I live in a small Danish town that would have very likely been surrounded by solar panels by now if we had not put up a fight.<p>The problem is that these projects are pitched to land owners, to be placed in areas they can't see from their own windows. Those who live nearby are not involved until the approval is a formality (or presented as such). Often times the investors will also pay certain house owners for their silence, making the locals suspicious of each other.<p>They do this because obviously no one likes someone from the outside to take away the green* surroundings that are a big part of why people live there - and in the process lowering the value of everyone's houses.<p>I can't comprehend why someone would think that this was a good way of rolling out solar.<p>I agree that we are going to need solar as part of the mix. It would just be much better to start with the locations where people do NOT want to live, for instance next to motorways.<p>Luckily I think we are slowly moving in that direction due to all the resistance.<p>*I'm well aware that fields are heavy industry, but they are plants and rarely 2,5 meters tall.
So you put up a fight because people put something on their own land that doesn't look pretty without a HOA agreement in place? Or am I missing something?<p>If I were living there and wanted to do an upgrade like solar panels but then some neighbor complained that my house is an "eye sore" and was supposedly decreasing their property value, I'd be really frustrated.
What's the over-under on tire and brake dust settling on panels next to (presumably) high-speed motorways?
Thank you for bringing this up. It's not something I've thought of as a problem before.<p>It does in fact - based on my 5 minutes of research - seem that it can be an important factor, especially if the panels are placed within "splash range" of the road.<p>When I mention solar panels near motorways I'm not picturing them right next to the road, I'm thinking of larger strips, perhaps 30-100 meters from the road and in areas that have already become unattractive due to noise pollution. There are many such areas.<p>I think the main issue with using them is that there are many land owners involved. It's easier to get fewer land owners to commit larger fields, than many land owners to commit small strips. But that is IMO a solvable problem, not a good reason for placing the panels next to where people like to live.
> When I mention solar panels near motorways I'm not picturing them right next to the road, I'm thinking of larger strips, perhaps 30-100 meters from the road and in areas that have already become unattractive due to noise pollution. There are many such areas.<p>FWIW, most of the bigger solarfarms in East Germany seem to be on former Cold War airbases, or in former lignite mining areas. IMHO a pretty good 'land recycling strategy':<p><a href="https://www.google.com/maps/@51.1658488,12.4325343,5059m/data=!3m1!1e3?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI2MDQwOC4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com/maps/@51.1658488,12.4325343,5059m/dat...</a><p><a href="https://www.google.com/maps/@52.8290328,13.6890243,2783m/data=!3m1!1e3?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI2MDQwOC4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com/maps/@52.8290328,13.6890243,2783m/dat...</a><p><a href="https://www.google.com/maps/@51.3296415,12.6590003,1983m/data=!3m1!1e3?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI2MDQwOC4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com/maps/@51.3296415,12.6590003,1983m/dat...</a><p><a href="https://www.google.com/maps/@52.633346,13.7674599,1989m/data=!3m1!1e3?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI2MDQwOC4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com/maps/@52.633346,13.7674599,1989m/data...</a><p><a href="https://www.google.com/maps/@53.9209948,13.2235344,3356m/data=!3m1!1e3?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI2MDQwOC4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com/maps/@53.9209948,13.2235344,3356m/dat...</a><p><a href="https://www.google.com/maps/@51.5524298,13.9695021,4648m/data=!3m1!1e3?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI2MDQwOC4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com/maps/@51.5524298,13.9695021,4648m/dat...</a><p><a href="https://www.google.com/maps/@52.612948,14.2381122,2691m/data=!3m1!1e3?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI2MDQwOC4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com/maps/@52.612948,14.2381122,2691m/data...</a>
I'm betting the effect is a rounding error compared to road salt build up.
You know that all that "nature" you desire is synthetic? Living in rural areas without actually working there is as far from a natural state as it can be: the whole lifestyle is based on subsidies by cities and technology: your concrete, your car, your heating, your power, groceries... it's all getting brought to you by fossil fuels and plastics.<p>So maybe accepting some part of that technology to stand on your "natural" grass in your front yard might be necessary to at least offset _some_ of the costs you're imposing on the environment living your lifestyle.
It seems as though you are antagonizing a certain imaginary group of people that I do not belong to, just because I chose to live in the country side.<p>There was a reason I used the phrasing "green surroundings", I'm well aware that it's not "nature" in the sense of being untouched by humans. There are hardly any such places in Denmark.<p>Nevertheless people live here because they like these surroundings, it doesn't make any sense that they should "pay" for living here by having those surroundings taken away.<p>Whether or not it's feasible to have people living in the country side is a whole other discussion, which I do not think can be boiled down to city = good, countryside = bad.<p>Another related discussion is what is the natural habitat for a human being, at this point in time a slight majority of humans might live in larger cities, but that is historically a new development. I don't have the answer here, but my guess would be that a small town in the country side is more similar to the environments humans have historically lived and evolved in.
