It certainly would seem like the obvious choice to place these solar farms, omeara.
If only they weren’t so far away from where we need the electricity, transmission loss is a major concern over the distances you’re suggesting, potential for catastrophic outages due to the distance between source and usage points overall is nothing compared to the initial cost of connection but not insignificant (if you really believe in catastrophic climate change).
Then there’s the design parameters to consider, PV have a sweet spot for optimum productivity, they don’t really like overly hot or cold temperatures, require regular maintenance/cleaning and they prefer not to have any flammable material underneath them.
Deserts aren’t all shifting sand dunes but if you bulldoze all the scrub and wreck the fragile ecosystem, they can quickly turn into rolling dunes. Of course we can asphalt the pads but that would just be ridiculous (creating more problems than it would solve).
Whatever we do to transition away from FF’s it has to be workable, cost effective and improve our environment.
Todays renewable technologies are capable of producing electricity, no argument there from me.
Unfortunately it’s not a workable solution, exorbitantly expensive without being able to produce what is actually needed and the impacts just on the land needed/required is bonkers (that’s without considering the materials needed to build and replace these systems into the future).
But hey! Science is grouse and we can iron out those little problems by next week, August at the latest, so said the delusional bed wetter’s with a Goldilocks Complex.
