Solar panel efficiency is inversely proportional to temperature, plus all that sand + wind is going to be adding to maintenance costs. There's better places to put solar panels than in the desert.
Solar in desert has a lot of issues including wind and sand coverage. Although the deserts of the region may seem like unchanging environments, the ecosystem and weather is hostile to solar installations (amongst other things). Moreover, solar panels become less efficient at higher sustained temperatures, which increases land and infrastructure maintenance costs.
Solar panels are also less efficient when it's hot, but these are all just losses that can be overcome by throwing more panels at it. If you have a giant desert, it's basically free energy for the taking - you just need to make that initial investment. And unlike e.g. Sahara, there's well-developed infrastructure around the desert, nor are there issues with political instability.
Your comment shows you really don't know much about solar PV. Deserts are horrible for solar, for two major, and a bunch of minor reasons:
1) Heat kills PV efficiency, since, to a first order approximation, current is proportional to irradiance (deserts good), but voltage is inversely proportional to temperature (so deserts very bad). You make way more power on a clear winter day in Colorado (assuming no snow on the panels!) than you do on an Arizona summer day. If you don't like this, take it up with God, since it's just the way he built the universe and the quantum physics of semiconductor junctions.
2) Dust (and/or salt, if you're anywhere near the ocean) is a huge enemy of solar power production (so deserts bad, again). Dust or salt spray can easily cost you nearly half of your power output. PV panels are scarily susceptible to even small shading from leaves or even bird crap on them. I can throw a business card on most panels and take out 1/3 to 2/3 of that panel's output. If wired in a string, as is typical for utility scale PV, the loss of that single can take out the power production of that entire string (typically 12-22 panels worth), since it can no longer reach the inverter bus voltage set by the unimpaired strings.
Oh, and cleaning panels is really expensive - it was $0.50/panel a decade ago when I was collecting the largest database of DC solar panel data in the world - I don't imagine it's gotten any cheaper... (One of the big selling points of our software was that it could optimize cleaning and maintenance timing and intervals. This can actually make the difference between breaking even on the array cost or not!)
Deserts aren't good locations for solar, for several reasons:
1. They get hot, and solar PV needs light, not heat to work. Heat actually reduces the effectiveness which is why the difference in output between the best and worst places for solar PV in the USA probably isn't as wide a delta as you would think.
2. They're generally not near people, who mostly live on the coast and so have higher transmission costs. Transmission is enough of a cost factor that building solar and battery (or datacenters) on sites of old coal plants is often done to re-use transmission and save money.
Desert like conditions are required for concentrated solar, which require strong direct sunlight and heat, but PV doesn't have that requirement and can still work in cloudy regions and is generally cheaper than CSP these days even in the desert regions. So solar should be distributed more towards where people live and use electricity.
I think adding the costs to the consumers electricity bills made sense when the grid was mostly polluting, as it incentivises efficiency but as we get closer to a clean grid, it makes less sense. Shifting to time-of-use is probably a good next step to keep the incentive to not burn polluting fuels, shifting the costs to people still burning gas makes sense too.
The whole of society is rigged to give money to homeowners (due to racism and classicsm mostly), so it's not unexpected that solar would lean the same way, it's not inherent to the tech though, just how society works at the moment.
Classic deserts aren't the best place for solar. They may be sunny but wind-blown dust covers panels. Sand+wind etches glass. And heat reduces PV efficiency. A better option might actually be the high north. It gets plenty of sun for at least half the year and when it isn't getting sun it is getting wind.
Panels laid out in deserts accumulate dust that can cut production by 50%.
This mainly just means the desert is a dumb place to put a solar farm. But ignorant investors love the idea of desert solar farms, so there is plenty of money being wasted building desert solar farms.
In the desert, you typically have to build expensive transmission lines out to the site to get the power to where you actually want it.
So, (1) you have to acquire single-use land, (2) the panels produce half as much power as they could because of heat and dust, (4) the panels' life is curtailed by the high temperature, and (4) you have to build a long transmission line back to someplace populated.
There is no question but that panels in the desert can work. But it is a poor use of a panel that could produce much more power, more cheaply, longer.
It's a desert. There's arguably less biodiversity there than most places. I'm pretty sure there's enough room for there to still be plenty of cactuses and jackrabbits AND a massive amount of solar panels.
Rooftop and parking lot solar isn't the same thing. It's not automatically better. The efficiency of rooftop solar isn't nearly as good as an array that can follow the sun. Given finite resources you could make a case we're better off deploying those panels in a desert and connecting a big fat cable to them vs. a million houses all paying individual installers to install tiny, inefficient arrays piecemeal.
Good solar conditions in a desert are probably offset by the heating and cooling costs required for wild temperature swings in such an environment.
Come to think of it, I don't think I've ever seen anyone normalize the energy production potential of an area based on the energy needs that are localized for that area.
> Rooftop solar doesn't use any additional land and the US has vast tracks of mostly uninhabited deserts.
The problem of putting solar panels in deserts is well known: it's not where people live, so you need a way to transport the electricity, and you lose a lot of energy between where it is produced and where it is consumed. So, putting them in deserts is a terrible idea. On rooftops it makes a lot more sense in regions that get good sunlight.
How much efficiency do they lose? Desert land is orders of magnitude cheaper than German farmland, and the latter appears to be economic to cover in PV panels, so if we could get the cost of materials down we could deal with losing 20% or maybe even 90% efficiency.
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