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.
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.
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.
I can't comprehend why someone would think that this was a good way of rolling out solar.
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.
Luckily I think we are slowly moving in that direction due to all the resistance.
*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?
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.
Thank you for bringing this up. It's not something I've thought of as a problem before.
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.
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.
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.
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':
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So it would be kind of fair to at least start accepting some externalities - like energy - to be actually part of your living reality.
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.
1-2 days per year the whole town has a smell of manure.
That's is an externality we accepted when we moved here, so we do not complain that the fields need to produce food.
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.
Cozy small time agriculture in the west is a small part of your general food supply. The rest is in places you do not want to live and is called monoculture.
A huge part of your food supply is not produced "in the countryside" in either Denmark or most of the West.
It all starts with oil and energy. Nothing else matters as much. So getting off oil and producing energy in other ways is at the forefront of our struggle as a species and if you deny this progress because it hinders the view from your detached house porch I get the impression you have not really realized the situation we are in.
I totally agree, except for the last part where you attack a straw man.
I'm not talking about the view from my front porch, I'm talking about solar panels in nearly every direction, like a sort of barrier, choking the town.
As mentioned we do have solar panels in some directions, we just don't want them everywhere.
Also there's no dichotomy here, it's not a choice between choking small towns and saving the planet vs. the opposite.
I'm arguing that we should first and foremost place solar panels where people already do not want to live for various reasons. The incentives we've created so far have not been good at that.
Update: I realise that I misread the first part of your comment. The agriculture that the panels are replacing is probably what you would call monoculture. It would however seem that the monoculture you picture looks very different from what we have in Denmark. If you think about endless "field deserts" that's not what it is. That is also why people like to live here.
> it's all getting brought to you by fossil fuels and plastics.
Which come from where? Last I checked there weren't many pump jacks in Copenhagen.
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.
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.
Cozy small time agriculture in the west is a small part of your general food supply. The rest is in places you do not want to live and is called monoculture.
All "raw materials" you mentioned are not produced "in the countryside" in either Denmark or most of the West.
It all starts with oil and energy. Nothing else matters as much. So getting off oil and producing energy in other ways is at the forefront of our struggle as a species and if you deny this progress because it hinders the view from your detached house porch I get the impression you have not really realized the situation we are in.
I was speaking globally, it's not like Denmark is producing tons of crops. I agree small time boutique agriculture and a lot of the regulatory policy (i.e. crapping on any sort of value producing industrial activity while exempting other things of which farming is one) that enables it is a short sighted scourge that stunts economic development, a sort of "the island tourism economy" we have at home if you will.
That said, I'm happy to watch the people who want to peddle that garbage fling poo at the people who want to peddle bigco solar/wind farm projects because they're bad too. Most of them are miracles of financial/regulatory engineering that only really move panels and electrons around as a pretext for the former and the end result is they drive up the marginal price of all sorts of things and far too often only deliver value to the investors. This is shortsighted and will ultimately hamper adoption of these technologies and is already damaging our institutions.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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: 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
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.
We've been able to do that since at least 1897. It just wasn't important enough to bother with for a lot of the intervening time. It may still not be, we'll find out by people doing it or not doing it.
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.
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.
Whether you store it or not, getting free energy from the sun for half the year is better than getting no energy from the sun. Every marginal reduction in fossil fuel usage helps.
Scandinavia is actually seeing a pattern where in the summer, there is so much electricity produced that it's approximately free, and in the winters, when solar panels produce nothing, there's not enough to go around so prices are sky high.
It's a very weird situation where it's financially difficult to build new power because you'll be doing it entirely for free half the year, but then you get 4-5 months that are an absolute goldmine.
Which is pretty much the ideal conditions for coal plants, so they make a killing during the winter and then shut off during the summer.
We need something that works throughout the winter so we can finally get rid of the coal plants the whole year!
We do not need more power in the summer though, that's covered by solar already.
Free electricity in summer and high prices in winter is not a bad place to be really — it provides a good incentive to develop long-term storage. Batteries are probably not it. Pumped hydro is good — not in Denmark (too flat), but maybe in nearby Norway. Maybe synthetic fuels could be produced and stored economically?
A mix of renewables definitely seems like the way to go, but I also wonder whether we might start to see some seasonal industry based on power prices - bitcoin mines, or even aluminum smelters, which only run during summertime? Though I suppose less capital-intensive processes would make more sense.
There is lots of talk of green steel in Sweden. The basic concept is to use the cheap energy during summers to produce hydrogen, and then burn that hydrogen to melt iron and make various alloys.
So far a few attempts have been made, lots of investments, but unfortunately it hasn't worked out yet.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
Umm, so we still have to build enough traditional (and, ideally, dispatchable) generation capacity to make sure we can cover our electricity needs during those periods in winter where it's very cloudy and it's not windy?
"Cloudy and still weather has caused Great Britain’s renewable energy output to fall to near zero this week"
"Britain’s wind power output fell to just above zero on Wednesday, which, combined with the cold, dark weather, caused the market price for electricity to climb to almost £250 per megawatt-hour at auction, or almost seven times the average price before the pandemic"
"The sudden drop-off in renewable energy due to dull windless winter weather, known as dunkelflaute in German, has also forced the system operator to pay gas power stations more than £500/MWh to run on Wednesday evening when household demand is expected to reach its peak.
The weather conditions – the third dunkelflaute of the winter so far – left Britain’s electricity grid reliant on gas-fired power stations. They accounted for more than 70% of power generation at points on Wednesday."
In New England it works fine and we project 3 hours of production during the winter months. Not sure what Denmark’s latitude is, but 7 hours of production is not needed.
We have solar in Finland as well, like everyone else. Yes, it's useless in winter. Yes, the expansion has slowed down, because there is no storage and limited export options.
The Nordic power market is a mess, and it's not because solar doesn't work in winter but because the grid needs massive investments on all levels and nobody wants to be left holding the bill for it.
Electrification? Sure, I'll buy an EV when the _local_ grid operator makes sure my lights don't flicker when the neighbor uses an angle grinder. The last update was that they plan to replace the old transformer station from the 60's "when it breaks".
Local generation? Can't get rid of the excess generation if I wanted to.
Is Denmark's power grid expansion still geared at selling Swedish electricity to the Germans?
Sweden? No internal transfer capacity so their consumers have constant high prices while power is exported cheaply.
Indeed, and large parts of the reason has nothing to do with geography. The same applies to Denmark and the rest of the Nordics.
Obviously solar will be decreasingly useful as you get further to the pole, but the Nordics aren't worse off than Alaska or Canada in that regard, and both do solar to some extent AFAIK.
It has lot to do with geographic latitude and weather patterns. The amount of electric output per amount solar installed strongly affects the profitability of solar installation (if you don't count of government subsidies).
And summer isn't when you need the power anyway, so its very inefficient since northern winters has barely any sunlight at all, its close to 0 from solar power then. In warmer countries you want power in the summer for AC during the day, so there it matches usage, but in northern countries solar isn't very useful at all.
> but the Nordics aren't worse off than Alaska or Canada in that regard
Nordics are much further north than Canada, most Canadians live further south than Paris and Paris is a lot further south than even Denmark that is much further south than Finland.
Are you saying it's cloudy for four months straight?
And the panels are still making power during the winter.
A detailed chart would be nice but a good starting point to imagine is 60-70 days that average 50% solar power and the rest of the year is full solar power minus a couple particularly bad days.
Edit: In winter, in denmark, the amount of sunlight you get per square meter of flat ground is absolutely awful. But the amount of sunlight you can catch on a highly tilted solar panel is still pretty good, about half of the average output. So if you space them properly and overbuild based on the average, the 90% number isn't crazy.
> Are you saying it's cloudy for four months straight?
No. But it's cloudy most of the time for four month straight (in average there's only 200 hours of sun between November and February in Copenhagen. Yes, you read it right, that's not even 2 hours per day in average!).
