Solar panels have always bothered me because they require such intense manufacturing and usage of scarce resources. TLDR of article: “Many people will argue that if low-tech solar panels are less efficient, we would need more solar panels to produce the same power output. Consequently, the resources saved by low-tech production methods would be compensated by the extra resources to build more solar panels. However, efficiency is only crucial when we take energy demand for granted, sacrificing some efficiency may gain us a lot in sustainability.”
If solar energy is collected from such remote areas, is there perhaps a show-stopping problem of transmitting that power out to city? Transmission has huge losses over great distances.
There was a recent proposal to cover train tracks and (I think) some segments of rivers with solar panels. One of the problems IIRC was transmitting the power. My memory is a bit fuzzy on it… not sure why they couldn’t just directly power the electric train that runs below them… but whatever the issue was, it might be the same issue as the desert would have.
You can’t really trust layperson’s common English here. There are vast forests which are not being tagged as “forest” because a majority of trees don’t reach a certain defined height. These non-forests are useful for decarbonization but they’re being cleared on the basis that they are not technically a “forest”. So now there is a movement to protect these non-forests.
Re transmission - yes there are increasing losses - but the OP is about cheap panels, so cheap electricity. It doesn’t have to go so far, for example I’m thinking that the population in the Sahel is projected to increase a lot - that highest fertility in the world, as these regions develop they’ll need electricity.
As for your non-forest, I’d call that scrubland, certainly not desert - which implies to me sand or bare stones, deserted by almost all life not just by people. Of course flowers can bloom even in the desert on occasional years after rains. Indeed the whole Sahara was much greener, only a few thousand years ago, and maybe could be again if we could work out the secret. But that’s still a perturbation, and even with solar panels, there’d be plenty space left.
Transmission does not have excessive losses. They’re typically well under 5%. Even in grids with lots of long distance transmission (NZ has lots of generation in the south island, demand in the north island), the last-50-km losses are higher than the long-distance losses.
Rail current draw tends to be very bursty including both consumption and regen, with capacity that is quite limited on longer lines. The amount of power that can be connected isn’t very large, and because it’s a very long, narrow corridor, the average distance from a panel to an inverter is going to be large, or the inverters are going to be small.
Railways also like to regularly shut off the power to make maintenance safer and faster, and just use other tracks or diesel trains. This would interrupt the generation.
Mechanical mounting and windage concerns could also be present; a structure overhead could affect the aerodynamics of particularly high-speed trains, and the roof could funnel crosswinds into the train rather than over the top.
I’m not sure it’s impossible, it’s just that there are still much better places to put panels.