You clearly haven't been on a highway leading straight towards a hillside panel cluster [1] at that particular time of day and year when the reflection trail of the panels passes over the road. It's much worse than going towards dawn or sunset because those are toned down do much by atmospheric attenuation. All you can do is blindly maintaining speed and hoping that nobody in front of you panics. We have a lot to learn about panel placement and permits, maybe we need to deliberately add jitter to panel orientation in locations where the reflection beam would pass over sensitive locations like high speed roads or even go back to heliostat installations there. (Or at least have some minor articulation capabilities to aim the reflection away)

[1] http://maps.google.com/maps?saddr=NM32&daddr=E56&geocode=Fet... I think it was at the location marked in the link, the end points of the route mark the glare source and target. IIRC it is an unrestricted stretch, where on a Sunday when trucks are not permitted even the slow lane often travels at 150 kph or more

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It's the same light from the sun that you say is attenuated by the atmosphere before reaching your eyes that is reflected from the solar panels. It is literally impossible for it to be worse.

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Edit: no problem, maybe I could have been more clear :)

Blew my mind when I drove past that (on the way to Las Vegas?).

I swear it appeared as though the air was incandescing at the top of the tower where all the sun's rays were focused. Def something out of a Sci-Fi film....

I saw it driving from Las Vegas to SF. Remember it being near Zzyzx which reminded me of Sonic Youth music video.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crescent_Dunes_Solar_Energy_Pr...

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_thermal_energy#Molten_...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivanpah_Solar_Power_Facility

I am not sure why people think that a desert is bare and empty, I guess most just assume that because you can't see it as easily as you can in a forest that there is nothing there, but desert ecosystems are much more fragile than most other ecosystems and do not adjust easily to random interference.

I won't pretend that I know these projects are well-sited or they couldn't easily be done in a better way to lessen their impact. But, you can't use "it has a new harm" as an a priori veto of changes when the status quo is so deeply, deeply harmful.

I would ask those locals if they are ok with having no electricity other than what they can generate themselves on their own houses.

Desert may be a fragile area, but what is the real impact of its disruption? Everywhere there are tradeoffs.

Messing with ecosystems on a large scale will probably have serious side effects which we haven’t investigated; better to err on the side of caution.