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Re:Geothermal May Beat Batteries for Energy Storage by mschuster91 on Wednesday October 12, 2022 @04:29AM (#33174346)
> Putting the panel in existing (light coloured) desert is much worse because deserts have an albedo around 0.4-0.6 so you are making 400-550W of new heat for your 200-300W of work.

Yeah, but the heat doesn't penetrate to the ground any more, which should help with water retention?

Re:Geothermal May Beat Batteries for Energy Storage by Schroedingersat on Wednesday October 12, 2022 @05:49AM (#33174774)
Local effects vs. global effects.

You might make your desert nice, but you're still doing a climate change if you try to install more than a few hundred TW of solar panels.

Ideally you make the desert nice and then take a chill pill before covering all of the deserts and settle for somewhere in the range of 2-100kW per human as a steady state economy powered by a mix of wind, solar, geothermal, and maybe some nuclear.