Solar Land Use Debate

Not really, there is plenty of land which is not suitable for other things. The solar power to cover all the worlds need could fit in a large desert.And it's much cheaper and easier to install a ton of panels at once, then one and one on rooftops with varying size and design. It' also easier and cheaper to keep them clean.But one does not rule out the other. The world should probably invest massively in both kinds of solar, since solar at rooftops with battery storage can help re

Problem being, AFAIK, that solar farms consume vast parts of surface area compared to other forms of power gen.

This ignores nuclear power. It also ignores the fact that you can put solar panels in places that you can't put farms such as the desert.

Land usage is not much of an actual problem. For one sunlight falls pretty much everywhere. You don't need to put a solar plant out away from cities like coal and oil plants. You can cover the acreage of a city with solar panels. Just putting panels up over parking lots in suburbs/exurbs contributes significantly to the area's power needs.Offshore wind is also extremely productive and eats up no arable/useful land. Farmland is also great siting for wind because there'

why? there’s more than enough land for solar panels and the ocean is incredibly harshthis is a similar flaw with things like “solar roads” or “solar sidewalks” it’s just unnecessary complexity

I would call that a minor hurdle. There's actually no shortage of unused land. Or roofs. And agrivoltaics (combining solar with farming) is a thing. And wind turbines and farms are a common combination as well. And we have off shore wind, and floating offshore wind. Which you can combine with solar. Floating solar to limit evaporation in hydro basins is also a thing.

"solar panels, distributed across deserts and areas with almost 24/7 sun"Um... I don't think so...

It is hard to find any correct statement here. Power we generate from nuclear and geothermal heat sources is not in any sense ultimately solar.The area that must be covered by solar panels to reproduce current power generation would be quite small. Existing pasturage alone suffices. Pasture grass does not need full sun, and benefits from decreased evaporation. Other low-impact sites include reservoirs, residential and industrial roofs, and parking lots, with important secondary benefits in ea

Well, most land is either farmland, forest or desert. Forest is out of the question for any solar installations unless you want to cut down the trees. Desert is not easily accessible for most parts of the world and provides terrible conditions for solar cells that have sharply declining efficiency with heat and don't like dust.Leaves farmland, if you want to do this kind of thing at any sort of required scale. (Sure you can put solar cells on barn roofs, but the premise was scale magnitu

I have a solar setup. I’m fortunate that cleaning my panels is a matter of scrubbing them or taking my boat out when it’s raining. The article mentions the huge solar installations in the deserts. This is the wrong approach and is wasteful. Society needs more solar pv generation where it’s being used. Lamp posts and stuff are a great example. Thinking about providing energy and thinking about huge power plants is old school coal/oil thinking. The sum of many smaller installations on roofs,