Ground mounted solar and the effect on environment
Hello all,
I’ve been frequently running into an opinion that solar fields or utility scale ground mounted solar is bad for the environment.
Supposedly it generates heat, that would be otherwise absorbed by the flora, etc.
I’m having trouble to find counter-arguments for people that raise these points.
For instance one thing that this point of view omits is that every energy source has a heat loss during the process. Nuclear generates large amounts of energy but also generates a lot of heat that dissipates through the cooling, like every steam-based energy generation method.
As a glider pilot I know that big solar arrays indeed sometimes create thermals that probably add to the heating of the atmosphere but how does it compare to the other generation methods and what are the other parts of this equation, that outweigh it?
Somehow I intuitively feel like solar is all things accounted for still much better for the environment, but I wonder if anyone has went down this rabbit hole of trying to compile all studies from different fields of expertise that would prove it?