> A detailed chart would be nice but a good starting point to imagine is 60-70 days that average 50% solar power and the rest of the year is full solar power minus a couple particularly bad days
That's an insane assumption! An average of 50% solar power during the day is the higher bound of what you can expect in the middle of the Nevada desert! (Because you know, the sun rises and falls during the day, it's never going to give the full power during daytime). And because there's night half of the time in average, even in Nevada you end up with load factors around 25%! (Go check the figures!)
In winter in Danemark, the situation is obviously far worse! A 2-5% load factor is to be expected depending on the weather. (Just check the live data: we're in April, it's 11am and solar panels are delivering just 10% of their power right now https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/DK-DK1/live/fifteen... )
> the 90% number isn't crazy.
If this number doesn't sounds crazy to you, it's just because you're completely off in terms of orders of magnitude involved. 90% is likely achievable in southern US with great effort, lots of storage for night times and significant over-paneling, but it's pure science fiction in Denmark.
No no no no, that line has nothing to do with load factor. I'm talking about half the kilowatts for the house coming from solar, and half coming from the grid.
> Just check the live data
There's no way those panels are optimally angled and out of shade if they're making that little. Are those panels installed in rows on the ground? Rows that are pretty close to each other? Panels on a roof, the steeper the better, will see a much higher load factor in winter.
I'm other words, a home rooftop install will do much better in winter than a standard commercial install. That's a mixture of chance and optimizing for different things.
A thought experiment: You have one big solar panel mounted very high, with a multi-axis aiming system that points it directly at the sun. Do you think the amount of power you can make is going to be that far off a linear relationship with the number of hours of daylight?
> No no no no, that line has nothing to do with load factor. I'm talking about half the kilowatts for the house coming from solar, and half coming from the grid.
Assuming consumption isn't correlated with sun hours, these are equivalent unless you over-panel. With a load factor of 5%, you need to over-panel 10x to achieve 50% of your energy supply (in fact it's more complex than this and you'll need even more of that but that's an OK simplifying assumption).
> There's no way those panels are optimally angled and out of shade if they're making that little
Those are commercial solar farms, optimally angled under the constraint that the cost must be reasonable.
> A thought experiment: You have one big solar panel mounted very high, with a multi-axis aiming system that points it directly at the sun.
Do you have an idea of how much it would cost?! With Materials + installation + maintenance, such a mechanism would dwarf the price of the panels. There's a reason we don't deploy those at scale in practice …
> Do you think the amount of power you can make is going to be that far off a linear relationship with the number of hours of daylight?
In a country where 80% of the winter is cloudy, it's going to be very far, yes. The 10% power happening right now is because it's cloudy (light clouds, no rain, but still). It peaked at 40% in recent days with proper sun, but it happened only a handful of times in the entire winter.
I don't think so? If your Nevada desert load factor is 25%, then we're talking about it dropping to 12% or something. Unless I'm not understanding the way you're using those numbers.
> unless you over-panel
Some amount of over-paneling would be perfectly fine here. Not 10x, agreed.
> Those are commercial solar farms, optimally angled under the constraint that the cost must be reasonable.
They're optimized mostly for total power output, which affects things. And they don't have a free house to be mounted on.
They're also not trying very hard to avoid shade. The commercial plant has to buy land for every panel, while a house has much more land than panels. That's a massive difference. When the sun is near the horizon, you want your rows of panels to be very far apart or at different heights. Which means:
A commercial solar plant like one pictured in the article will have each panel shade most of the next row's panel when the sun is very low. To stop this effect, you need to put the rows super far apart, or put them at different heights (like on a roof). This means a home install could have 4x as much light hit each panel in the depths of winter.
> Do you have an idea of how much it would cost?!
It's a thought experiment. Don't worry about the cost of tracking. Because it turns out, a 60 degree angle that completely avoids shade is just as good. The key is avoiding shade. Commercial plants do not avoid shade. Rooftop installs do avoid shade (they won't be quite as tilted, but they'll still have a huge advantage). If you have a nice big yard you can also avoid shade.
> The 10% load factor happening right now is because it's cloudy (light clouds, no rain, but still). It peaked at 40% in recent days with proper sun, but it happened only a handful of times in the entire winter.
I think you didn't go through the full implications of this.
It's mid-april. If it's cloudy this far from the depths of winter, that means needing more panels is much more of a year-round thing. Which means a household array needs to be bigger as a baseline. Which means it can tolerate more losses in the winter.
The thing that would make 90% unreasonable is the difference between winter and non-winter power output. If spring and/or fall also require lots of panels, then 90% gets more realistic because expanding the system saves money for more months of the year.
> And they don't have a free house to be mounted on.
Rooftop solar is more expensive than solar farms. There's nothing free in putting a solar panel on a roof. (Which is a pity because it means that if your country doesn't have a desert, the economically optimal way of installing solar panels is deforestation, but that's the world we live in…).
> Because it turns out, a 60 degree angle that completely avoids shade is just as good
Not at all…
The sun isn't just going up and down you know, it also circles from east to West…
> They're also not trying very hard to avoid shade. […] When the sun is near the horizon, you want your rows of panels to be very far apart or at different heights.
> A commercial solar plant like one pictured in the article will have each panel shade most of the next row's panel when the sun is very low.
I'm sorry but this is utter bullshit. The commercial plants do avoid shade as much as possible because shade destroy efficiency (one cell being shaded criples the output of the entire row…).
They don't care about shade when the sun is low because when the sun is low the incidence angle is terrible in the first place. You want your average panel directed south (or north in the southern hemisphere), when the sun is low, it's going to be completely in the East or completely in the West, and you care about the cosine of your incidence angle, which means the output is going to be near zero even without any shade whatsoever.
> It's mid-april. If it's cloudy this far from the depths of winter, that means needing more panels is much more of a year-round thing.
Of course clouds are a year-round thing, what do you think… But sunny days are still much more frequent in summer.
> Which means a household array needs to be bigger as a baseline
Yes, but that's over-paneling…
> The thing that would make 90% unreasonable is the difference between winter and non-winter power output. If spring and/or fall also require lots of panels, then 90% gets more realistic because expanding the system saves money for more months of the year.
Sigh… Over-paneling 10x isn't going to be more worth it just because in spring and winter you need 5x. That's a nonsensical argument…
I'm sorry but you obviously have no idea about any of these things, I can only invite you to document yourself better at this point, because you're just pilling up crazy takes on top of crazy takes here.
> The sun isn't just going up and down you know it also circles from east to West…
Over a narrow range in winter. You get good coverage from pointing very south and avoiding shade.
> I'm sorry but this is utter bullshit. The commercial plants do avoid shade as much as possible because shade destroy efficiency
They do not avoid it "as much as possible". The panels are shading each other in that very photo, and that photo wasn't taken at the crack of dawn.
It's basic trigonometry. Narrow spacing needs the sun to get pretty high before shading stops. A roof install never shades itself. The difference matters.
> They don't care about shade when the sun is low because when the sun is low the incidence angle is terrible in the first place.
Wrong answer. Those panels are plenty tilted for low incidence sunlight. The ones in front will make plenty of power in the winter. But the ones behind them won't.
The limiter is the price of land. If land was free I guarantee they would spread them out more.
And a home install doesn't have this specific issue.
> Yes, but that's over-paneling…
No it's not! If you need it for most of the year it's not "over"!
> Sigh… Over-paneling 10x isn't going to be more worth it just because in spring and winter you need 5x. That's a nonsensical argument…
If you need 5x or more for half the year, you calculated "x" wrong. Your math is what's nonsense here.
> They do not avoid it "as much as possible". The panels are shading each other in that very photo
You haven't linked the photo…
> It's basic trigonometry. Narrow spacing needs the sun to get pretty high before shading stops.
Of course it's “basic trigonometry”… It doesn't matter if the panels are shaded when the incidence angle is high anyway!
> The limiter is the price of land. If land was free I guarantee they would spread them out more.
