[nonethewiser]

> Curious what makes you think that the overhead and inefficiencies inherent to a million small solar installs is somehow better than a single managed facility benefiting from economy of scale both for maintenance and design.

Location. Deserts are far from people. 80% of people in the US live on the east half of the country (and most of these on the eastern half of that). But even the midpoint is too far from deserts to use energy from it.

[maxerickson]

My town built a solar install on undeveloped land adjacent to the airport. That's lower impact than desert and cheaper than smaller installs would have been. I'm sure there's lots of situations like that, even in areas denser than the rural Midwest.

[s1artibartfast]

Transmission losses are tiny. Think single digit percent.

Meanwhile urbal solar is many times more expensive, and vastly less efficient per panel.

The total us grid transmission losses are 5%

https://www.nrdc.org/bio/jennifer-chen/lost-transmission-wor....

[unusualmonkey]

> Deserts are far from people

So... you've not heard of LA or Arizona or Nevada etc?

[titzer]

I lived in LA. It is a desert. It'd be just fine to cover parking lots, highways, and rooftops with solar. There are at least 100 square miles of parking lots in LA.

[seanmcdirmid]

LA actually isn’t a desert, although there is desert in the LA area. Most of LA is classified as Mediterranean, and gets enough rain (the closer to the coast, the less deserty it is). Lots of mountains make for interesting climate zones.

[titzer]

Fine, to be pedantic, it's right on the limit of being desert. LA averages about 15 inches of rainfall per year, whereas the classification for desert is less than 10 inches. With the amount of irrigation in the area, this is not generally acknowledged. Funny, I used to have to hop over a giant puddle in the street every morning to catch the bus to UCLA because the sprinkler systems for someone's 4ft wide lawn were just that badly misconfigured. I always thought that inane.

[seanmcdirmid]

I spent all my time in LA living in Westwood, and saw some interesting rain storms while I was there. Interesting tidbit: Santa Monica (just next to the coast) actually gets less rain a year than LA (13.5 inches vs. 14.7 inches). I'm guessing they get more moisture in fog than in rain.

[ben_w]

You could, with current technology, put the PV on your antipode with sufficiently small losses it's basically fine.

Actually building one is harder than designing one, so I'm not suggesting breaking ground on a global grid immediately, but if you in the USA can get past the three way split of {east, west, Texas}, that'll do a lot all by itself.

[caeril]

Transmission losses are a concern, but this is fairly irrelevant to the OP's original idea: that of producing carbon fuels in the desert and then transporting them. Most populated places in the US are pretty far from Erath, Louisiana or Cushing, Oklahoma, and we get by just fine under this arrangement.

[tobias2014]

High voltage direct current is the keyword. It is possible. Unfortunately the plans to build a giant solar farm in the Sahara and connect it to Europe never took off (for now). Losses are about 10% per 3000km. See also what the DESERTEC foundation does.