God this was a terrible article. You have to get to the third-to-last paragraph to understand what is happening. I skimmed the article scrolling and saying to myself "are tha panels lowering the ambient temperature?" And yes that sounds like what's happening even though I'm still not sure after getting to the end of the article.
It makes a lot of sense to me that PV and wind power could have subtle undesirable effects that we don't know about until it scales up.
Taking gigawatts of energy out of the planet ecology and redirecting it to something else seems like it could have drawbacks. Of course, on net it seems likely to still be a significant improvement over burning hydrocarbons.
The Science article they reference that has far more information than this blog piece.
https://www.science.org/content/article/massive-solar-farms-...
Even the article in Science is based, mostly, on an article by Branch et al. published in the journal Earth System Dynamics:
https://doi.org/10.5194/esd-15-109-2024
2024 discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39577599
flagged because I think this link needs to be resubmitted with the science.org article. It's like an AI summary where the AI is markov chains.
God this was a terrible article. You have to get to the third-to-last paragraph to understand what is happening. I skimmed the article scrolling and saying to myself "are tha panels lowering the ambient temperature?" And yes that sounds like what's happening even though I'm still not sure after getting to the end of the article.
It makes a lot of sense to me that PV and wind power could have subtle undesirable effects that we don't know about until it scales up.
Taking gigawatts of energy out of the planet ecology and redirecting it to something else seems like it could have drawbacks. Of course, on net it seems likely to still be a significant improvement over burning hydrocarbons.