Unpopulated by humans you mean.
>humans aren't really causing any stress on their ecosystems
If you place tens of millions of solar panels in a region you will destroy the ecosystem of that region, and yes, deserts are ecosystems too. Maybe you feel that is a fair trade and we will need to make these kinds of trade-offs ... but what if there was an alternative that used 100 times less land area for the same amount of power generated and works at night too? Would you still make the trade?
Also, there is this weird assumption made by proponents that only deserts or 'undesirable' land is going to be used for renewable deployment. That's not true today, and it will not be true in the future as we scale up the renewable infrastructure.
Sure. This was in response to this: Every square meter of Earth is part of some ecosystem that is under stress due to human activity.
> If you place tens of millions of solar panels in a region you will destroy the ecosystem of that region, and yes, deserts are ecosystems too.
This is untrue. This solar farm will take up 120 sq km (out of the 10,000 sq km cattle property), and is unlikely to cause any environmental issues from the panels themselves, since they'll just shade some areas of sand.
Hi from Australia.
We have huge unpopulated deserts and humans aren't really causing any stress on their ecosystems outside climate change.
We are about to take a tiny, tiny part, put some solar panels on it and send the electricity to power Singapore.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/oct/21/australi...
> Every single one of those panels will be land-filled and replaced continually ... forever. So you have 100km x 300km (+ whatever materials you need to support and maintain those panels) of shit going to landfills that then you will need to subsequently dig up again to replace ... forever.
Solar panels are already over 90% recyclable, with some processes recycling up to 99%: https://www.newenergysolar.com.au/renewable-insights/renewab...