They wouldn't, they'd just put more panels on a bigger surface. And again, industrial actors are maximizing the economic output they can make. Whatever decision you take at your level, it's going to be more expensive than what they are doing, and more efficient.
> No it's not! If you need it for most of the year it's not "over"
Yes it is… By definition you are over-paneling if your peak production is higher than what you use. This threshold is important because cost calculations only works when you haven't reached that yet!
> If you need 5x or more for half the year, you calculated "x" wrong. Your math is what's nonsense here.
X is the value for which the cost/MWh makes sense. The further you got from there, the bigger fraction of the power is unexploited and the higher the cost per unit of useful electricity rises.
I didn't invent these concepts or these calculations, those are standards when talking about solar.
They don't build them in deserts that far north, do they?
I got this "fixation" by doing the math to figure out why panels do so badly when there's still seven and a half hours of daylight.
The insolation per square meter of ground is very low when the sun is near the horizon. But the insolation of a flat surface at 60 degrees of tilt is still pretty good. If you avoid shade.
Please tell me you have no disagreements with that. It's basic math.
So as you said with basic panels "one cell being shaded criples the output of the entire row". Normal commercial installs don't try to capture the morning sun. But in the middle of winter in Denmark the "morning" sun is basically all you have access to.
You said "They don't care about shade when the sun is low because when the sun is low the incidence angle is terrible in the first place."
If you tilt really far and avoid shade, you counteract the bad incidence angle. A single square meter of panel can absorb the light that would have hit 6 square meters of ground.
> They don't build them in deserts that far north, do they?
I'm not aware of any desert in Denmark…
But you say the design is driven by lack of space, then why do they use the same design in deserts?! That's my question. Denmark doesn't have much free space, but Sweden do, land is cheap in many places there, yet the Swede don't design their plant differently.
> Normal commercial installs don't try to capture the morning sun. But in the middle of winter in Denmark the "morning" sun is basically all you have access to.
And yet you insist commercial plants don't do that? Why? Are they stupid?
> If you tilt really far and avoid shade, you counteract the bad incidence angle.
Only the vertical angle, not the horizontal one… And again it makes no sense to optimize for winter morning sun when there's only 2 hours of sunlight per day in average during winter…
You could set up a football field of our perfectly optimized morning sun solar panels, plus the same for evening sun, and you'd still have failed to power a house for the full month between January and February where the sun often don't show up once, and in that time span you've already exceeded the 10% non-solar budget in that mental exercise…
Right! A lack of places with such super free land that also have horrible sun angles.
> But you say the design is driven by lack of space, then why do they use the same design in deserts?!
The desert builds don't have to deal with the same horrible sun angles.
But whatever, I might be wrong on what they would do with free land. That was a guess, I admit it. That guess was to illustrate my point about angles. It's not a critical part of my argument.
It's a fact that solar panels on a roof avoid the shading problem, while a normal commercial layout does not. Pure mathematics.
> Only the vertical angle, not the horizontal one…
The horizontal angle doesn't change very much. If you point flat 50-60 degrees south (the year-round optimal angle for Denmark) you will get a significant amount of sun no matter the season if you avoid shade. Winter sun is less than average but it's close to 50%, not 5%.
> And again it makes no sense to optimize for winter morning sun when there's only 2 hours of sunlight per day in average during winter…
That's so close to understanding my argument!
Commercial plants don't bother. They're not optimal for winter. But if you build on a slanted roof you get that optimization for free. So a home install actually becomes better than a commercial install for this specific use case.
But it's not 2 hours of significant light, it's more than that. Clouds don't make the sun useless.
Yes the range reduces in winter especially when you go north, but you still get at least 45° of incidence angle in the best case scenario.
> Winter sun is less than average but it's close to 50%, not 5%.
How can it be 50% when the sun is beyond the horizon for 17 hours straight?! For some reason you obsess with shade, but disregard the most important one: the one caused by earth moving in front of the sun (also called “night”)…
> That's so close to understanding my argument!
> Commercial plants don't bother. They're not optimal for winter
I see what you mean, but plants optimize for electricity value, not rough output, and electricity is more expensive in winter, if they could get good yields at that period, they would actually make more money than the one they get by selling excess electricity in summer…
> But it's not 2 hours of significant light, it's more than that. Clouds don't make the sun useless.
For regular solar panels, they pretty much do, especially in the north (because the cloud layer is effectively much thicker due to the high sunlight incidence angle). Amorphous panels have better performance in these scenarios but it's still far from good, especially if you tilt them heavily to face the sun as these panels need to be facing the sky to get as much diffuse daylight as possible.
As a result, the sunny hours, even though rare, are going to dwarf the others in electricity production, even if there's few of them.
But if you believe you can sustain 90% of your electricity consumption from solar in Denmark, go ahead, I'm not going to convince you otherwise and I'll have no guilt if you lose your shirt in the process.
> How can it be 50% when the sun is beyond the horizon for 17 hours straight?!
50% of the average. The average being a day with something like 12 hours of sunlight. Sorry to be unclear.
> I see what you mean, but plants optimize for electricity value, not rough output, and electricity is more expensive in winter, if they could get good yields at that period, they would actually make more money than the one they get by selling excess electricity in summer…
One important factor is that they're not optimizing for power per panel. Panels are pretty cheap, and filling the land with panels makes sense as an overall decision.
Let me reframe things. For a commercial plant it's not that they could get significantly more power in deep winter, it's that they could get the same power with 20% as many panels. But spreading panels out that far would be worse the rest of the year.
Many home installs can get that "spreading" for free.
So to redo my claim from earlier, if there was a magic button to put 50 feet between each row of panels with no downside, I strongly bet commercial installs would pay to press it. And it should take the winter output up from "useless" to "bad".
It's possible I'm still severely underestimating the clouds. But when there is light, there's this interesting advantage small/widely-spaced installs get in winter. Or rather, they have a much smaller disadvantage.
Anything that doesn’t break even suffers from its own success.
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).
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.
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.
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.
from the article which uses intentionally deceptive photography angles to paint a very different picture, yes
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.
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.
> But they did get a big warning shot in 1989 and 2011, and ignored those lessons for cost reasons.
Cost is always a valid reason!
> A couple hundred people died.
Looks like about a thousand people in the US die of hypothermia every year, on average. So this happens frequently in states that aren't in its own interconnection, too.
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.
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.
It’s basically like walking through a industrial estate, just with more grass in between. Really very bleak.
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.
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...
I seem to have come across as a nimby in my comment…
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.
It still doesn’t mean they aren’t bleak to look at.
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.
Personally I’d rather have the latter - sparse but huge industrial objects - than the widespread low level monotony of a solar farm.
TIL shadows from trees only project down directly under the tree and never project away from the tree itself. My entire life experience has been rendered useless.
Ultimately, everything we build we build for ourselves, and people will generally prefer something that's nice to look at, if slightly inefficient, over the thing that's optimal at the cost of every other parameter.
It's obvious from the scale of it that the fact of how shadows move over the course of a day isn't going to make much difference, even if they go much above the height of the panels, which they don't need to in order to hide them from people at ground level.
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.
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.
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.
They still do rooftop solar like I say, it is just at a scale that seems to only pay for the lights in the building and not generate surplus. So a guy still has to be up there no matter what every now and then even right now.
Desert ecologies are often boosted by solar (turns out animals spend lots of time in the shade so they aren’t roasted, and solar panels are shade). Industrial areas, at least where I live, tend to be pretty dynamic with respect to structures, I guess you could do it, but you would have to redo it a lot.
Manatees like when you leave a freshwater hose leaking into the saltwater. Ecologist tell you it is bad though because the animal develops a dependency towards human intervention that might not be a long term phenomenon.
Where I live the industrial areas are pretty much two elevations across the entire lot. You get the warehouse where it is a massive building with a flat roof of a single height. And you get where the trucks pull in and back into the warehouse, also a bunch of flat cement with fixed height requirements one could trivially deck with solar.
