Vocal Voices

The Telegraph is going it's mile about the proposed plan to up solar to 36GW and to use countryside ground to do it.

It sounds really horrible, an area the size of one of our national parks.

So what is it really?

We generate around 47GW power max. So if we wanted to get 47gw of solar we'd need 512 square km of ground. That's a patch of ground some 22km on a side.

Horrible right?

How about if we decided to encourage 800 farms to give over some land, or put up a roofed building with solar panels on it as I have seen businesses doing in France local to us.

Well that would drop it a bit. Down to 28 meters a side. Doesn't seem too bad does it?? How many farms are there in southern England? 38,400. Now if we took only 4,000 of them, you would need a space 6m on a side.

I hate it when papers try to stamped the unexpecting public into knee jerk reactions by selling horror stories which are simply not true.

If we had a truly effective storage mechanism we could take down all the wind turbines and get rid of all the gas and do the whole lot on stored energy and generated hydrogen.

That's the real problem. Storage. Not power. The amount of energy that hits southern England, alone, on a summers day is just short of 20TW. Solar panel efficiency is around 18% so we that much land could recover some 4,000 GW of power. This is per second so each hour would be 4,000 TWH.

Of course this is not feasible. But it gives you an idea of just how much energy is hitting the ground and how we are simply ignoring it and burning fossil fuels instead.

Which is why storage is a really, really, hot potato right now.

But let us run horror stories about how our entire land is going to be covered in solar panels.

Only if we want to power the whole of Europe and half of the US too.

Saw an article in DM saying how inefficient wind farms are, taking into account the cost of manufacture, installation, generation,
ie they only work when the wind is blowing.
THere is another one which says "fracking" should bge called " shale gtas extraction" Sounds much better and not as contraversal.

In a country that is only about 50% self-sufficient in food production it is absolute madness to put solar panel farms on any area of arable land. Same as growing crops to burn in incinerators and calling them "biomass"; it's bonkers. Same as artificial lakes for pumped hydro storage or making billions of environmentally unfriendly cells for battery storage.

Small modular reactors (SMRs) and small scale hydro on our thousands of miles of rivers are the way to go but they are not sexy even though they can all run 24/7.

In the same Telegraph article it also says that the Biden administration has said that the UK and the US must take the "tactical decision " to park climate change concerns and boost fossil fuel supplies to take on the Kremlin.
Talk about a 180 degree turn...

Workingman wrote:In a country that is only about 50% self-sufficient in food production it is absolute madness to put solar panel farms on any area of arable land.

Did I mention the bit about 4,000 out of tens of thousands of farms donating a 6x6m plot? Could be a barn roof or even a new elevated roof.

Scare story.

Barn, warehouse, railway station, supermarket roofs. Yes. Arable land. Definitely NO!

Agreed.

But the problem is they show arable land under solar panels and it is not needed. There are other pictures like this one.



But they don't want to show those one's. It tells the real story.

Just a quick reality check here.

This is how much space you need to feed the world with solar power. Yes that was World power capacity. Yes, yes, you need 24 hours etc. But there are deserts on every continent.



The issue is not space to generate power. It is transmitting it over a global grid without too much power loss. Even then you could triple that and still not touch the desert space in any meaningful way.

Which is why I hate the "we don't have the space" talk for solar. We don't have the sunlight, yes, we get less in winter, yes, we don't have the distribution capacity, yes. We don't have the space? BS.

When people say "We" do not have the space they are generally talking about their own country and the need for arable land to grow food. The UK is already short in that respect.

Looking at the map Germany would need about 250000 hectares, UK would need 195,000 hectares or so - that's a lot of food or a lot of roof space. We could put them on some on non-arable south facing hillsides so long as we do not cut down trees - that would be counter productive. Even then the land becomes barren and we lose biodiversity.

Individual solar panels produce low voltage DC which incurs big losses in transmission. To reduce the losses it needs to be converted to high voltage DC, a mix of series and parallel connections. Transmission losses of 3% per 1,000 km are pretty good, but then it has to be locally converted to AC for use in homes and industry. We would need local production.

The world would need something like 100,000 square kilometres of solar panels. All that glass, silicon, aluminium, copper wire, inverter stations - a doddle. More as electricity usage increases.

From 26th of November to the 16th of January we get less than eight hours of sunlight and a lot of it is minor productive - it's why plants close down. That is the time of year when we use most electricity. We get nothing at night. And then there is the storage problem for when the sun don't shine....

A few squares on a map make it look ever so easy. It remined me of the old saying that everyone on Earth could fit in Yorkshire, even Lancastrians. True, but not very practical.

Workingman wrote:True, but not very practical.

Always true. But there is a balance.

Germany has 211 GW of installed capacity.
The UK has 78 GW of installed capacity.

Checking on some calculators says about 5 acres per MW. This works out at 158,000 hectares. UK land mass in hectares? 24m.

Something wrong with the German figures there.

However we don't actually use 78MW, we max out at around 43 most of the time. So around 87,000 hectares.

Doing a little digging around finds you.

Power Roll's analysis shows that there are around 2.5 billion square meters of south-facing commercial roof space in the UK, which could support over 400 GW of solar power; well in excess of the latest estimates of the capacity required to deliver net zero

2,500 km2 or 250,000 hectares.

Something a bit fuzzy about all those calculations. But the reality is simple. We have the roof space, we can generate, at least in daylight times, sufficient power when the sun shines. Excess can go to hydrogen or other storage, compressed air even, the UK is having good success with this.

I'm just sick and tired of the "there is no room to do Solar so we shouldn't bother". It is not true and saying we're going to use up all the farmland is nothing more than scaremongering. All we need to do is make it worth the while of commercial enterprises then get on with sorting out long term storage. I have mentioned, a time or 10 that all those commercial EV's and personal EV's sitting doing nothing are a power bank haven't I..... And we haven't even got into home storage like the Tesla Powerwall.