Thanks for your thorough response, I appreciate it.<p>My point was less that "everything comes from the city" but that living in the countryside has massive externalities that get deposited elsewhere as I mentioned.<p>So it would be kind of fair to at least start accepting some externalities - like energy - to be actually part of your living reality.<p>In essence: you need energy, get it yourself and don't NIMBY your way out of the consequences of "living in the countryside".
The fields that the solar farms are replacing were generating food for everyone, including those who live in the cities.<p>1-2 days per year the whole town has a smell of manure.<p>That's is an externality we accepted when we moved here, so we do not complain that the fields need to produce food.<p>Also, you are implying that we have not accepted any solar panels, which is wrong. We have plenty in the near area. We just don't want all the fields surrounding the town to be plastered with panels.
> it's all getting brought to you by fossil fuels and plastics.<p>Which come from where? Last I checked there weren't many pump jacks in Copenhagen.<p>Pretty much all material wealth of modern society comes from raw materials sourced in rural areas. Those then get processed locally (e.g you don't waste money shipping logs, you mill them and ship boards) and post processed in increasingly urban areas. It's the paper pushing (engineering, finance, etc) of the supply chain and distribution that tends to be centered around urban areas.<p>I hate these sort of macro-economically ignorant takes and their peddlers. Acting like either part of the economy could exist in anything like it's current capacity without the other is an exercise in lying with numbers to obfuscate the lies.
The Guardian here using the word "climate" 6 times. They mention prices and economics zero times. They talk about energy sovereignty zero times. While the US attack on Iran has massively increased fossil fuel prices.<p>Framing solar expansion as being for the climate rather than the number one way reduce cost of living for everyone, boost the economy through cheap electricity, _and_ decrease dependency on other countries (a proper nationalist goal), is simply propagandizing for fossil fuel and capital interests. That's what the Guardian is doing here. Choosing that framing in an article less than 3 weeks after the attack on Iran is deliberate.
Solar power has been long supported by subsidies in Denmark.<p><a href="https://ens.dk/en/energy-sources/promoting-solar-energy" rel="nofollow">https://ens.dk/en/energy-sources/promoting-solar-energy</a><p><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200806023128/https://www.pv-tech.org/news/cost-milestones-show-danish-solar-is-ready-for-subsidy-free-says-govt" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20200806023128/https://www.pv-te...</a><p>On the other side, it looks like the electricity prices are so high now, that it makes sense to install solar power even without subsidies. (This situation is good for owners of power plants, bad for customers and industry).<p><a href="https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/w/ddn-20251029-2" rel="nofollow">https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/w/d...</a>
Though if we steer the conversation towards sovereignity, it bears mentioning that all components of solar installs (inverters, panels, and batteries) tend to be made in China, and afaik just recently they revoked some tax breaks that applied to solar equipment.
Sovereignty doesn't mean autarky. Gas requires continuous resupplying which depends on maintaining relations with foreign countries. Solar requires you to acquire equipment to set it up, but doesn't require an ongoing relationship beyond that. Having invested heavily in solar doesn't give china a veto in your political affairs thereafter, except to the degree they would have one otherwise.
According to data from 2021, China produced 79.4 % of all polysilicon (the most energy hungry part of PV production) in the world, 96.8% of all wafers.<p><a href="https://www.iea.org/reports/solar-pv-global-supply-chains/executive-summary" rel="nofollow">https://www.iea.org/reports/solar-pv-global-supply-chains/ex...</a><p>So if a country counts on becoming energy sovereign by investing into solar, this really depends on goods relations with China.
Don’t attribute to malice what can be attributed to stupidity. And this is a leftist rag, so there’s lots of stupidity going on.
We are at a moment where we are finding more and more ways to integrate solar in. It is likely we will go 'too far' in some ways but hopefully over the next few decades we will see a lot more well integrated solutions like vertical panels complementing farming and solar integrated, potentially with lower efficiency but also less impact, into things like building surfaces and other non-traditional places. Getting a diversity of options out there, and iterating on them, is key to the next phase where solar is everywhere reasonable by default and well integrated in to daily life.
