Thread by @atomicthumbs

While looking at the replies to this thread, I noticed people claiming that the desert is "empty," "barren," or otherwise lifeless, in an almost kneejerk pro-extractivism reaction.

This isn't true. These deserts have rich, vibrant, and incredibly fragile ecosystems. A thread:

https://twitter.com/D1C0MM/status/1403379328675508227

Primer: these are concentrated solar power plants, which use mirrors to focus sunlight on the tower in the middle, heating a working fluid to run turbines.

Concentrated solar power is generally regarded as an obsolete technology. Photovoltaic has beat it in cost for a decade.

The two CSP plants in the United States are the Crescent Dunes Solar Energy Project and the Ivanpah Solar Power Facility.

Ivanpah came online in 2013, Crescent Dunes in 2016. The former has three towers; the latter has one tower and a molten-salt energy storage system.

Ivanpah is still producing. The company that owned Crescent Dunes went bankrupt once NV Energy terminated their contract for being too expensive, and the plant is dormant. The molten-salt system was a maintenance headache, with leaks emitting fumes that damaged workers' lungs.

(More about Crescent Dunes specifically in this earlier thread:

https://twitter.com/atomicthumbs/status/1403580304904704001

)

The OP's framing was purely aesthetic, but the reactions I see there espouse a colonialist viewpoint that the environment exists to be "used," and that if it isn't doing something for us, it's going to waste.

This is the mindset that got us into this mess to begin with!

I said "kneejerk" in the first tweet here as it seemed to be an instinctual thing: people jumping to the defense of an obsolete, massively wasteful technology without knowing anything about it, claiming the only alternative is coal mines.

In reality, there's a reason there are only two CSP plants in the US: it's an idea from before solar panels became cheap. Crescent Dunes' dispatchability and ability to generate at night (when it worked) couldn't save it from bankruptcy.

Ivanpah burns more than 960 megawatt hours of natural gas *each operational day* to heat the system up in the morning. In 2014, it emitted 46,084 metric tons of carbon dioxide.

Rooftop solar has manufacturing impacts and other issues, but it doesn't burn natural gas to work, and it doesn't destroy sensitive ecosystems.

I've said enough about the plants themselves. They are visually impressive, but at the same time they (and desert PV installations) are disruptive to the environment in which they're built.

Now, I'll be talking about my personal experience in these places, and things I've seen:

I'm a landscape photographer and I've spent a great deal of time in the past decade camping in the Nevada desert.

I've visited and photographed both power plants, spending much more time around Crescent Dunes. These are my photos.

The desert there is the opposite of lifeless.

When I first explored the valley the Crescent Dunes plant is built in, I was in art school and had ideas for desert art installations, things that made intense noise autonomously, but far from any human. I was scouting for locations for them.

I brought a basic mockup of an installation with me to test it: a solar-powered fire alarm bell, which would ring under the sun.

After a week in the desert, I became convinced that my projects would be immoral to implement and scrapped them. I didn't take the bell out of my car.

I arrived near the the gate of the abandoned Anaconda Moly mine at night, and woke up near sunrise in the morning.

What woke me up was coyotes, nine of them, singing to each other. I couldn't see any of them, even with binoculars; they were hidden by the undulating landscape.

Hours later, after I made breakfast and wandered down the mine fence for a while, I sat and watched an enormous flock of birds, hunting for insects, moving as one. They were a mile or so away, but I could hear the sound of their wings in the still desert air.

On a later trip, I found the solar plant made sounds that made hearing that sort of thing impossible.

The only non-insect animal life I observed near it was a hawk that flew past my drone to inspect it, and only on the drone's camera.

That is, of course, anecdotal. I am not a wildlife biologist. That later trip was in August; the earlier one was in the winter or early spring.

What I can cite is information by a source I trust, Basin & Range Watch (@basinrange). Their website has a wealth of information on environmentally destructive projects in the Great Basin: basinandrangewatch.org

No matter purpose a desert project serves, it will involve clearing some portion of the desert. The bigger it is, the more area must be cleared.

This destroys plants and soil that take decades to *millenia* to recover.

Soil in deserts is literally alive. Biological soil crusts are communities of microorganisms that perform an immense range of functions relating to the health of the desert ecosystem, from carbon and nitrogen fixation to dust capture and protection from invasive plants.

When they're disturbed, by vehicle travel, human footsteps, construction, or otherwise, it can take upward of five thousand years for the cyanobacteria, lichen, moss, and fungi that make up the crust to recolonize disturbed areas: bearfoottheory.com/desert-hikers-…

Desert soils, whether they've got crust or not, support a tremendous and incredible variety of plants.

One of these is Tiehm's buckwheat, a plant that only exists on a few acres in the Silver Peak Range in Nevada.

ioneer, an Australian mining company, aims to build a lithium mine in the Silver Peak range. This would destroy much of the known range of Tiehm's buckwheat, likely rendering the plant extinct; it's not built to grow outside the areas that it thrives.

After ioneer put flyers in the small nearby town of Dyer offering a $5000 reward for "undocumented populations" of the flower, 60% of the population of the plant was destroyed in a mysterious incident the company claimed was due to "rodent activity." thenevadaindependent.com/article/the-cu…

Fortunately, the Biden administration has since expressed support for listing Tiehm's buckwheat under the Endangered Species Act. Hopefully, that will be enough to protect it and keep it in the world.

The Center for Biological Diversity (@CenterForBioDiv) is an organization that has done a lot of work in this and other protective efforts: biologicaldiversity.org

Desert tortoises are another threatened species threatened by desert solar projects. Plans for the Ivanpah plant had to be scaled back to protect them, with a construction halt and mitigation efforts.

Even so, you can't move a tortoise's burrow. They're slow creatures, and relocated tortoises are more likely to die: basinandrangewatch.org/TortoiseTransl…

The ideal solution to all this would be degrowth and the elimination of the massive energy waste and rent-seeking inherent in capitalism. Just because it's cheaper to build a solar installation in the desert doesn't mean it's better—but there's profit to be made in solar.

Barring a miraculously effective campaign to degrow, promote mass transit, destroy capitalism, and eliminate waste, the best thing to do is to seek alternative technologies that don't require additional large-scale development and disturbance of natural areas.

Rooftop solar, nuclear, geothermal, ocean thermal: all of these have limitations and issues, cause their own sorts of environmental destruction, or need further development, but all are superior to desert solar.

In case this takes off, I have something to promote: take a camping trip in the deep, high-altitude desert, far away from civilization, if you're able. If you're at all like me, it will change you deeply and irreversibly.

While you're out there, take a small leaf from a sagebrush plant, twist and crush it between your fingers. Smell it. There's nothing like that smell in the whole world.

(Another conservation org I'd meant to mention but forgot: Great Basin Resource Watch, @basin_watch. They do great work in these areas too, with a focus on environmental justice: gbrw.org/our-work/)

This is an extremely good video about Tiehm's buckwheat and other plants that live in the area threatened by the Rhyolite Ridge lithium mine.

https://twitter.com/_Garlend/status/1403909318601228289

go and see.

A correction: there are eight CSP plants total in the United States. There are only two solar power tower plants; the rest of them are parabolic trough plants, an older and less efficient technology. (Unlike solar towers, they don't fry many birds.)

https://twitter.com/atomicthumbs/status/1403885135477448709