Re: Cool idea, but...
A lot of deserts are not so easy to reach, and solar panels in deserts tend to get covered in dust, worn down by sandblasting, or buried quickly under shifting dunes. Temperatures also vary wildly from above 40°C during the day to below zero at night.
The big advantage of putting solar panels in space is that pretty much the only things you have to deal with are micrometeorites, and if you make them modular, you can probably easily cope with the odd module getting holed every now and then, and deal with the small loss of coverage that may result. The temperature of space is a constant, of a few Kelvin left over from the big bang, and the only source of heat is radiation from the sun, which you will be pointing at 24/7, so the panels will quickly reach thermal equilibrium. As another poster pointed out, things in geostationary orbit only get shade for at most 72 minutes at a time, so that's the only regular thermal stress they will be experiencing.
Compare that to having to regularly drive out into the middle of a desert in heat that will quickly kill you, to un-bury an array of panels to replace a load that have been blasted to shards by the wind, or failed from metal fatigue because the mountings are getting a daily 50°C temperature shift.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
