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Why would 'large scale solar' cause an issue for native species? Even if 100% of Australian power were generated by solar, what percentage of the total land area would be used? Well, lets check! The total power generating capacity of Australia is about 66GW, but about 18 is already hydro, wind, or solar. So we need to come up with about 48GW. Lets take a fairly moderate estimate of 4 acres per MW (4000 acres per GW). It may be more or less than this, but in the long run this is not a terrible estimate. So we need to come up with about 50 * 4000 == 200,000 acres of land. South Australia by itself is 243,000,000 acres, we need about 200k, so this is about .8% of the total land area. This seems like a lot! However, the total number of dwellings in South Australia is about 768,000. The average size of a roof, according to google, is about .03 acres. So just putting photovoltaics on 1/2 of the roof area (meh, I don't know how to estimate usable roof area with a random direction and I don't know whether roofs in Australia are flat, so lets take 1/2) would get you 11.5k acres. So 5% of the total power usage of all of Australia could be provided just by putting solar panels on the roofs of houses in South Australia. Seems like a good deal for endangered species. What about the other 95%? Well, again, you would only need 0.8% of South Australia to supply the energy needs of all of Australia. Like you said, Australia is a MASSIVE country, and has extremely low population density and an almost perfect climate for solar power production. So what is your point exactly? That if they took less than 1% of the land of one part of the country and converted to 100% renewable energy some lizard which is only 'unique' by an arbitrary human criterion might have too much shade? |
https://www.pv-magazine-australia.com/2019/06/13/australia-c...