Solar Farms.

I have read one of article in which all disadvantages of solar farms present If I find that article then surly I will sure with you guys ..... jasonmoulding

As much of a blot as the many acres of yellow oilseed rape (and its pollen) that people used to complain about, years ago?

Absolutely our thoughts Tony. We live in a very attractive area of the country, on the edge of an AONB. There are several fields of solar panels around us, and they're fine - we've had years of fields covered in black polythene for large parts of the year, or as you say oil seed rape. At least solar farms don't give hay fever! (Oil seed rape is horrible stuff to live near.)


What I find more frustrating is the lack of solar farms on industrial / large commercial buildings with their huge roof area. If there was rather more of that then there wouldn't be so much need to put them on farmland.


As for the switcher problem, well that's our problem to develop better ones! ?


Cheers,


Andy

At work we're looking to cover most of our roof with PV to help offset the 4 electric car charging points we've just installed!

As for covering large roof areas with PV there are a number of hurdles to get over. We looked at putting about 2000 sq ft of PV on a large storage building on another site some years ago and there were issues of planning (probably not insurmountable but we were in a national park), structural considerations (the steel frame building was over 60 years old and while sound would probably need strengthening), routing cables to feed into the grid and the main one: cost! With the end of the various grants and advantageous feed-in tariffs it just wasn't worth it.

The strength of a building's roof may well be what prevents it being covered with solar panels.  On older buildings, the columns that hold the roof up will only have been designed to take the roof itself, not dozens of solar panels, and the metal framework needed to support them.

Good points of course, but for a start encouraging it on new builds may be helpful. I know another problems is the ownership / leasing arrangements for many buildings which makes it in neither the owner nor the leasee's interest to fit them - but given the will that shouldn't be insurmountable.

I do wonder if part of the problem here is the way we tend to concentrate things like solar panels and wind turbines.  My wife is Swedish and where we tend to stay when (we're allowed to!) visiting relatives you can see a fair few wind turbines in the surrounding countryside, but it's maybe 3 here, 1 there, another 2 somewhere else.  It's not 100 in a single field which is obviously going to be more visible!

I fully appreciate that Sweden is different to the UK and that there are indeed advantages to putting a lot of something in one place.  I just wonder whether a larger number of much smaller generation points might be a more acceptable alternative?