And when I looked at industrial areas in denmark, or at least in the vicinity of copenhagen, I saw pretty much exclusively that outside actual oil refineries. Just a ton of warehouses, flat roofs, truck yards. Again already with some solar, just only implemented to the extent to supplement a buildings utility bills, using only a small fraction of that massive flat roof, not to produce an excess of energy. I dare say most industrial property the world over looks more or less like that: rectangular building, flat roof, truck yard.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> large majority of the scientific community is treating it and calling it an existential threat
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.
Yes. Extinctions are horrible, but they aren’t an existential threat to us. Climate change simply isn’t an existential threat. That doesn’t mean it isn’t urgent. Like, the Bronze Age collapse and black plague and WWII weren’t existential, doesn’t mean they’re fine. But raising the stakes beyond what the science says like this undermines the credibility of the real warnings.
I think it's really naïve to realize that climate change is an existential threat to many species, but not connect that we are part of the ecosystem which is being put in danger. You are experiencing survivorship bias.
Even if we don't go extinct. It's still an existential threat to our way of life. Which is also a totally valid interpretation of the phrase.
Ex ante survivorship is literally the delineation between existential and not.
> Even if we don't go extinct. It's still an existential threat to our way of life
You see why this comes across as bullshit, though. It’s needlessly redefining a word to seem more punchy. We have plenty of perils we massively mobilize against without imagining they’ll exterminate the human species.
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.
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.
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
Yes, but that temperature isn't going to be reached by fossil fuels.*
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.
* 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.
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).
> There is clearly a temperature at which this planet will not support human life, and we could definitely get the planet to that temperature
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.
You literally said “the existential threat happens in 100 years.”
And to your questions, we don’t know. I’d love to see the data. I’m still sceptical we hit “existential” levels for human survival. That wouldn’t even happen if we went back to dinosaur levels of CO2.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
not buying that this isn't anti renewable propaganda for the US
the images in the article looks bad
until you take a short look at satellite images and realize:
- it's not the norm but the exception
- the photos are made to make it look maximally bad in a deceptive/manipulative way,
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.
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.
It's similar to the telephoto shots of wind farms taken from far away that make them seem really close together.
_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
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.s I am pro renewable and pro-solar/wind/nuclear just to clarify that this is nothing about my personal beliefs.
I'm aware of this policy. I cannot re-find the source, but there was an investigative piece somewhere that found they continued to take money from fossil-fuel aligned companies. I cannot find it after trying to look again admittably, though I am unsure if it because of my poor memory and that it didn't exist in the first place or because search engines are poor at this sort of thing. They do however continue to take ads from very high carbon industries like airlines and the such however.
They largely share my views, I am not suspicious because they don't align with my views, I am suspicious of all profit-motivated companies equally.
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.
Zoom out a bit though, and you quickly realise it's not the norm. There is vastly more farm land throughout the country and Hjolderup is the exception, not the rule.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
going as far as North Africa is a bit too far to be convenient for power transport
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.
Does it still work out if you take into account the insurance premiums for a cargo ship stacked with batteries? Can't imagine the fire hazard is pretty.
Oh, there's precedent for shuttling freighter size metal fire hazards intercontinentally to top up charge, is there?
How does that work out in cost per kWh? Profitable operation anywhere close?
Crisis relief (as suggested by jmward01 here) may be another matter, but setting up the ability to do this on scale, and maintaining it, can't be anything like easy economically.
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.
We will probably be using that in aviation for a long, long time. Turbines are pretty efficient and jet fuel has a remarkably high energy density for something that does not easily explode.
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.
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
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.
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
- that village is the exception, not the norm at all
- 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 ....
- 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.
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.
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.
(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. )
Denmark has undergone the same sort of right wing populism that has gone through most of the west. Including rhetorical tricks like this.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
> You're naive if you think your storage solution can handle the massive reserves required
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.
This thread was about Denmark, but obviously the solution will be different everywhere. Some places have suitable geography, others have more sun and milder winters where overbuild+batteries are easier, some have existing Nuclear that can be kept running affordably, maybe you even have politically stable neighbors where a HVDC grid can smooth out differences in weather, there are no generic answers.
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.
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.
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.
I can't comprehend why someone would think that this was a good way of rolling out solar.
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.
Luckily I think we are slowly moving in that direction due to all the resistance.
*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?
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.
They're not talking about a home owner's solar panels here, but giant solar farms surrounding them.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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':
https://www.google.com/maps/@51.1658488,12.4325343,5059m/dat...
https://www.google.com/maps/@52.8290328,13.6890243,2783m/dat...
https://www.google.com/maps/@51.3296415,12.6590003,1983m/dat...
https://www.google.com/maps/@52.633346,13.7674599,1989m/data...
https://www.google.com/maps/@53.9209948,13.2235344,3356m/dat...
https://www.google.com/maps/@51.5524298,13.9695021,4648m/dat...
https://www.google.com/maps/@52.612948,14.2381122,2691m/data...
I'm betting the effect is a rounding error compared to road salt build up.
Not everywhere uses salt, lots of grit used around here.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So it would be kind of fair to at least start accepting some externalities - like energy - to be actually part of your living reality.
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.
1-2 days per year the whole town has a smell of manure.
That's is an externality we accepted when we moved here, so we do not complain that the fields need to produce food.
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.
As I said below:
Cozy small time agriculture in the west is a small part of your general food supply. The rest is in places you do not want to live and is called monoculture. A huge part of your food supply is not produced "in the countryside" in either Denmark or most of the West.
It all starts with oil and energy. Nothing else matters as much. So getting off oil and producing energy in other ways is at the forefront of our struggle as a species and if you deny this progress because it hinders the view from your detached house porch I get the impression you have not really realized the situation we are in.
I totally agree, except for the last part where you attack a straw man.
I'm not talking about the view from my front porch, I'm talking about solar panels in nearly every direction, like a sort of barrier, choking the town.
As mentioned we do have solar panels in some directions, we just don't want them everywhere.
Also there's no dichotomy here, it's not a choice between choking small towns and saving the planet vs. the opposite.
I'm arguing that we should first and foremost place solar panels where people already do not want to live for various reasons. The incentives we've created so far have not been good at that.
Update: I realise that I misread the first part of your comment. The agriculture that the panels are replacing is probably what you would call monoculture. It would however seem that the monoculture you picture looks very different from what we have in Denmark. If you think about endless "field deserts" that's not what it is. That is also why people like to live here.
> it's all getting brought to you by fossil fuels and plastics.
Which come from where? Last I checked there weren't many pump jacks in Copenhagen.
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.
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.
Cozy small time agriculture in the west is a small part of your general food supply. The rest is in places you do not want to live and is called monoculture.
All "raw materials" you mentioned are not produced "in the countryside" in either Denmark or most of the West.
It all starts with oil and energy. Nothing else matters as much. So getting off oil and producing energy in other ways is at the forefront of our struggle as a species and if you deny this progress because it hinders the view from your detached house porch I get the impression you have not really realized the situation we are in.
I was speaking globally, it's not like Denmark is producing tons of crops. I agree small time boutique agriculture and a lot of the regulatory policy (i.e. crapping on any sort of value producing industrial activity while exempting other things of which farming is one) that enables it is a short sighted scourge that stunts economic development, a sort of "the island tourism economy" we have at home if you will.
That said, I'm happy to watch the people who want to peddle that garbage fling poo at the people who want to peddle bigco solar/wind farm projects because they're bad too. Most of them are miracles of financial/regulatory engineering that only really move panels and electrons around as a pretext for the former and the end result is they drive up the marginal price of all sorts of things and far too often only deliver value to the investors. This is shortsighted and will ultimately hamper adoption of these technologies and is already damaging our institutions.
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.
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.
https://ens.dk/en/energy-sources/promoting-solar-energy
https://web.archive.org/web/20200806023128/https://www.pv-te...
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).
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/w/d...
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.
https://www.iea.org/reports/solar-pv-global-supply-chains/ex...
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.
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.