I live in the UK in a town of 10,000 people, so say 4,000 houses (probably far higher than there are). If every house had a 10kWp (way more than most installs) that would be 40MW generation.<p>On the outskirts of town we have a 40MW solar farm about the same size as the golf course. Most people have no idea it's there, it uses barely any land compared to the rest of farmland around here. That generates about 40GWh a year.<p>The cost of renting the land it's on each year is about £20k a year, or 50p per MWh, basically nothing. Land is effectively free compared to the value from "farming the sun", it's far cheaper than the scaffolding to put 8kWp on a roof
Denmark is a poor location for solar. They are pretty far north and don't have a lot of sunny days that are good for solar generation. When they do, those peaks drive energy prices negative. From the article: <i>Over the next 10 years, the official expectation is a very large rise in the amount of solar produced. But that kind of clashes with the reality on the ground – they can’t make money</i>
Far north places have long summer days. This doesn't align well with the winter heating needs but it does balance really well with wind generation which peaks in winter.
Latitude is not everything. Oslo, which is further north than all of Denmark gets more insolation than Hamburg, which is further south than all of Denmark.<p>And don't forget that storage is getting cheaper so it will get more and more practical to save a some of that midday solar energy to be used in the evening.
If it's a poor location for photovoltaics, it's exactly as a poor for photosynthesis
It's very seasonal for both. But we're currently better at storing wheat for 6 months than we are at storing electricity for a similar period.
In most places photosynthesis is limited by (1) the availability of water and (2) the availability of bio-available Nitrogen. Sunlight is less limiting by far.
For plant growth also very important is the ambient temperature, which in Denmark higher than for example in Canada at similar latitude. This caused by Gulf Stream. Its carrying warm water northeast across the Atlantic makes Western Europe and especially Northern Europe warmer and milder than it otherwise would be.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_Stream" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_Stream</a><p>The Gulf Stream has more energy than all the world’s rivers combined.<p><a href="https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/power-and-energy/ocean-current-energy" rel="nofollow">https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/power-and-energy/oce...</a>
Thing is, panels are so cheap that if you put them on your roof, it very well might cost the same or less as roof tiles per m2.<p>You can also put more panels on than the rated peak of your inverter. As long as you don't surpass voltage limits, if you put on more panels, youll get more generation during non-peak hours, and it wont even affect your inverter negatively.<p>Usually you can easily put 2x+ the peak wattage, as your inverter likely has 2 strings, and each of them can take the whole capacity of the inverter alone.
That's a terrible argument on the face of it. "They can't make any energy, but also they make so much energy they can't use it all".<p>I actually live in Denmark, and we can produce solar energy just fine. My dad installed rooftop solar 10 years ago, and that thing has 90% of his electricity usage since then. It's still producing at around 85% capacity too.
I don't understand why energy production <i>must</i> be profitable.
Anything that doesn’t break even suffers from its own success.<p>If you have a public transportation system that loses money on every rider, then more people using it means everyone has to pay more (in taxes).<p>This can all work out when the economy is good and taxes can be increased, but it’s an inherently fragile system. At exactly the moment when most people will be dependent on a publicly funded system — when times are tough — is exactly the same time when tax revenues drop.<p>By creating a system that can’t sustain itself, you are making the system more likely to collapse in a crisis.
Energy production doesn't have to be profitable, but no private investor would invest into a unprofitable business.<p>If energy production in Denmark would not by profitable, the Government of Denmark could nationalize the energy production, or push households to install more solar and sell the energy at predefined price to the grid, or increase taxes to pay out subsidies to make energy production profitable again for private investors. Or combine all this approaches.
For it to be market based the investment must generate positive return.<p>On other hand I would not find replacing all energy production with government run nuclear plants as unreasonable.
It does at least need to be feasible
from the article which uses intentionally deceptive photography angles to paint a very different picture, yes<p>more interesting is, if that is actually true. Or only true because idk. the investors also bought the land and they profits are used to amortize the land buying cost etc.
A quick calculation shows to supply all of Denmark's energy needs with solar, (assuming sufficient storage), they would need about 1,000 km² of solar panels. That's about 2% of their land area. That assumes a solar irradiation rate of 0.5 kWh / m² which is about what they get in winter. They get 6 kWh / m² in summer, so there would be 10 fold over production then. If they stored that by converting it to hydrogen, even if done very inefficiently, it would more than halve the land area required.<p>Given their solar irradiation is so poor they would be better off with wind. While 2% is big, it isn't inconceivable, particularly as solar panels don't prevent the land from being used for other things, such as transport, buildings, even some forms of agriculture. People will get comfortable with it over time, just as they did with destroying most natural ecosystems in Europe to turn the land over to agriculture. That horrifies me far more than covering 2% of land with solar panels.
