Good things can look bad when photographed at certain angles. Not shocking. if we really cared about land use around california deserts we would do something about the sprawl of LA
LOL always something to complain about. CA has incredible amounts of desert and so does Nevada and other states in this region and it's almost all empty.
The comments from people living in the "Lake Tamarisk Desert Resort" are just mind-boggling. The resort, which is named after an invasive species, is an artificial lake in the middle of the desert.
A resident is quoted as saying "What was an oasis has become a little island in a dead solar sea" because a single solar facility was built whose edge is three miles away. The facility has a radius of about 1.5 miles.
The Guardian couldn't have interviewed anybody less sympathetic than these guys.
My next question naturally was how does that compare to a nuclear power plant? According to https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=104&t=3 : "The Prairie Island nuclear plant in Minnesota has two reactors, each with about 520 MW net summer generating capacity (the smallest reactors operating in the United States)"
Is solar going to be able to meet the demands placed on it with these various "x% by 2050" type goals? With electric vehicles consumption is only going up. Do we have enough land near the areas that demand the most power?
I'm not sold on putting solar out in the untouched or minimally disturbed middle of nowhere.
It seems that we can get a win-win by having PV solar do double duty as shade - putting solar up as shade above parking lots, on roofs where it shades the roof, or in places where the agriculture is compatible and shade has benefits (grazing land, some plants that already need shade), as that agriculture already disturbs the local flora and fauna.
Flagged. While I'm certain solar and other 'green' technologies all have downstream consequences, The Guardian left out a ton of context, selected the absolute worst, tightly-cropped photos, and cherry-picked a few anecdotes to support what amounts to a clickbait/moral panic headline.
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[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 33.3 ms ] threadA resident is quoted as saying "What was an oasis has become a little island in a dead solar sea" because a single solar facility was built whose edge is three miles away. The facility has a radius of about 1.5 miles.
The Guardian couldn't have interviewed anybody less sympathetic than these guys.
My next question naturally was how does that compare to a nuclear power plant? According to https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=104&t=3 : "The Prairie Island nuclear plant in Minnesota has two reactors, each with about 520 MW net summer generating capacity (the smallest reactors operating in the United States)"
Is solar going to be able to meet the demands placed on it with these various "x% by 2050" type goals? With electric vehicles consumption is only going up. Do we have enough land near the areas that demand the most power?
It seems that we can get a win-win by having PV solar do double duty as shade - putting solar up as shade above parking lots, on roofs where it shades the roof, or in places where the agriculture is compatible and shade has benefits (grazing land, some plants that already need shade), as that agriculture already disturbs the local flora and fauna.
I never understood this complaint: if these projects are not done, orders of magintudes more of animal species disappear.