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
I like make the point that solar farms produce 30-100 times more energy per acre than farming plants.
Lot of 'nature' is actually land that has been or being completely trashed via agriculture. But it's so normalized people don't get that.
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.
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.
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: 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
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.
It would make even more sense if we can synthesize fuels
We've been able to do that since at least 1897. It just wasn't important enough to bother with for a lot of the intervening time. It may still not be, we'll find out by people doing it or not doing it.
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.
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.
Whether you store it or not, getting free energy from the sun for half the year is better than getting no energy from the sun. Every marginal reduction in fossil fuel usage helps.
Scandinavia is actually seeing a pattern where in the summer, there is so much electricity produced that it's approximately free, and in the winters, when solar panels produce nothing, there's not enough to go around so prices are sky high.
It's a very weird situation where it's financially difficult to build new power because you'll be doing it entirely for free half the year, but then you get 4-5 months that are an absolute goldmine.
Which is pretty much the ideal conditions for coal plants, so they make a killing during the winter and then shut off during the summer.
We need something that works throughout the winter so we can finally get rid of the coal plants the whole year!
We do not need more power in the summer though, that's covered by solar already.
Denmark is very well suited for wind power.
Free electricity in summer and high prices in winter is not a bad place to be really — it provides a good incentive to develop long-term storage. Batteries are probably not it. Pumped hydro is good — not in Denmark (too flat), but maybe in nearby Norway. Maybe synthetic fuels could be produced and stored economically?
A mix of renewables definitely seems like the way to go, but I also wonder whether we might start to see some seasonal industry based on power prices - bitcoin mines, or even aluminum smelters, which only run during summertime? Though I suppose less capital-intensive processes would make more sense.
There is lots of talk of green steel in Sweden. The basic concept is to use the cheap energy during summers to produce hydrogen, and then burn that hydrogen to melt iron and make various alloys.
So far a few attempts have been made, lots of investments, but unfortunately it hasn't worked out yet.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_Stream
The Gulf Stream has more energy than all the world’s rivers combined.
https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/power-and-energy/oce...
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.
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.
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".
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.
> that thing has 90% of his electricity usage
How is that supposed to work with cloudy days with barely 7 hours of daylight in winter?
Solar has always been a part of a wholistic strategy. We’ve known this ever since the sun went down at night and we had to compensate for it.
True, but then why claim unrealistic figures like op and their "90% of his electricity usage"…
> strategy
Umm, so we still have to build enough traditional (and, ideally, dispatchable) generation capacity to make sure we can cover our electricity needs during those periods in winter where it's very cloudy and it's not windy?
eg Jan 2025
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2025/jan/22/weather-bomb-e...
"Cloudy and still weather has caused Great Britain’s renewable energy output to fall to near zero this week"
"Britain’s wind power output fell to just above zero on Wednesday, which, combined with the cold, dark weather, caused the market price for electricity to climb to almost £250 per megawatt-hour at auction, or almost seven times the average price before the pandemic"
"The sudden drop-off in renewable energy due to dull windless winter weather, known as dunkelflaute in German, has also forced the system operator to pay gas power stations more than £500/MWh to run on Wednesday evening when household demand is expected to reach its peak.
The weather conditions – the third dunkelflaute of the winter so far – left Britain’s electricity grid reliant on gas-fired power stations. They accounted for more than 70% of power generation at points on Wednesday."
In New England it works fine and we project 3 hours of production during the winter months. Not sure what Denmark’s latitude is, but 7 hours of production is not needed.
New England is Spain in terms of latitude.
Americans tend to forget how far north Europe is compared to the US.
We have solar in Finland as well, like everyone else. Yes, it's useless in winter. Yes, the expansion has slowed down, because there is no storage and limited export options.
The Nordic power market is a mess, and it's not because solar doesn't work in winter but because the grid needs massive investments on all levels and nobody wants to be left holding the bill for it.
Electrification? Sure, I'll buy an EV when the _local_ grid operator makes sure my lights don't flicker when the neighbor uses an angle grinder. The last update was that they plan to replace the old transformer station from the 60's "when it breaks".
Local generation? Can't get rid of the excess generation if I wanted to.
Is Denmark's power grid expansion still geared at selling Swedish electricity to the Germans?
Sweden? No internal transfer capacity so their consumers have constant high prices while power is exported cheaply.
Norway? Geo-blocked by Sweden.
Solar power in Finland is really not important.
Data from 2025.
Nuclear 32 TWh, Wind 22 TWh, Hydro 12 TWh, Solar 1 TWh.
https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/finland
Indeed, and large parts of the reason has nothing to do with geography. The same applies to Denmark and the rest of the Nordics.
Obviously solar will be decreasingly useful as you get further to the pole, but the Nordics aren't worse off than Alaska or Canada in that regard, and both do solar to some extent AFAIK.
It has lot to do with geographic latitude and weather patterns. The amount of electric output per amount solar installed strongly affects the profitability of solar installation (if you don't count of government subsidies).
You get the following output on average each year
Denmark 1000 kWh/kWp
South Germany 1200 kWh/kWp
South Spain 1700 kWh/kWp
Egypt up to 2000 kWh/kWp
And summer isn't when you need the power anyway, so its very inefficient since northern winters has barely any sunlight at all, its close to 0 from solar power then. In warmer countries you want power in the summer for AC during the day, so there it matches usage, but in northern countries solar isn't very useful at all.
> but the Nordics aren't worse off than Alaska or Canada in that regard
Nordics are much further north than Canada, most Canadians live further south than Paris and Paris is a lot further south than even Denmark that is much further south than Finland.
Great Britain, even more North, has viable solar on its Southern edge.
As a complementary source of energy, yes, especially in summer (because the flip side of being north is that your summer days last longer).
But in winter, you'll have something like 2-5% load factor on your solar panels…
Those days add to the 10%. Is that not obvious?
How do you only consume 10% of your total consumption in 1/3 of the years? Mining bitcoin in summer yo drive total consumption up?
Are you saying it's cloudy for four months straight?
And the panels are still making power during the winter.
A detailed chart would be nice but a good starting point to imagine is 60-70 days that average 50% solar power and the rest of the year is full solar power minus a couple particularly bad days.
Edit: In winter, in denmark, the amount of sunlight you get per square meter of flat ground is absolutely awful. But the amount of sunlight you can catch on a highly tilted solar panel is still pretty good, about half of the average output. So if you space them properly and overbuild based on the average, the 90% number isn't crazy.
> Are you saying it's cloudy for four months straight?
No. But it's cloudy most of the time for four month straight (in average there's only 200 hours of sun between November and February in Copenhagen. Yes, you read it right, that's not even 2 hours per day in average!).
> A detailed chart would be nice but a good starting point to imagine is 60-70 days that average 50% solar power and the rest of the year is full solar power minus a couple particularly bad days
That's an insane assumption! An average of 50% solar power during the day is the higher bound of what you can expect in the middle of the Nevada desert! (Because you know, the sun rises and falls during the day, it's never going to give the full power during daytime). And because there's night half of the time in average, even in Nevada you end up with load factors around 25%! (Go check the figures!)
In winter in Danemark, the situation is obviously far worse! A 2-5% load factor is to be expected depending on the weather. (Just check the live data: we're in April, it's 11am and solar panels are delivering just 10% of their power right now https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/DK-DK1/live/fifteen... )
> the 90% number isn't crazy.
If this number doesn't sounds crazy to you, it's just because you're completely off in terms of orders of magnitude involved. 90% is likely achievable in southern US with great effort, lots of storage for night times and significant over-paneling, but it's pure science fiction in Denmark.
> That's an insane assumption! [...] load factor
No no no no, that line has nothing to do with load factor. I'm talking about half the kilowatts for the house coming from solar, and half coming from the grid.
> Just check the live data
There's no way those panels are optimally angled and out of shade if they're making that little. Are those panels installed in rows on the ground? Rows that are pretty close to each other? Panels on a roof, the steeper the better, will see a much higher load factor in winter.