The dirty secret is of course that the Danish power grid would be totally unusable without the base power provided from Sweden and Norway.<p>They almost suffered a catastrophic shutdown a year or two ago and the situation has not improved
The Nordic grid was designed to work as an interconnected system though - Danish wind exports and Norwegian/Swedish hydro imports balance each other out. Calling it a "dirty secret" makes it sound like a failure when it's actually the intended architecture. Denmark is frequently a net electricity exporter.
Is that really a "dirty secret"?<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_Europe_Synchronous_Area" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_Europe_Synchronous...</a> exists for good reason.
The only dirty secret is that humans are happy to kill future generations as the effects of the oil economy will only minimally affect the people alive today.
That's like pointing out that Rhode Island isn't designed to be a self-sufficient grid.
Yeah and entire countries would shut down without LNG and oil- it's almost as if we are all living in an interconnected world!
I took a stroll recently through the countryside around Swindon, UK, where there’s a massive new solar farm on formerly arable land. One thing I only just realised was how the view from the ground is so badly affected when you’re down amidst the endless rows of panels - they reach well above head height.<p>It’s basically like walking through a industrial estate, just with more grass in between. Really very bleak.<p>Give me an onshore wind farm over this.
Are you <i>sure</i> it’s arable land? The majority of solar farms in the UK are built on low-grade land that aren’t suitable for growing food.
I wonder if that will remain the case. The input costs for farming are increasing (seed, fertiliser, energy), the output is becoming less predictable (flood, drought) and the grants from DEFRA which are meant to smooth things out have dried up somewhat since Brexit. If farmers are offered a guaranteed income for a field, I suspect they'd take it.
Green grass is still good to look at.
I can no longer edit my comment to add this, but this article really hammers the point home.<p>In the UK, by 2050, less than 1% of land will be needed for solar and wind production. Similar to what is currently used by golf courses.<p>The infographic showing land use on that page is eye-opening. Considering that the UK would naturally be covered in rainforest and not fields.<p><a href="https://www.carbonbrief.org/qa-what-englands-new-land-use-framework-means-for-climate-nature-and-food/" rel="nofollow">https://www.carbonbrief.org/qa-what-englands-new-land-use-fr...</a>
So much spare land in flat roofs in industrial and warehouse space but solar installations there, if they are there, seem to be limited to covering utility bills for the building over generating surplus for the grid. Much of the roof will remain uncovered, along with all the periphery lot, parking, truck yard, and access roads. No one would be complaining about any view there...
How much extra on your electricity bill are you prepared to pay to not see it?
I seem to have come across as a nimby in my comment…<p>I’d happily pay less on my bill if it meant gas no longer set the price of electricity in the UK, even if it did mean covering loads of arable land in panels.<p>It still doesn’t mean they aren’t bleak to look at.<p>I get why people don’t like them. I get why people don’t want a wind turbine on every peak in the Cambrian hills.<p>Personally I’d rather have the latter - sparse but huge industrial objects - than the widespread low level monotony of a solar farm.<p>Unfortunately we need both.
Needs a beauty strip of trees around the panels.
Most of the new solar farms do plant them, it just takes decades for trees to grow big enough to hide the panels<p>Personally I like the panels
Yeah, 'cause shade is precisely what's needed for a solar farm
Around, not over. Trees are a well studied thing where can you pick different species for different characteristics, like height, and growth speed.
Ok, but why are you down among the panels? We have solar farms near my house and I don't hang out in them. You only see it when you drive by the place. I would much less prefer a giant windmill obstructing an otherwise scenic view.
> Give me an onshore wind farm over this.<p>Guess why those aren't common? Largely because the same people vehemently opposing these solar parks, have already been blocking onshore (and even near-coast offshore) wind for more than a decade.
Climate change is an existential threat, it's switch to green power asap or burn the world our kids will live in
Would be nice if we started with the actual marginal land and not the marginal land in real estate terms. Roofs for a start. Parking lots next. Really no reason why any and all industrial land shouldn't look like a pure sea of solar from orbit. Every square inch is low hanging fruit no one would complain about a solar panel going in there.
But it's literally not low, it's up on a roof. The ground installs are preferable because they are low and easily accessible.
The best land for solar farms tends to be in the desert where there isn’t enough water for industrial use.
I would actually phrase is a "fossil fuels are an existential threat" - regardless on how climmate change will impact us, it is IMHO enough to see the destructions people are capable due to fossil fuel money & it makes 100% sense to get ridd of any dependency on fossil fuels ASAP.
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I don't think you're qualified to make this assessment. If a large majority of the scientific community is treating it and calling it an existential threat, I'm tempted to agree. In fact, I think most widely held scientific stances on this are meant to be balanced and as agreeable as possible, so I personally believe it's likely to be worse than the mainstream opinion.<p>Climate migration is already an issue. Extreme climate events are already increasingly problematic. Will civilization collapse in the next 50 years. Almost certainly not, but will we be better off then than we are now? Unless we rapidly increase the rate at which we address this issue, I don't see how that happens either.
