It's not like the area is straight up (coarse and rough and irritating) sand. Tortoises, foxes, lizards, snakes, rodents, bats, birds, etc.

Flora wise, it's going to be predominantly desert scrub bush and to a lesser degree, microphyll woodland. Even in the article photo, you can see desert scrub in the undeveloped portions.

I think environmentalists that care about the desert would much prefer solar development to occur on already disturbed land.

> would much prefer solar development to occur on already disturbed land.

Where? "Disturbed" land is taken.

In fairness, plenty of rooftops still don’t have PV on them.

We never did manage to get solar roadways strong enough to use and cheap enough to be economical; but I wonder, could we do better with solar between the rails of railway lines? Or high enough above them to enclose them and their trains?

Solar roadways were always a terrible idea. Solar railways would have the same problem.

Putting solar above parking lots and parking decks is a much more viable way to use vehicle-related infrastructure for solar.

Using desert habitats are probably superior since we are in a climate emergency and need to build as much solar and wind as possible as fast as possible. Ground solar is cheaper than elevated solar as I understand it.

> Solar roadways were always a terrible idea. Solar railways would have the same problem.

As I understand it, the problem was it was too expensive to make it sufficiently damage resistant, that damage being continuous wear from all the traffic.

Just outside my window, there is a tram line. Grass grows in the spaces between the rails. I suspect you could put normal panels in those gaps where grass currently grows, and most of the panels would last just as long there as they would on a rooftop.

Hmm. And how much square footage do you estimate that would cover? How would you run electrical lines by and through the constantly moving (expansion/contraction, as well as vehicle weight) heavy steel elements? How would you deal with the constant maintenance that must be done on everything from light rail to heavy cargo lines? How would you make sure all your panels weren’t destroyed in one pass by a drug connector?

Roads are at least as bad, and near as I can tell, there is literally no road surface (from hardened steel to concrete to glass to asphalt!) that won’t get potholes and other damage decently quickly.

And they don’t have any sensitive electrical connections or need clear sunlight to do anything useful.

> Hmm. And how much square footage do you estimate that would cover?

USA has 257,722 km of 1,435 mm gauge track, so… about 3.9 billion square feet there.

The EU is a bit less, but similar (208,211 km).

Worldwide is 1,370,782 km, various gauges. Roughly 21 billion square feet?

Should be good for a combined nameplate capacity around 393 GW.

> How would you run electrical lines by and through the constantly moving (expansion/contraction, as well as vehicle weight) heavy steel elements?

The trains and trams around here are electrically powered, so that’s already solved technically, and in cases like mine the solution has already been implemented.

I have no idea how the other stuff might influence costs.

None of your numbers line up. You’re using US track numbers, but essentially zero US track is electrified. The little bit that is electrified is often underground and all of it is high voltage and won’t work with solar like that.

Next to said tracks though are millions of acres of land that wouldn’t have all the maintenance issues and would actually work?

It’s a similar issue with solar roadways - it’s a really impractical place to put solar; not even close to worth it maintenance wise or efficiency - and you pretty much always have better options literally 10 ft away.

> None of your numbers line up. You’re using US track numbers, but essentially zero US track is electrified.

Doesn’t matter. The engineering solution is known (as I type I am literally looking at overhead power cables above the street, powering one of Berlin’s tram lines). Use that class of existing solutions rather than asking me to reinvent it badly.

> Next to said tracks though are millions of acres of land that wouldn’t have all the maintenance issues and would actually work?

Great, so use that too, if you like. But the ask I was responding to was the idea we should use land which is already in an unnatural state.

That’s literally not how any of that works at all.

Taken as in active use or as in the hands of private land owners? Not uniformly so, in either case.

As someone else has mentioned, within the built environment would be at the top end. As far as solar power plants go, geographically altered, old agricultural, and wildfire affected lands.

Yes, there are some species that require desert conditions in order to live. They have adapted to this particular harsh environment and the conditions in these places help keep out competition for the scarce available resources. You really should do some basic research or at least watch an Attenborough documentary because "everything you know about biology" is apparently quite limited. Yes, deserts have less life and far less obvious signs of it given the lack of resources, but that also means that the web of life between the various organisms is far more fragile and takes a lot longer to recover from any injury or intrusion.

A far better place to put solar panels are in places where we know the impact of people and machines will be barely noticed and where life will spring back quite quickly. Put them in the middle of farmland. We have far more arable land than we need to be using, taking it out of production for a decade or two will be good for the soil, and it will spring back to life within days of the construction machinery leaving.

> A far better place to put solar panels are in places where we know the impact of people and machines will be barely noticed and where life will spring back quite quickly. Put them in the middle of farmland. We have far more arable land than we need to be using, taking it out of production for a decade or two will be good for the soil, and it will spring back to life within days of the construction machinery leaving.

"We need to be using" from a metric you just conjured, or we are actually using?

Using the US as an example, too much land is used for cereal grains like corn and wheat, to the point where it has become politically necessary to subsidize worthless and inefficient usages like ethanol just to get rid of the surplus. Ergo, I am making the assertion that if the US can afford to waste arable farmland growing corn that then needs to heavily subsidized to turn into ethanol and HFCS this arable land is being wasted and could be better served as space for solar panels.

Taking land like this out of production will serve the purpose of supporting crop prices (limiting the political fallout of such a move) and it is well-established that modern farm practices have done significant damage to topsoil and that leaving land fallow or planting gaps between panels with prairie grasses will help build back some of the topsoil and soil nutrients.

Do you have a counter-argument to refute my assertion?

Food supply is a strategic priority for any country, and a bit of surplus is to be expected as you want such important things to have a slight slack built into them and not break under stress.

Not everything is done in the name of 110% efficiency.

Deserts have been growing though, particularly the Sahara due to human activities like farming and grazing animals. So perhaps there’s opportunities to reduce deserification by combining solar and agriculture, and also provide power to poor regions.

According to this link there is promising benefits:

https://cleantechnica.com/2019/09/09/combining-solar-farming...

The California desert is so different though - there is so much life everywhere. Spending nights camping out there, you just see so much.

There are these really cute rat-looking things that eat bark and make a crazy scratching sound while you’re trying to sleep. There’s a huge variety of birds, some of which are brutal — they’ll pick up those rats and throw them at a cactus to impale them so they can be eaten more easily. Then there’s mice, ants, coyotes (woke up in the middle of the night to a big pack running by), tons of crazy plants. There’s even some spots with water & real oasis feeling - palm trees, frogs, insects, and running water - right in between some cliffs, tucked away, with no people around as far as you can see.

I always thought the desert was just mostly sand and occasional cactus, but have been proven SO wrong after spending lots of time there.

You raise a good question. I wonder, just a thought experiment, if providing shade in a desert might create refuge for plants that can't survive directly in the desert sun...

Those would be different plants than the ones already living there (ones that can survive in direct sunlight). The usual aim is to preserve the full variety of the world's ecosystems, and encouraging or allowing non-native species into a desert works against that.

There's a brief overview of the flora and fauna in this desert here [1], and much more detail on the "See also" pages.

In particular, note the endemic flora — these species live _only_ in this desert.

I don't know what impact this development will have, so I won't comment on that.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorado_Desert#Flora_and_faun...

Going to guess limited impact. The Colarado Desert is 7 million acres. This project will use 2000 acres. That's 0.02%.