Labour’s ‘rooftop revolution’ to deliver solar power to millions of UK homes

[resybaby]

Id guess the ownership of a lot of our commercial roofspace comes into relevence with commercial buildings and the lack of panels.
My brother in law is a Director of a big UK listed but international battery specialist manufacturer/provider, but most of his buildings are leased - and the owners wont allow him to mount panels on the roof, he has asked - i guess there is no financial benifit to the owner as they dont pay the leccy bill.
They have (reluctantly) advised they would permit installation on a frame over some of the car parking areas, but having costed that the brother in law says the costs deem it uneconomic.
If the buildings were owned, obviously a different kettle of fish, but so many are leased these days to retain capital in the business itself.

[Mart]

Id guess the ownership of a lot of our commercial roofspace comes into relevence with commercial buildings and the lack of panels.
My brother in law is a Director of a big UK listed but international battery specialist manufacturer/provider, but most of his buildings are leased - and the owners wont allow him to mount panels on the roof, he has asked - i guess there is no financial benifit to the owner as they dont pay the leccy bill.
They have (reluctantly) advised they would permit installation on a frame over some of the car parking areas, but having costed that the brother in law says the costs deem it uneconomic.
If the buildings were owned, obviously a different kettle of fish, but so many are leased these days to retain capital in the business itself.

May be wrong, but I believe you are spot on, and the leasehold nature of so much of the UK's factory/warehousing has been pointed to as a major issue regarding commercial scale demand side PV rollout. Perhaps an issue that the new Government should focus on just as much, or even more.

Back to domestic, I was saying to Wifey a few weeks ago how sad it is to see almost no new PV on roofs near us in the last 5-10yrs, and the starting point was miniscule too. But Cardiff Council have set out some very big 'aspirational' targets, so there is hope, perhaps!

Cardiff’s needs a ‘green energy revolution’ to reach net-zero

510MW of roof mounted solar PV (the equivalent of 115,000 domestic roofs).

Might be a stretch, as Google suggests Cardiff has around 125k households. [Edit - I take that back, since equivalent to, does make it possible, especially considering supermarkets etc, but that leasing issue still remains.]

[Tinbum]

Hi, I mentioned the golf courses for scale. Just to show that there isn't a shortage of farmland, especially this low grade arable/grazing land. I fully appreciate that many people are genuinely concerned, which I believe is down to misinformation and anti-RE FUD.

I'm sorry if this seems rude or argumentative, but there really is no issue regarding solar farms and crop production losses*. But there is a need to expand RE generation and the mix as quickly as possible.

Lastly you suggest turning countryside into an industrial area, but we weren't talking about the countryside, we were talking about low grade agricultural land, and farming is an industry. There are of course strong arguments for some of this low grade land to be returned to nature, especially woodland/forestry, and PV farms whilst not on anything like that scale, do dramatically increase the amount of wild flowers and pollinators.

*Yes it is entirely sensible to have concerns over loss of crop production, but when the issue is analysed and the scale is taken into account, those fears should dissipate almost entirely.

How do golf courses show their isn't a shortage of farmland?

Sorry but we are talking about countryside.

I'm not ant RE and have the intelligence to dissect information for myself. We can't produce enough food as it is at the moment before using agricultural land for PV.

Their are plenty of other more suitable options to generate power. This is being done for profit, it's not for the RE aspect at all, if it was they would use other methods..

[openspaceman]

most of his buildings are leased - and the owners wont allow him to mount panels on the roof,

I imagine most of the big sheds are constructed to tight structural limits for cheapness so adding weight directly to the roof compromises the ability to withstand snow load and such like.

[Krill]

Well that's an easy change to planning laws to implement re roof structural limits.

Regarding the profit point that's a strawman. Food production is done for a profit, not for charity. Even if those areas were not used for solar parks, that does not mean the use can be forcibly altered to crop production or grazing. Maybe the planning use is changed but that doesn't make the owners use it for that purpose unless society and the government goes (and sorry for the political point Joeboy) full eminent domain and public ownership.

Put me in the camp that thinks raised panels and grazing is the smarter choice, unles we start outlawing meat production...