Of course I'm qualified to make the assessment, as the respectable scientific community has been warning people to not make such bombastic statements, and similar warnings were in the IPCC. You really aren't doing yourself any favors by pushing hysteria into scientific disciplines. This is exactly why the climate movement has lost so much credibility and suffered so many policy setbacks.<p>No, the world is not ending. The clouds are not burning. There is no risk to life on earth. These are technical discussions about whether sea levels will increase by 2mm per year or 3mm per year.
> <i>large majority of the scientific community is treating it and calling it an existential threat</i><p>I haven’t seen evidence of this. What I see is scientists making measured predictions about massive costs in human life, economies, refugee crises, and wars. Extinctions. Like, horrible stuff. But not extinction or even civilisational collapse.
> I don't think you're qualified to make this assessment.<p>The scientists aren’t, either, given how many times they have failed.
It is 100% an existential threat, but the existential bit happens in 100 years so of course you're not going to see it materialize over night
> <i>It is 100% an existential threat, but the existential bit happens in 100 years</i><p>No, it’s not, and no, we don’t know that. Humans will survive climate change. Rich countries will survive, too.<p>We will all suffer. Economically, healthwise and aesthetically. But that’s not existential. Framing it as such is disingenuous and counterproductive.
We will go from 8 billion humans to maybe 1 or 2 billion humans, but that is probably going to happen either way. Poor countries will be obliterated, rich countries are likely to see tanking living standards. Long term humans go extinct (or are superseded by some sort of singularity successor) and the earth recovers in a few thousand years as if we never existed.
RCP8.5 is pretty much ruled out by people as unlikely for some reason, even as we have the major super power on the planet pulling out of the Paris agreement on climate change.<p>There is clearly a temperature at which this planet will not support human life, and we could definitely get the planet to that temperature if we don't change course and reach net zero.<p>Saying its not an existential threat is just wild to me.
> There is clearly a temperature at which this planet will not support human life<p>Yes, but that temperature isn't going to be reached by fossil fuels.*<p>The reduced brain function from the extra CO2 (if we burned all of it) may make us unable to adapt to the higher temperature, however.<p>* Ironically, unbounded growth of PV to tile all Earth's deserts could also raise the planet's temperature by 4 K or so, and 6 K or so if tiling all non-farm land.<p>Deserts are huge, this by itself would represent an enormous increase in global electricity supply; but also, current growth trends for PV have been approximately exponential (in the actual maths sense not just "fast") for decades now, so this could happen in as little as 35 years give or take a few (both scenarios are within the same margin for error, because exponential is like that).
> <i>There is clearly a temperature at which this planet will not support human life, and we could definitely get the planet to that temperature</i><p>There is such a temperature. We are not getting to it in half a century at current emission rates, even with zero curtailment. If you have a source that shows the opposite, I’d be happy to read it.
Perhaps we should be using ‘apocalyptic threat’ instead?
I've never been able to decide whether it is or not. I'm still vaguely scared of the clathrate gun, permafrost releasing extra CO2, and phytoplankton shrinking under ocean acidification so we can't have as much oxygen as we're accustomed to.<p>Edit: one of those crossfire situations where the downvotes could be coming from either direction. I'm going to assume they mean "don't be scared".
I don't know who downvoted you, people treat this topic with religious zeal. Yes, basically all the arguments trying to claim that the influence of CO2 has positive feedbacks relies on cascades of things amplifying warming.<p>And that's certainly something to discuss, whether there exists a type of rube goldberg machine where higher levels of CO2 cause the permafrost to melt which cause even higher levels of CO2 which cause something else to release even more CO2, etc.<p>I certainly wont deny that such a sequence of events is possible, and it's worth studying. But on the other side of that you have basic physics, which shows that the warming effects go with the log of CO2. That really slows things down by quite a bit. It turns a doubling into an additive factor.<p>Now, could it be that the cascade of events is such that it overcomes the logarithm? E.g. that it is an exponential or super-exponential chain of events that would release exponentially more CO2. Uhh, maybe, but this is not something to try to terrify the population with. And it sounds extremely unlikely. So you need an extremely precarious set of assumptions -- or just deny physics outright -- to overcome Arrhenius' Greenhouse rule. Logarithms cover a multitude of growth sins.
That just sounds like endless corn fields, only solar panels.
I don't much like walking through corn fields either, it's heavy going, all that trampling. Farmers should just grow pretty flowers, small ones.
