Anywhere else but the desert, and the ecological impact would stop such projects. Its ironic, since the desert is a more fragile environment that most others. This project would likely exterminate many species and sterilize all the land under the mirrors. If anything thrived there, it would be completely unlike what is there now, causing an incalculable rippling ecological impact elsewhere.
But desert projects get a pass on all this for some reason. I guess because, people don't like to live there. Same reason fuzzy mammals get protected status, while lizards and worms get nothing - human preference.
Not all deserts are equal. The Sahara desert is truly immense -- 99.99% of it is not at risk of construction. And unless you are building on top of something with a natural water source, you're probably not endangering any life; the parts without water sources are essentially lifeless.
Frankly, after the initial setup, the shelter the panels provide will probably support more life than the open sand. Same as why environmentalists are ok sinking ships to provide a foundation for artificial reefs -- nature does not magically optimize for the most life-dense environment; it just is the way it is.
If there is one environment on the planet not in risk it's the Sahara. A lot of Egypt, Northern Africa, Iraq/Palestine would have looked like the American Midwest back when they were empires.
True its a man-made desert (despite some published nonsense about 'shifts in the earth's axis' causing weather changes). So are most of the ecosystems on the planet, by now. The issue is, changing relatively stable ecosystems is done at our peril. I just want to point out how little we really care about this stuff - to the point we enthusiastically endorse mega projects that amount to terraforming, with so little discussion.
It is, however, important to make sure that this plant is not in any migratory paths of birds. The air above the centre of the plant will be hot enough to incinerate them (this has happened with these sorts of solar plants)
You are thinking about a different type of system I suspect. If anything the air would be cooler above a system of this sort as the heat is being carried away by pipes.
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/188328-californias-new-so... <--- Don't think too much about the numbers they report; reports have come out conflicting with original reports. The point is that CSP does kill off flocks of birds... The question is how many.
Ah, yes. After re-reading the article I can see that I misunderstood what kind of system they were building - I saw the arrays of mirrors and thought they were building one of these:
Again, the attitude here is that species unique to the desert environment are worthless; that more familiar species that humans like have value; that somehow its better for every life form to have more shade and water and less sunlight. This is untrue for the desert environment. And hard for many people to comprehend.
"More life" has never been the ecological impact metric. Why, a cattle feedlot has more life than the prairie that came before. And so on.
The desert is by no means lifeless. Some 50 species of mammals, endless snakes and arachnids (scorpions etc), many species of grass and brush. Even in the relatively-less-inhabited sand dune 'oceans' there is life.
But nobody is putting solar panels in the sand dunes. It will have to be on solid ground - rocky plateaus. Which are the most-populated of the Sahara environments.
You have to make relative impact judgement eventually. Pure relativism will just paralyze you.
No reasonable person is going to think that replacing 1km^2 of the central Sahara is equivalent to bulldozing 1km^2 of the Amazon. "More life" might be simplistic, so call it more life*biodiversity for total impact or whatever you want.
And in this specific example, the fact is that you are impacting almost no desert species in the dry parts of the Sahara. I suspect you are conflating low-moisture "deserts" like the Sonoran desert, where there is in fact life to impact:
Nobody is building anything on sand dunes. That's a straw man, right? Its the rocky places that have life, and are also useful for construction projects.
The Sahara has been there for centuries now. Its not a local disturbed weather pattern by now. So as an ecological issue, its significant. It should be considered when proposing megaprojects that alter square miles of ground. Yet it hardly gets mentioned. I take this as evidence we are not serious about ecological impact issues.
Sure, it's ~5-15,000 years old. The snowball started a feedback loop when people cut down local forests and over grazing killed off a lot of grass land. Altering local wind patterns etc. But, that's still an eye blink in terms of ecology.
I think you're forgetting how absolutely, insanely large the Sahara desert is. We're talking about a solar plant that will be the size of a single city. Frankly, I think statements like "exterminate many species" are absurdly hyperbolic. Will it kill some animals? Yes. Species? I doubt it.
Species are notoriously local. The choice will be, which species to exterminate. Probably will be done without thought, because the site will be chosen purely economically.
No they are not. Species are dependent upon habitats for which they are adapted to. If a particular species is extremely local, it is strictly because the suitable habitat for their physical characteristics is extremely localized.
This isn't the Galapagos islands. This is the Sahara desert. To suggest that there is some habitat feature in one extremely small section of it that isn't present in others is just plain ridiculous. The main driver of extinction and endangerment in the Sahara has been over hunting by humans. Not habitat loss.
I'm glad you raise this point. I think if we are going to stick huge solar farms in the desert we need to either (a) minimize the surface area (since it will become uninhabitable) and also figure out how to minimize the impact of thermal pollution on surrounding areas or (b) figure out how not to sterilize the area. Since I doubt anyone right now is in the mood for (b), I think we should be arguing strongly for (a).
