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Boomtown
A solar land rush in the West
Angelo, Hillary Publisher: Harper's
Date Written: 01/01/2023
Year Published: 2023
Pages: 9pp
Resource Type: Article
Abstract:
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Excerpt:
[T]he town's resistance also raises a profound question: In a world replete with wasted landscapes, why steer solar toward remote and undeveloped territory? So-called disturbed lands - unreclaimed brownfields, defunct mining sites, and fallowed agricultural fields, or even canals, parking lots, and highway medians - are all places where solar panels, substations, and transmission lines could be built. But the sheer existence of cheap and plentiful public land facilitates the construction of a new energy system in the old model - in which the federal government lowers barriers to private development, centralized energy generation, and long-distance transmission.
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Conservationists argue that the easy availability of public land has caused a creep toward ever-larger projects and diminished our imagination for solar's versatility.
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the ideal scenario for the country's transition to renewables: orderly construction along designated corridors, the use of both rooftop and utility-scale sources, and the prioritization of disturbed lands.
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