We currently use vast amounts of land growing corn and other crops specifically for biodiesel. Solar panels produce over 100x more energy per hectare than corn ethanol, even in countries like Denmark with limited sunlight. It makes perfect sense to repurpose some biofuel farmland for solar panels. That's just efficient land use, not an attack on agriculture.
> corn and other crops specifically for biodiesel.<p>honestly that always sounded very misguided to me<p>fields are not perfectly renewable, biomas gets removed from them and fertilizers can only help so much in any given time frame<p>mostly corn/raps mono-culture can make that easily far worse<p>and not needing to import food can safe a lot of energy too<p>also as you mentioned, modern solar panels seem overall more efficient<p>in difference to solar or wind, biodiesel just seem a very bad choice
Don't forget all the pesticides and fertilizer that they have been pumping into the ground for the last 100 years.<p>Farms are industrial estates.
The Guardian continues its anti-solar crusade. For some inexplicable reason
You don't even have to go to the issue of climate change to defned this anymore. The far more relevant factor is the cost of energy as well as national security.<p>Europe as a whole has engaged in greenwashing where instead of really solving their emissions and energy problems has simply offshored those problems to poorer countries. If a neighbour uses fossil fuels for electricity generation and you buy their excess electrricity, you're not greener. You've just cooked the books.<p>People who might say "when I go outside at this very specific place solar panels look ugly" should carry no weight when those solar panels (in Denmark's case) covers 0.2% of rural land. Go somewhere else.<p>Unsurprisingly, China is leading here by making solar panel installations have multiple uses like reversing desertification and use vegetation growth from the shade and the water used to clean the panels as a place for grazing livestock. Obviously Europe in general and Denmark in particular doesn't have deserts, of course.<p>I'm generally a fan of putting solar panels on non-arable land. In the US, that's much of the southwest, which incidentally also has very good solar yields because of the high amount of sunshine. There are whole areas of grass plains that can't be used for traditional farming as we discovered in the 1930s. It was called the Dust Bowl. There was a famous book written about it (ie the Grapes of Wrath).<p>What I don't understand is why we don't build more solar around or over highways. This is already public land and it's land not doing anything else. The solar wouldn't interfere with the core purpose either. I guess people want solar panels tucked away where few can see them.
One interesting detail about Denmark's renewable energy infrastructure mix is that Vestas, the largest wind turbine manufacturer in the world, is a cornerstone of Danish industry. Note in the article that wind supplies about 40% of Denmark's electrical needs, and that the populist right party mentioned in the article doesn't attack wind turbines, despite the antipathy that other (supposedly populist) rightwing figures do in other countries.
Lived there. Baltic weather, not too sunny. Must be a great place for wind generation though.
For decades I've been pointing to Denmark (partly out of national pride) as a successful model for renewables as Australia dragged its feet on the issue due to fossil fuel industry lobbying.<p>The positive I take from the article is that Denmark is successfully diversifying its renewable energy sources, something that's needed while battery infrastructure is built to scale, and I sincerely hope it doesn't become a serious political issue like it's been here in Australia for decades (and continues to be today).
Not mentioned is that studies are showing that areas over solar farms remain stable in temperature, but surrounding areas get a few degrees warmer, which is problematic for either people living close to them and/or if they are planted next to crops, other infrastructure etc.
not buying that this isn't anti renewable propaganda for the US<p>the images in the article looks bad<p>until you take a short look at satellite images and realize:<p>- it's not the norm but the exception<p>- the photos are made to make it look maximally bad in a deceptive/manipulative way,<p>and that is even in context, that Denmark is a special case in that it both quite small and has little "dead" (not agriculturally efficiently usable land). And many old "culturally" protected houses where fitting solar on top of it is far more complicated/inefficient. Don't get me wrong it isn't the only special case, but there are very many countries which don't really have such issues.<p>Also quite interestingly this "iron fields" can be "not bad" from a nature perspective, at least compared to mono-culture with pesticide usage. Due to the plant and animal live below them. Through that is assuming people do extra steps to prevent that live.
There is an art to taking pictures of solar farms from exactly the right angle so that the panels seem continuous, often making use of deep shadows to cover the gaps.<p>It's similar to the telephoto shots of wind farms taken from far away that make them seem really close together.
"not buying that this isn't anti renewable propaganda for the US"<p>Its the Guardian so that is a <i>very</i> unlikely motivation.
_Something_ motivates them, though. They have been on a wild anti-solar bend the last year or more. Dozens of articles, all with the same anti-solar NIMBY bent
Haha, the Guardian is just as much in bed with the capital class.