Thermal pollution on this scale is also going to cause local (or non-local) climate change, and we're going to need to deal with this at some point. There are no free lunches.
The best way to get an extra kW is to save it by improving efficiency or not wasting it in the first place. (Just as it's almost certainly cheaper to prevent the Earth from getting fucked up, complete with deflecting asteroids, than it is to colonize Mars.)
(Funnily enough, when I was designing a science fiction setting in the 1980s -- and of course like anyone paying attention I was already worried about global warming -- I posited that we'd be worrying about thermal pollution in the future. I thought we'd be using fusion power incredibly wastefully (flying cars, etc.) but life is always more complicated, and instead we're going to have thermal pollution from solar.)
Care to put some magnitude numbers on that "thermal pollution" effect? How does it compare to, say, the emission of warm water from conventional power plants into the marine environment? Or urban heat islands? How is the albedo of the plant versus that of the existing terrain?
I'm also confused about the idea of a desert "becoming" uninhabitable. The whole discussion reminds me of people talking about bird death effects only related to wind power, ignoring all other environmental and man-made causes. I do accept that the desert is an ecosystem of its own and the usual checks should be made that you're not eradicating the sole habitat of an endangered species.
Edit: there's even an environmental impact check in that EISA PDF from my other comment.
The Ouarzazate solar complex study area is not part of any protected natural zone; however, the following are located on its outlying zones:
The Mansour Ed Dahbi artificial lake, part of RAMSAR (site of the dam – located 6 km South of the site);
The Bouljir dorcas gazelle reserve (13 km to the North-West of the site);
The Iguernane Reserve (15 km to the North–West of the site);
The key site of Sbaa Chaab (20 km East of the site);
The Biosphere Reserve (solar complex in buffer zone B of the Biosphere Reserve).
None of the plant species found in the project site and its environs is considered rare or endangered.
The solar complex project site is considered to be of low heritage value.
The areas with high heritage value are located on the eastern and western reaches of the project site.
The emission of warm water from (conventional and nuclear) power plants is a significant issue but it's kind of not the most prominent issue w.r.t. nuclear power so it tends to be ignored (e.g. the fact that the water is slightly more radioactive or contaminated gets a lot more attention -- it's well known that heat-loving ecosystems develop around power plant outflows).
The magnitude of the thermal pollution varies by technology. Morroco is planning a heat-concentrating system (boiling water with a giant parabolic mirror, in essence) which produces very intense heat in the middle and actually cools the land in the surrounding errors (since the mirrors will have a much higher albedo than rocks and sand). I'm not actually sure if this is going to be a net increase in heat absorption, so this might be a non-issue. (This form of solar generation is apparently more expensive than photovoltaics, though.)
The Union of Concerned Scientists is much more worried about water use, especially in arid areas, with such power plants.
Photovoltaics (solar cells) are pretty much black and about 20-30% efficient) so they're absorbing more incident radiation than rocks and sand and then converting 70-80% of it to heat. We see similar effects from urbanization of desert areas (e.g. Phoenix and Las Vegas) so it's not like the effects will be unprecedented -- they just shouldn't be ignored.
That's exactly the misconception folks have about desert right there, in that quoted "becoming". The idea is that deserts are worthless, containing no life. Probably because they contain nothing that humans value for their own comfort.
Yet deserts have lots of life, unique life, that because of the harsh environment is exquisitely tuned to the desert environment. This is the stuff that will be lost if the sunlight is gone, the heat goes away, the moisture balance is upset by so much shade. Plentiful shade and cool and wet are good for people; disaster for the desert ecosystem.
The 'thermal pollution' is, curiously, cooling instead of heating in this case. Light is turned to electricity instead of falling on the ground and becoming heat.
The ground absorbs most of the solar radiation anyway. So having some of that radiation hit some black pipes is not going to change the amount of heat generated in any significant way. So you need to explain what you mean by "thermal pollution".
The albedo (reflectivity) of typical desert landscape is going to be higher than that of solar collectors (which, by definition, are trying to collect sunlight). Large cities, which are not specifically trying to collect sunlight, already have climatic effects (because they absorb more heat).
I'm not down on solar, just pointing out it has its own potential downsides which shouldn't be ignored.
Solar is doomed by that logic then. Because its effectiveness is exactly related to its physical and thermal footprint. We are already working on making the most of every square meter (conversion efficiency, concentrating the sunlight, using the most consistently-lit sites) so no help there. So if energy must be generated, a) is a lost cause. If this project is economically successful the next step is more desert consumed, and so on forever until its all gone.
But desert projects get a pass on all this for some reason. I guess because, people don't like to live there. Same reason fuzzy mammals get protected status, while lizards and worms get nothing - human preference.