this post was submitted on 24 Jan 2024
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United States | News & Politics
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Some thoughts.
Renting rooftop space can add to costs for commercial land. You want to use my roof? I'm going to charge you for it.
You can use municipal buildings, but cities are dense by definition, and solar needs lots of space.
Solar works best in certain regions. A panel sitting in southern cloudless AZ will generate a lot more energy than cloudy northern DC.
Unused land is often unused for a reason. It's not usable. We're using most of the best farmland in the US already. Sending water to deserts is wasteful.
Why not use this land for solar power?
Those are fair points but why not use that land to expand cities and homes, especially with the population continuing to grow we will need places to house people and using the land to build only solar farms will eventually have to be either moved when things expand or have to be skipped over and move communities further from natural resources where most cities are built close by already. I don't think solar will be the 1 technology every region should use to solve the power problem but for sunny desert areas like Nevada, Arizona, Texas etc solar is good. Northern states could other technologies for power generation not just focusing on solar in the end.
The US west (and south-west in particular) has a serious problem with water as it is. Adding more population to that land is probably going to be a bad idea. We have plenty of room to expand more cities. Cities are more efficient uses of land. We don't need to push people out to the middle of nowhere yet.