The US wants to build solar farms on unused land.
The US wants to build solar farms on unused land.
The Bureau of Land Management proposed using 22m acres of public land for solar projects – roughly the size of Maine, or an area larger than Scotland
But why don't we just build them in cities and parking lots especially since they want them within 10 miles of communities? I understand cost but this makes sense to just put them into cities and use the unused land to expand or use for farms and other things vs wasting land to build only solar farms.
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Some thoughts.
Renting rooftop space can add to costs for commercial land. You want to use my roof? I'm going to charge you for it.
You can use municipal buildings, but cities are dense by definition, and solar needs lots of space.
Solar works best in certain regions. A panel sitting in southern cloudless AZ will generate a lot more energy than cloudy northern DC.
Unused land is often unused for a reason. It's not usable. We're using most of the best farmland in the US already. Sending water to deserts is wasteful.
Why not use this land for solar power?
Could have some unforseen ecological impacts if we just cover large swaths of desert. They're still eco systems. Of course if the alternatives are fossil fuels then I'm sure it's a better option. But if we're putting this infrastructure in the middle of nowhere why not nuclear? What's worse for the desert eco system? Covering it with solar or the very very slim chance of a nuclear accident? If it's far from any populated areas nuclear seems like the obvious best option.
Could have some unforseen ecological impacts if we just cover large swaths of desert.
Every decision ever made has a potential for unforseen consequences. You do what you can with what you know though.
I'm a huge fan of nuclear power. Liberals have well and truly screwed us all by taking a strong stance against it.
You do what you can with what you know though.
Yes, I'm not saying don't do anything, just that given what we do know, nuclear is probably the better ecological option here.
I feel like solar is a lot quicker to set up then nuclear and harder to shut down if political rivals gain power. I'm a big fan of both so either is a win in my book but I'm hoping as well nuclear gains more traction eventually.
A small silver lining; I think I read an article about how solar farms can foster its own biomes by adding vaste amount of shade. It doesn't make up for the loss but if it can be engineered to sequester more carbon and host fauna, it's not a net loss.
Thinking about it, maybe we need to rethink our approach to solar farms and put the panels on post higher up and more evenly spaced to have a proper undergrowth
Those are fair points but why not use that land to expand cities and homes, especially with the population continuing to grow we will need places to house people and using the land to build only solar farms will eventually have to be either moved when things expand or have to be skipped over and move communities further from natural resources where most cities are built close by already. I don't think solar will be the 1 technology every region should use to solve the power problem but for sunny desert areas like Nevada, Arizona, Texas etc solar is good. Northern states could other technologies for power generation not just focusing on solar in the end.
The US west (and south-west in particular) has a serious problem with water as it is. Adding more population to that land is probably going to be a bad idea. We have plenty of room to expand more cities. Cities are more efficient uses of land. We don't need to push people out to the middle of nowhere yet.