The guardian have previously been found to generate a significant amount of ad revenue from fossil fuel companies. They aren't politically aligned with it, but are financially. Remember that a large portion of the left in the UK are also anti-solar since they are pro-green nature and they have yet to make a choice on this.<p>P.s I am pro renewable and pro-solar/wind/nuclear just to clarify that this is nothing about my personal beliefs.
The satellite photos of Hjolderup look worse than the photos in the article to me... the photos in the article seem like a fair representation of the consequences of installing solar fields like this--your house and town end up surrounded by solar panels.
100%<p>It also presents the draw man that solar can only go in huge fields that would otherwise grow food.<p>There are plenty of rooftops and car parks that can be covered in solar to excellent benefit.<p>Ie <a href="https://www.eventplanner.net/news/10582_largest-solar-carport-in-the-world-opened-at-lowlands-festival-site.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.eventplanner.net/news/10582_largest-solar-carpor...</a>
> It also presents the draw man that solar can only go in huge fields that would otherwise grow food.<p>> There are plenty of rooftops and car parks that can be covered in solar to excellent benefit.<p>It's worth calling this approach out too: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agrivoltaics" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agrivoltaics</a>
and field which have been damaged due to overuse and incorrect handling and preferable shouldn't be used for the next ~50 year
> - it's not the norm but the exception<p>I bet makes the person dealing with the outcome of being surrounded by them feel a lot better.
I can't even read it because you either have to accept all tracking or pay a subscription fee. Pretty sure that's against the GDPR? Anyway, not a good look.
Why not make transparent panels? And put them on the top of houses everywhere, since actually nobody uses the top of their house for anything. And prohibit putting panels on fertile soil.
Sounds like America... I could see panels being thought to take up farmland and not look that great but if it could use other lands and be out of the way idk what the remaining objections are
everything that goes into real life is an aesthetic experience. it's not complicated. imo, you can either literally hide things from the public, or aesthetic concerns, like whether or not a piece of infrastructure's exterior is physically beautiful & attractive, becomes the #1 priority.
Northern Europe really is the energy armpit of the post-fossil world, although more so away from coasts.
This would’ve been a non issue if human beings worked together as a species, but we don’t. There is plenty of space on the planet where no one lives and nothing thrives that could be converted massive solar farms that power the planet.
Transmitting that energy from where nobody lives to where people do live becomes the problem with that.
> Transmitting that energy from where nobody lives to where people do live becomes the problem with that.<p>That’s kind of what we do today for pretty much everything. Most of the population on the planet doesn’t live near oil rigs, refineries, solar farms, power plants or wind. In fact most of the population doesn’t live near where we produce our food or most of the things we need for survival.
Building HVDC lines from North Africa to Europe, for example, wouldn't be a huge feat of civil engineering. Rather standard stuff, really.
we don't need something that long distance at all<p>EU has enough areas with sparse population and not that much nature which also are south enough to have it work out well with solar panels of the current generations.<p>And besides that even most EU countries have enough places in them to still put a lot of solar panels without much issues and/or replacing fields.<p>going as far as North Africa is a bit too far to be convenient for power transport
Spain and Morocco already have a 1.4 GW DC interconnect and the XLinks project intends to connect Morocco and the UK.
I've been watching the math of batteries and cargo ships and we may not be too far from shipping electrons generated in the Sahara to the UK and Europe at a reasonable price. That totally changes the game if you have cargo ships moving to where the power will be needed. I can imagine these ships going to where the weather is predicted to cause an issue to help even out the grid and just in general creating a responsive base load for the world. It sounds like sci-fi, but with the direction batteries have gone it isn't that crazy anymore.
It could possibly be combined with a solution to the storage problem: store the energy in some transportable chemical form like hydrogen, methane or the electrolyte of a redox flow battery.
Buckmister Fuller envisioned a worldwide high-voltage transmission network implemented with 1980’s technology, there just isn’t the worldwide political will or cooperation to build it.
The only real problems with long distance electricity transmission are political and to a lesser extent financial. Technically it is solved problem.<p>The Desertec project could have turned a relatively small patch of Libyan desert into a solar farm that could supply all of Europe's electricity except that politics makes it impossible.
in the distances we speak about we do so all the time with more centralized energy sources (like e.g. nuklear) due to their centralized nature<p>the issue is less the transport distances but changes in "from where to where" sometimes needing some extensions/improvements to the power grid. Through commonly in ways which anyway make sense and all pretty much "standard" solutions well understood. Through there are some more complicated exceptions to that.<p>EDIT: "distances we speak about" assumed less many local less dense populate/suitable spots across the EU, not a mega project like a energy pipeline from North Afrika.