I'm other words, a home rooftop install will do much better in winter than a standard commercial install. That's a mixture of chance and optimizing for different things.
A thought experiment: You have one big solar panel mounted very high, with a multi-axis aiming system that points it directly at the sun. Do you think the amount of power you can make is going to be that far off a linear relationship with the number of hours of daylight?
> No no no no, that line has nothing to do with load factor. I'm talking about half the kilowatts for the house coming from solar, and half coming from the grid.
Assuming consumption isn't correlated with sun hours, these are equivalent unless you over-panel. With a load factor of 5%, you need to over-panel 10x to achieve 50% of your energy supply (in fact it's more complex than this and you'll need even more of that but that's an OK simplifying assumption).
> There's no way those panels are optimally angled and out of shade if they're making that little
Those are commercial solar farms, optimally angled under the constraint that the cost must be reasonable.
> A thought experiment: You have one big solar panel mounted very high, with a multi-axis aiming system that points it directly at the sun.
Do you have an idea of how much it would cost?! With Materials + installation + maintenance, such a mechanism would dwarf the price of the panels. There's a reason we don't deploy those at scale in practice …
> Do you think the amount of power you can make is going to be that far off a linear relationship with the number of hours of daylight?
In a country where 80% of the winter is cloudy, it's going to be very far, yes. The 10% power happening right now is because it's cloudy (light clouds, no rain, but still). It peaked at 40% in recent days with proper sun, but it happened only a handful of times in the entire winter.
> These are equivalent unless you over-panel.
I don't think so? If your Nevada desert load factor is 25%, then we're talking about it dropping to 12% or something. Unless I'm not understanding the way you're using those numbers.
> unless you over-panel
Some amount of over-paneling would be perfectly fine here. Not 10x, agreed.
> Those are commercial solar farms, optimally angled under the constraint that the cost must be reasonable.
They're optimized mostly for total power output, which affects things. And they don't have a free house to be mounted on.
They're also not trying very hard to avoid shade. The commercial plant has to buy land for every panel, while a house has much more land than panels. That's a massive difference. When the sun is near the horizon, you want your rows of panels to be very far apart or at different heights. Which means:
A commercial solar plant like one pictured in the article will have each panel shade most of the next row's panel when the sun is very low. To stop this effect, you need to put the rows super far apart, or put them at different heights (like on a roof). This means a home install could have 4x as much light hit each panel in the depths of winter.
> Do you have an idea of how much it would cost?!
It's a thought experiment. Don't worry about the cost of tracking. Because it turns out, a 60 degree angle that completely avoids shade is just as good. The key is avoiding shade. Commercial plants do not avoid shade. Rooftop installs do avoid shade (they won't be quite as tilted, but they'll still have a huge advantage). If you have a nice big yard you can also avoid shade.
> The 10% load factor happening right now is because it's cloudy (light clouds, no rain, but still). It peaked at 40% in recent days with proper sun, but it happened only a handful of times in the entire winter.
I think you didn't go through the full implications of this.
It's mid-april. If it's cloudy this far from the depths of winter, that means needing more panels is much more of a year-round thing. Which means a household array needs to be bigger as a baseline. Which means it can tolerate more losses in the winter.
The thing that would make 90% unreasonable is the difference between winter and non-winter power output. If spring and/or fall also require lots of panels, then 90% gets more realistic because expanding the system saves money for more months of the year.
> And they don't have a free house to be mounted on.
Rooftop solar is more expensive than solar farms. There's nothing free in putting a solar panel on a roof. (Which is a pity because it means that if your country doesn't have a desert, the economically optimal way of installing solar panels is deforestation, but that's the world we live in…).
> Because it turns out, a 60 degree angle that completely avoids shade is just as good
Not at all…
The sun isn't just going up and down you know, it also circles from east to West…
> They're also not trying very hard to avoid shade. […] When the sun is near the horizon, you want your rows of panels to be very far apart or at different heights.
> A commercial solar plant like one pictured in the article will have each panel shade most of the next row's panel when the sun is very low.
I'm sorry but this is utter bullshit. The commercial plants do avoid shade as much as possible because shade destroy efficiency (one cell being shaded criples the output of the entire row…).
They don't care about shade when the sun is low because when the sun is low the incidence angle is terrible in the first place. You want your average panel directed south (or north in the southern hemisphere), when the sun is low, it's going to be completely in the East or completely in the West, and you care about the cosine of your incidence angle, which means the output is going to be near zero even without any shade whatsoever.
> It's mid-april. If it's cloudy this far from the depths of winter, that means needing more panels is much more of a year-round thing.
Of course clouds are a year-round thing, what do you think… But sunny days are still much more frequent in summer.
> Which means a household array needs to be bigger as a baseline
Yes, but that's over-paneling…
> The thing that would make 90% unreasonable is the difference between winter and non-winter power output. If spring and/or fall also require lots of panels, then 90% gets more realistic because expanding the system saves money for more months of the year.
Sigh… Over-paneling 10x isn't going to be more worth it just because in spring and winter you need 5x. That's a nonsensical argument…
I'm sorry but you obviously have no idea about any of these things, I can only invite you to document yourself better at this point, because you're just pilling up crazy takes on top of crazy takes here.
> Not at all…
> The sun isn't just going up and down you know it also circles from east to West…
Over a narrow range in winter. You get good coverage from pointing very south and avoiding shade.
> I'm sorry but this is utter bullshit. The commercial plants do avoid shade as much as possible because shade destroy efficiency
They do not avoid it "as much as possible". The panels are shading each other in that very photo, and that photo wasn't taken at the crack of dawn.
It's basic trigonometry. Narrow spacing needs the sun to get pretty high before shading stops. A roof install never shades itself. The difference matters.
> They don't care about shade when the sun is low because when the sun is low the incidence angle is terrible in the first place.
Wrong answer. Those panels are plenty tilted for low incidence sunlight. The ones in front will make plenty of power in the winter. But the ones behind them won't.
The limiter is the price of land. If land was free I guarantee they would spread them out more.
And a home install doesn't have this specific issue.
> Yes, but that's over-paneling…
No it's not! If you need it for most of the year it's not "over"!
> Sigh… Over-paneling 10x isn't going to be more worth it just because in spring and winter you need 5x. That's a nonsensical argument…
If you need 5x or more for half the year, you calculated "x" wrong. Your math is what's nonsense here.
> They do not avoid it "as much as possible". The panels are shading each other in that very photo
You haven't linked the photo…
> It's basic trigonometry. Narrow spacing needs the sun to get pretty high before shading stops.
Of course it's “basic trigonometry”… It doesn't matter if the panels are shaded when the incidence angle is high anyway!
> The limiter is the price of land. If land was free I guarantee they would spread them out more.
They wouldn't, they'd just put more panels on a bigger surface. And again, industrial actors are maximizing the economic output they can make. Whatever decision you take at your level, it's going to be more expensive than what they are doing, and more efficient.
> No it's not! If you need it for most of the year it's not "over"
Yes it is… By definition you are over-paneling if your peak production is higher than what you use. This threshold is important because cost calculations only works when you haven't reached that yet!
> If you need 5x or more for half the year, you calculated "x" wrong. Your math is what's nonsense here.
X is the value for which the cost/MWh makes sense. The further you got from there, the bigger fraction of the power is unexploited and the higher the cost per unit of useful electricity rises.
I didn't invent these concepts or these calculations, those are standards when talking about solar.
> You haven't linked the photo…
The one at the top of the article.
> They wouldn't, they'd just put more panels on a bigger surface.
Given a specific budget they can only buy so many panels. Free land would change the tradeoffs.
> And again, industrial actors are maximizing the economic output they can make.
Based on current costs. Change the costs and the methods change too.
> Whatever decision you take at your level, it's going to be more expensive than what they are doing, and more efficient.
No. I already have the land and the house. That means most efficient for me is different.
I don't want to waste any more of our time arguing about how to define X so I'll skip the rest.
