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 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.

Green grass is still good to look at.

There is grass. Grass is allowed to grow around the panels. It’s great for biodiversity.

Climate change is an existential threat, it's switch to green power asap or burn the world our kids will live in

How much extra on your electricity bill are you prepared to pay to not see it?

That just sounds like endless corn fields, only solar panels.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Great Britain, even more North, has viable solar on its Southern edge.

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.

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.

Which actually works out to rather more than one person per winter, when averaged out.

That's like pointing out that Rhode Island isn't designed to be a self-sufficient grid.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

Spain and Morocco already have a 1.4 GW DC interconnect and the XLinks project intends to connect Morocco and the UK.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Energy density is a real problem.

The Guardian continues its anti-solar crusade. For some inexplicable reason

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.

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.

_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

> - 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.

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.

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.

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

Northern Europe really is the energy armpit of the post-fossil world, although more so away from coasts.

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

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.

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. )

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.

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.

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.

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.

Wind and solar can provide enough energy. You may be referring to their well-publicized variability. Energy storage can solve that.