We work together pretty well. From a 20,000 foot level maybe it looks like chaos and like a central guiding hand would make everything better. But, two people working together is easier to direct than 100,000 people (or more!). Unpacking this gives us the wonders of the economics and behavioral psychology. I’d say, all things considered, we could be doing a hell of a lot worse on cooperation with each other.
look at satellite images of Denmark or the village in question<p>- that village is the exception, not the norm at all<p>- that village is in a "small" (on agricultural scale) strip of solar panels, around which there are green fields over green fields over green field ....<p>- the photos are deceptive, the first is from the start of the strip to the end and contains the huge majority of all solar panels in like a 50km? 100km? radius. The second photo does not show the village but a separate house up the street, if the photo where in a bit more flat angle you would see a normal filed behind the solar panels. The village itself has a "strip" of (small) green fields around it which should make it less bad to live there.<p>I mean don't get me wrong it probably sucks for the home owners in Hjolderup. But it's not representative for the situation in Denmark at all.
Yes to progress, no to cheap right-wing populism with no real solutions to any problem. How about that?
Denmark could use floating sea solar.
if there where an issue yes,<p>but it doesn't look like there actually is a major issues.
A look at satellite images it looks more like a problem for a handful of people across all of Denmark which then is misrepresented by populist, to push anti-solar propaganda.<p>(Oh, and we don't even know how much the people in Hjolderup do resent it. Like seriously, they might even have put the solar panels there them-self to make money, idk.. Because conveniently the article shows pictures of Hjolderup to invoke a felling of how terrible it is, but never any interviews or options with anyone _from_ Hjolderup. )
Energy density is a real problem.
Denmark has undergone the same sort of right wing populism that has gone through most of the west. Including rhetorical tricks like this.<p>Though the recent election is slight swing to the left, and the newly created right wing parties are already undergoing various forms of internal meltdowns, making a center left government friendly green energy projects most likely.
Regardless of your political beliefs I would hope you could agree that using arable land for solar power is dumb. Denmark is almost entirely arable land and relatively small to boot so they should be using more compact power sources.
Why would I agree to such a stupid position?<p>Here in the us we could swap acres of corn used only for ethanol production for acres of solar panels that produce a 100x more power annually.
Yes, but the reason we incentivized ethanol production is to not lose the productive capacity for corn in case we need it to feed people. Having a significant excess of food production capability is incredibly important to long term stability. You really can't overstate the importance of food production capacity.
It's a hell of a lot less dumb than growing crops for biofuel on it, to start. And it's not even an either/or situation, you can do both on the same piece of land. I think there is plenty of 'arable' land for which the most productive thing it could be doing is solar power.
Agreed. I'm very pro-solar but there should be incentives for residential solar and solar on commercial buildings first. Covering up farmland and natural environments should be a last resort.
I always find it kind of ironic when the more allegedly libertarian pro-farmer side of the political spectrum start to get really concerned with how farmers use their land. And a solar farm has to be the most inoffensive thing to live next to, I was frankly shocked that it was something that appeared on a house survey result as "developments nearby you might be concerned about".
russia really doesnt like energy independence. Right wingers across Europe are supported with russian bribes, last big one caught is Nathan Gill.
The absurdity of the climate debate is that “we” talk almost constantly about two energy sources (wind and solar) that in no way have the potential to provide the stable baseload power required to electrify society. And unless nature has blessed your country with abundant geothermal or hydroelectric power, that leaves you with the following options: oil, coal, or nuclear power.
The addition of batteries as an intermittent power source brings us closer to 100% renewable energy and allows us to incrementally decommission dirty plants, such as coal- and oil-fired plants.<p>The design goal of adding a battery to grid power sources is to capture energy that would otherwise be lost when demand is lower than generation. In addition to capturing excess production of wind or solar-derived energy, one could capture unused energy from our current baseload generating plants overnight. We could also, this would also let us capture the energy that would otherwise be wasted by unnecessary nighttime lighting.
Denmark is linked to the Norwegian grid, which is essentially all hydropower [1]. It imports baseload when needed and exports cheap solar power when not.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Norway" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Norway</a>
Wind and solar can provide enough energy. You may be referring to their well-publicized variability. Energy storage can solve that.
The next phase in these conversations is usually to argue back and forth about whether energy storage is going to be good enough soon, or never will be, or already is. You're naive if you think your storage solution can handle the massive reserves required, unless you're not naive for technical reasons. Don't ask me, this part is always inconclusive.
Ok, I guess we'll never know then.
> <i>You're naive if you think your storage solution can handle the massive reserves required</i><p>The Scandinavian grid which Denmark is part of has 120 TWh of storage capacity (hydro in Norway and Sweden) which is literally 4 months of electricity consumption.