This makes no sense: solar plants in the deserts have the same shape yet even though the land is pretty much worseless.
Where did you get your morning shade fixation from?
They don't build them in deserts that far north, do they?
I got this "fixation" by doing the math to figure out why panels do so badly when there's still seven and a half hours of daylight.
The insolation per square meter of ground is very low when the sun is near the horizon. But the insolation of a flat surface at 60 degrees of tilt is still pretty good. If you avoid shade.
Please tell me you have no disagreements with that. It's basic math.
So as you said with basic panels "one cell being shaded criples the output of the entire row". Normal commercial installs don't try to capture the morning sun. But in the middle of winter in Denmark the "morning" sun is basically all you have access to.
You said "They don't care about shade when the sun is low because when the sun is low the incidence angle is terrible in the first place."
If you tilt really far and avoid shade, you counteract the bad incidence angle. A single square meter of panel can absorb the light that would have hit 6 square meters of ground.
> They don't build them in deserts that far north, do they?
I'm not aware of any desert in Denmark…
But you say the design is driven by lack of space, then why do they use the same design in deserts?! That's my question. Denmark doesn't have much free space, but Sweden do, land is cheap in many places there, yet the Swede don't design their plant differently.
> Normal commercial installs don't try to capture the morning sun. But in the middle of winter in Denmark the "morning" sun is basically all you have access to.
And yet you insist commercial plants don't do that? Why? Are they stupid?
> If you tilt really far and avoid shade, you counteract the bad incidence angle.
Only the vertical angle, not the horizontal one… And again it makes no sense to optimize for winter morning sun when there's only 2 hours of sunlight per day in average during winter…
You could set up a football field of our perfectly optimized morning sun solar panels, plus the same for evening sun, and you'd still have failed to power a house for the full month between January and February where the sun often don't show up once, and in that time span you've already exceeded the 10% non-solar budget in that mental exercise…
> I'm not aware of any desert in Denmark…
Right! A lack of places with such super free land that also have horrible sun angles.
> But you say the design is driven by lack of space, then why do they use the same design in deserts?!
The desert builds don't have to deal with the same horrible sun angles.
But whatever, I might be wrong on what they would do with free land. That was a guess, I admit it. That guess was to illustrate my point about angles. It's not a critical part of my argument.
It's a fact that solar panels on a roof avoid the shading problem, while a normal commercial layout does not. Pure mathematics.
> Only the vertical angle, not the horizontal one…
The horizontal angle doesn't change very much. If you point flat 50-60 degrees south (the year-round optimal angle for Denmark) you will get a significant amount of sun no matter the season if you avoid shade. Winter sun is less than average but it's close to 50%, not 5%.
> And again it makes no sense to optimize for winter morning sun when there's only 2 hours of sunlight per day in average during winter…
That's so close to understanding my argument!
Commercial plants don't bother. They're not optimal for winter. But if you build on a slanted roof you get that optimization for free. So a home install actually becomes better than a commercial install for this specific use case.
But it's not 2 hours of significant light, it's more than that. Clouds don't make the sun useless.
> where the sun often don't show up once
Nah.
> The horizontal angle doesn't change very much
Yes the range reduces in winter especially when you go north, but you still get at least 45° of incidence angle in the best case scenario.
> Winter sun is less than average but it's close to 50%, not 5%.
How can it be 50% when the sun is beyond the horizon for 17 hours straight?! For some reason you obsess with shade, but disregard the most important one: the one caused by earth moving in front of the sun (also called “night”)…
> That's so close to understanding my argument!
> Commercial plants don't bother. They're not optimal for winter
I see what you mean, but plants optimize for electricity value, not rough output, and electricity is more expensive in winter, if they could get good yields at that period, they would actually make more money than the one they get by selling excess electricity in summer…
> But it's not 2 hours of significant light, it's more than that. Clouds don't make the sun useless.
For regular solar panels, they pretty much do, especially in the north (because the cloud layer is effectively much thicker due to the high sunlight incidence angle). Amorphous panels have better performance in these scenarios but it's still far from good, especially if you tilt them heavily to face the sun as these panels need to be facing the sky to get as much diffuse daylight as possible.
As a result, the sunny hours, even though rare, are going to dwarf the others in electricity production, even if there's few of them.
But if you believe you can sustain 90% of your electricity consumption from solar in Denmark, go ahead, I'm not going to convince you otherwise and I'll have no guilt if you lose your shirt in the process.
> How can it be 50% when the sun is beyond the horizon for 17 hours straight?!
50% of the average. The average being a day with something like 12 hours of sunlight. Sorry to be unclear.
> I see what you mean, but plants optimize for electricity value, not rough output, and electricity is more expensive in winter, if they could get good yields at that period, they would actually make more money than the one they get by selling excess electricity in summer…
One important factor is that they're not optimizing for power per panel. Panels are pretty cheap, and filling the land with panels makes sense as an overall decision.
Let me reframe things. For a commercial plant it's not that they could get significantly more power in deep winter, it's that they could get the same power with 20% as many panels. But spreading panels out that far would be worse the rest of the year.
Many home installs can get that "spreading" for free.
So to redo my claim from earlier, if there was a magic button to put 50 feet between each row of panels with no downside, I strongly bet commercial installs would pay to press it. And it should take the winter output up from "useless" to "bad".
It's possible I'm still severely underestimating the clouds. But when there is light, there's this interesting advantage small/widely-spaced installs get in winter. Or rather, they have a much smaller disadvantage.
I don't understand why energy production must be profitable.
Anything that doesn’t break even suffers from its own success.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
The dirty secret is of course that the Danish power grid would be totally unusable without the base power provided from Sweden and Norway.
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.
No it wasn’t. That has come later.
Is that really a "dirty secret"?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_Europe_Synchronous... exists for good reason.
The power grids of US states are similarly linked. Very dirty.
Except for Texas, which decided as a state that avoiding federal regulation was worth people dying every winter from power outages.
I'm not a fan of Texan electrical isolationism, but "people dying every winter from power outages" is stretching it a bit...
Every winter is a stretch, yes.
But they did get a big warning shot in 1989 and 2011, and ignored those lessons for cost reasons. A couple hundred people died.
> But they did get a big warning shot in 1989 and 2011, and ignored those lessons for cost reasons.
Cost is always a valid reason!
> A couple hundred people died.
Looks like about a thousand people in the US die of hypothermia every year, on average. So this happens frequently in states that aren't in its own interconnection, too.
> Looks like about a thousand people in the US die of hypothermia every year, on average.
In their powerless homes?
I don't doubt people get lost in the woods. But that's not some systemic failure.
Which actually works out to rather more than one person per winter, when averaged out.
Like all the Canadians who die every winter in the Halifax explosion of 1917.
Ya, it was just one winter where people actually died, it was recent though.
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.
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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.
It’s basically like walking through a industrial estate, just with more grass in between. Really very bleak.
Give me an onshore wind farm over this.
Are you sure 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.
See the adjacent link I posted about projected land use.
Green grass is still good to look at.
There is grass. Grass is allowed to grow around the panels. It’s great for biodiversity.
I can no longer edit my comment to add this, but this article really hammers the point home.
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.
The infographic showing land use on that page is eye-opening. Considering that the UK would naturally be covered in rainforest and not fields.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/qa-what-englands-new-land-use-fr...
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…
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.
It still doesn’t mean they aren’t bleak to look at.
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.
Personally I’d rather have the latter - sparse but huge industrial objects - than the widespread low level monotony of a solar farm.
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
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.
TIL shadows from trees only project down directly under the tree and never project away from the tree itself. My entire life experience has been rendered useless.
Ultimately, everything we build we build for ourselves, and people will generally prefer something that's nice to look at, if slightly inefficient, over the thing that's optimal at the cost of every other parameter.
Assuming they're talking about this one: https://www.thisiswiltshire.co.uk/news/25299826.swindon-sola...
