[danw1979]

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.

[teamonkey]

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.

[cjrp]

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.

[teamonkey]

See the adjacent link I posted about projected land use.

[ghighi7878]

Green grass is still good to look at.

[teamonkey]

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

[teamonkey]

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...

[asdff]

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...

[pjc50]

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

[danw1979]

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.

[Animats]

Needs a beauty strip of trees around the panels.

[01HNNWZ0MV43FF]

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

[dylan604]

Yeah, 'cause shade is precisely what's needed for a solar farm

[swsieber]

Around, not over. Trees are a well studied thing where can you pick different species for different characteristics, like height, and growth speed.

[dylan604]

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.

[fluoridation]

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.

[ben_w]

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.

[hattmall]

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.

[deaux]

> 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.

[simmerup]

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

[asdff]

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.

[hattmall]

But it's literally not low, it's up on a roof. The ground installs are preferable because they are low and easily accessible.

[asdff]

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.

[seanmcdirmid]

The best land for solar farms tends to be in the desert where there isn’t enough water for industrial use.

[asdff]

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.

[seanmcdirmid]

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.

[asdff]

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.

[m4rtink]

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.

[nitwit005]

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

[card_zero]

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.

[asdff]

That is pretty much pasture land