a lot of rare earth materials. From one of the links below: > Unlike the wind power and EV sectors, the solar PV industry isn’t reliant on rare earth materials. Instead, solar cells use a range of minor metals including silicon, indium, gallium, selenium, cadmium, and tellurium. https://www.pv-magazine.com/2019/11/28/are-rare-earths-used-in-solar-panels/ https://www.pv-magazine.com/2019/11/28/are-rare-earths-used-... https://ratedpower.com/blog/rare-metals-photovoltaic/ https://ratedpower.com/blog/rare-metals-photovoltaic/
- jokoon 4y agothose mirror things use natural gas to start up, so not very green
- VintageCool 4y ago15 years ago it looked like solar thermal might be the way to go. But it turns out that, once people started manufacturing a lot of solar PV panels, they got really good at it. Solar PV costs dropped 90% in a decade. At this point, in most cases, it would probably be foolish to build a non-PV solar power plant.
- rurp 4y ago> Putting solar panels in the desert is good for the environment. This is categorically false. Solar panels actually increase the ambient temperature in the area [0]. Directly under a panel will be cooler, but those areas are 1. Heavily disturbed, with most the native plants an animals destroyed on installation and 2. Small compared to the total affected area. Solar fields take up a large amount of space and installing a new one involves damaging a lot of native landscape. Despite the drawbacks I think that solar is usually quite a bit better on net than the energy it's replacing, but we should still be clear about the costs and drawbacks. [0]https://www.nature.com/articles/srep35070 https://www.nature.com/articles/srep35070
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- barathr 4y agoIn this case the ecosystem in question has even less in the way of native plants and animals (to my understanding) than the semi-arid American Southwest landscapes usually examined in research papers on the topic. But yes the general point holds that a cost-benefit analysis is worthwhile, though here it likely is quite net-good.
- rurp 4y agoI happen to spend a lot of time in desert areas that have seen a lot of solar development in recent years and the places I am familiar with are anything but desolate; generally they are teeming with native flora and fauna. Unfortunately solar development has been harmful to these regions. That said, developing solar has significant benefits to other regions. Mining and burning more coal or other legacy power source does even greater damage to different areas so I get it, solar isn't something we should block reflexively. But there are still costs and tradeoffs to consider, and plenty of room to improve as we transition off of fossil fuels.
- DrThunder 4y agoIf you think natural desertification is bad then you should be fine with climate change. It'll create more growing area due to higher temps. You seem to have a bit of cognitive dissonance happening with your thought process here. You want climate change if it's caused by "green energy" but not if it's caused by fossil fuels? Is that your stance?
- vndsodfogis 4y agoChanging the natural state of the desert environment is good for the environment? the desert is full of plants and animals that are adapted to it already.
- seiferteric 4y agoHasn't North Africa only been a desert for a few thousand years? It's not exactly some perfectly balanced ecosystem that has existed for a million years or something. Really, it turning to a desert was an ecosystem collapse... Second, Africa is HUGE. The amount of land they would be using for this must be minuscule compared to the area of this ecosystem. Third, not all ecosystems are equal.. The biodiversity of some areas is so much higher than others, it's not comparable. An acre of rain forest must be worth more than an acre of desert.
- thaumasiotes 4y ago> It's not exactly some perfectly balanced ecosystem that has existed for a million years or something. There are no ecosystems like that. It's not even a possibility.
- seiferteric 4y agoMy point is that this one in particular is pretty new, and was previously completely different (wet and green). I doubt there has even been enough time for much balance to have been achieved. Also some quick googling claims that the amazon rain forest has existed for millions of years (between 10-55 MILLION years), seems pretty well established to me...
- throwawaylinux 4y agoThere are ecosystems that are millions of years old. The oldest rainforests have existed for nearly 100 million years.
- eastof 4y agoFor anyone interested to learn more: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daintree_Rainforest#History_and_description https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daintree_Rainforest#History_...
- thaumasiotes 4y agoAnd if you somehow were able to visit it 80 million years ago, you'd notice that it's completely different now.
- yodsanklai 4y agoBy definition, energy = transformation of the environment. The more energy we use, the more we transform our environment. Which most like isn't good for the environment, and eventually for us since we depend on this environment too.
- xthrown1 4y agoI've read enough history to have heard that same argument as to why moving rivers away from the Aral sea would be fine.