It's obvious from the scale of it that the fact of how shadows move over the course of a day isn't going to make much difference, even if they go much above the height of the panels, which they don't need to in order to hide them from people at ground level.
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.
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.
They still do rooftop solar like I say, it is just at a scale that seems to only pay for the lights in the building and not generate surplus. So a guy still has to be up there no matter what every now and then even right now.
The best land for solar farms tends to be in the desert where there isn’t enough water for industrial use.
But we already have land set aside for industrial use, why not make use of it? Desert isn't free land either. There is a whole ecology there.
Desert ecologies are often boosted by solar (turns out animals spend lots of time in the shade so they aren’t roasted, and solar panels are shade). Industrial areas, at least where I live, tend to be pretty dynamic with respect to structures, I guess you could do it, but you would have to redo it a lot.
Manatees like when you leave a freshwater hose leaking into the saltwater. Ecologist tell you it is bad though because the animal develops a dependency towards human intervention that might not be a long term phenomenon.
Where I live the industrial areas are pretty much two elevations across the entire lot. You get the warehouse where it is a massive building with a flat roof of a single height. And you get where the trucks pull in and back into the warehouse, also a bunch of flat cement with fixed height requirements one could trivially deck with solar.
And when I looked at industrial areas in denmark, or at least in the vicinity of copenhagen, I saw pretty much exclusively that outside actual oil refineries. Just a ton of warehouses, flat roofs, truck yards. Again already with some solar, just only implemented to the extent to supplement a buildings utility bills, using only a small fraction of that massive flat roof, not to produce an excess of energy. I dare say most industrial property the world over looks more or less like that: rectangular building, flat roof, truck yard.
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.
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.
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.
> large majority of the scientific community is treating it and calling it an existential threat
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.
So extinctions, but not extinction?
> extinctions, but not extinction?
Yes. Extinctions are horrible, but they aren’t an existential threat to us. Climate change simply isn’t an existential threat. That doesn’t mean it isn’t urgent. Like, the Bronze Age collapse and black plague and WWII weren’t existential, doesn’t mean they’re fine. But raising the stakes beyond what the science says like this undermines the credibility of the real warnings.
I think it's really naïve to realize that climate change is an existential threat to many species, but not connect that we are part of the ecosystem which is being put in danger. You are experiencing survivorship bias.
Even if we don't go extinct. It's still an existential threat to our way of life. Which is also a totally valid interpretation of the phrase.
> You are experiencing survivorship bias
Ex ante survivorship is literally the delineation between existential and not.
> Even if we don't go extinct. It's still an existential threat to our way of life
You see why this comes across as bullshit, though. It’s needlessly redefining a word to seem more punchy. We have plenty of perils we massively mobilize against without imagining they’ll exterminate the human species.
> I don't think you're qualified to make this assessment.
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
> It is 100% an existential threat, but the existential bit happens in 100 years
No, it’s not, and no, we don’t know that. Humans will survive climate change. Rich countries will survive, too.
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.
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.
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
Yes, but that temperature isn't going to be reached by fossil fuels.*
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.
* 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.
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).
> There is clearly a temperature at which this planet will not support human life, and we could definitely get the planet to that temperature
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.
Of course not in half a century, but it's not like the earth just stops getting hotter after 2100 rolls around.
What about 2200? Humanity at 2300? It's the same planet with the same feedback loops after all.
> What about 2200? Humanity at 2300?
You literally said “the existential threat happens in 100 years.”
And to your questions, we don’t know. I’d love to see the data. I’m still sceptical we hit “existential” levels for human survival. That wouldn’t even happen if we went back to dinosaur levels of CO2.
Perhaps we should be using ‘apocalyptic threat’ instead?
Sure. That’s fair. I still think it’s potentially hyperbolic, but it’s closer to true than false. “Existential threat” is just plain wrong.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That is pretty much pasture land
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.
honestly that always sounded very misguided to me
fields are not perfectly renewable, biomas gets removed from them and fertilizers can only help so much in any given time frame
mostly corn/raps mono-culture can make that easily far worse
and not needing to import food can safe a lot of energy too
also as you mentioned, modern solar panels seem overall more efficient
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.
Farms are industrial estates.
The Guardian continues its anti-solar crusade. For some inexplicable reason
So, looking on things from another angle is called "a crusade" nowadays. Yep, it is like it is.
Yes, looking at things from the same angle every time and not really representing the alternative view is indeed a crusade
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
The world's largest wind power company, Vestas, is from Denmark.
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.
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.
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.
not buying that this isn't anti renewable propaganda for the US
the images in the article looks bad
until you take a short look at satellite images and realize:
- it's not the norm but the exception
- the photos are made to make it look maximally bad in a deceptive/manipulative way,
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.
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.
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"
Its the Guardian so that is a very 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
That's just your reading comprehension.
They are reporting on an anti-solar NIMBY movement and mention how the far-right is pushing the issue. That doesn't mean they share the same opinion.
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.s I am pro renewable and pro-solar/wind/nuclear just to clarify that this is nothing about my personal beliefs.
Cite your source. The Guardian stopped accepting ads from the fossil industry 6 years ago - [0]
It is convenient to be suspicious against news that isn’t aligned with your views.
[0] - https://www.theguardian.com/help/insideguardian/2020/jan/29/...
I'm aware of this policy. I cannot re-find the source, but there was an investigative piece somewhere that found they continued to take money from fossil-fuel aligned companies. I cannot find it after trying to look again admittably, though I am unsure if it because of my poor memory and that it didn't exist in the first place or because search engines are poor at this sort of thing. They do however continue to take ads from very high carbon industries like airlines and the such however.
They largely share my views, I am not suspicious because they don't align with my views, I am suspicious of all profit-motivated companies equally.
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.
Zoom out a bit though, and you quickly realise it's not the norm. There is vastly more farm land throughout the country and Hjolderup is the exception, not the rule.
100%
It also presents the draw man that solar can only go in huge fields that would otherwise grow food.
There are plenty of rooftops and car parks that can be covered in solar to excellent benefit.
Ie https://www.eventplanner.net/news/10582_largest-solar-carpor...
> It also presents the draw man that solar can only go in huge fields that would otherwise grow food.
> There are plenty of rooftops and car parks that can be covered in solar to excellent benefit.
It's worth calling this approach out too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agrivoltaics
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
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.
It works fine with js disabled.
Isn't GDPR an EU thing?
Well an EU/EEA thing. And I'm in the EEA, so it applies when I visit The Guardian.
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.
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
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.
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.
going as far as North Africa is a bit too far to be convenient for power transport
"from North Africa to Europe" is, to be clear, ~9 miles in spots.
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.
Does it still work out if you take into account the insurance premiums for a cargo ship stacked with batteries? Can't imagine the fire hazard is pretty.
Wait until you hear what other stuff gets shipped
Oh, there's precedent for shuttling freighter size metal fire hazards intercontinentally to top up charge, is there?
How does that work out in cost per kWh? Profitable operation anywhere close?
Crisis relief (as suggested by jmward01 here) may be another matter, but setting up the ability to do this on scale, and maintaining it, can't be anything like easy economically.
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.
Yeah possibly. Synthetic hydrocarbon fuel that's already compatible with transportation infrastructure and energy consumers might be the best bet.
We will probably be using that in aviation for a long, long time. Turbines are pretty efficient and jet fuel has a remarkably high energy density for something that does not easily explode.
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.
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
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.
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
- that village is the exception, not the norm at all
- 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 ....
- 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.
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,
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.
(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.
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?
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.
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Norway
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.
> You're naive if you think your storage solution can handle the massive reserves required
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.
Yes but (deja vu here) pumped hydro storage benefits from geography, so it's only a solution for Norway and Sweden and other bumpy places.
This thread was about Denmark, but obviously the solution will be different everywhere. Some places have suitable geography, others have more sun and milder winters where overbuild+batteries are easier, some have existing Nuclear that can be kept running affordably, maybe you even have politically stable neighbors where a HVDC grid can smooth out differences in weather, there are no generic answers.