[openspaceman]

Well that's an easy change to planning laws to implement re roof structural limits.

Yes but that would be retrospective, not much can be done with the vast acreages of industrial roofs that have gone up since the internet boom. BTW I am in the solar on roof camp but there is a lot of land around my bit of the M25 that lies fallow, often because the farmhouse has been bought for seclusion from we untermensch.

[Moxi]

Well I’m on the fence about fields but I often wonder about all the greenhouses and if it’s possible to fit half the roof out with panels without adversely affecting the plant’s growth below. Coupled to batteries and adding grow lights would it be possible to extend the growing period in to the night ?

Then with regard to fields, there’s the fencing that could incorporate bifacial panels in some applications.

Another idea for some applications would be tracked arrays and or east west concertina folding arrays that could be deployed for a period in a grazed field while it recovers before being folded lifted and moved to the next field in a crop rotation style.

If some farmers could increase the margin between fields to a suitable width then panels could be mounted around the field perimeter.

Just saying that the current option of covering an entire field doesn’t have to become the default option. Integrated battery and panel systems that fit in a container footprint allowing flexibility to the farmer to maximise production on their land could be a viable proposition and could add a valuable income stream to many struggling farmers.

We require options and government support to give farmers the opportunities to raise crops, livestock and revenue by as many means as is practicable- it doesn’t need to be either or and nor does it need to be large scale.

There will be cost penalties for smaller scale but that requires the crops and livestock to be more honestly valued. No point in saying keep the fields for food if all the farmers go bankrupt because the cost of lamb beef potatoes or wheat is too low, that being where governments really need to lend support.

Moxi

[AGT]

Good, it will no doubt see improvement in the grid, a local town near me has to wait until 2027 until network improvements allows a solar farm

This install still allows sheep to graze, the panels are considerably off the grass to prevent accidental damage.

[Mart]

Hi, I mentioned the golf courses for scale. Just to show that there isn't a shortage of farmland, especially this low grade arable/grazing land. I fully appreciate that many people are genuinely concerned, which I believe is down to misinformation and anti-RE FUD.

I'm sorry if this seems rude or argumentative, but there really is no issue regarding solar farms and crop production losses*. But there is a need to expand RE generation and the mix as quickly as possible.

Lastly you suggest turning countryside into an industrial area, but we weren't talking about the countryside, we were talking about low grade agricultural land, and farming is an industry. There are of course strong arguments for some of this low grade land to be returned to nature, especially woodland/forestry, and PV farms whilst not on anything like that scale, do dramatically increase the amount of wild flowers and pollinators.

*Yes it is entirely sensible to have concerns over loss of crop production, but when the issue is analysed and the scale is taken into account, those fears should dissipate almost entirely.

How do golf courses show their isn't a shortage of farmland?

Sorry but we are talking about countryside.

I'm not ant RE and have the intelligence to dissect information for myself. We can't produce enough food as it is at the moment before using agricultural land for PV.

Their are plenty of other more suitable options to generate power. This is being done for profit, it's not for the RE aspect at all, if it was they would use other methods..

Hi, sorry I didn't explain that well. The discussion was/is about farmland, but you mentioned the PV as industrialising the countryside, so I was just pointing out that farmland is already industrialised, since farming is an industry. Farmed fields are not natural countryside.

Again, the reference to golf courses is simply to place the issue in context. With 2% of England covered by golf/golf related land, and 2% of England needed for a theoretical equivalent of 100% of UK leccy from PV alone - then it's clear that the amount of actual land that needs to be covered in England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland to produce some of the far lower PV contribution to the RE mix, is simply not an issue, probably less than 0.2%* of England land, less again as a %age of the UK.

*Working on a long term future contribution of 20% from PV, with half of that on low grade agricultural land, perhaps(?)

If there are are no great calls for golf or beef related land to be switched to crop land (and perhaps there should be), then PV looks to be a soft and somewhat irrelevant (in scale) target. Especially if the land can still be used for sheep grazing, and boosts diversity/pollinators.

It's so, so important to take the scale into account here. Yes of course we don't want to lose valuable crop land needlessly, but the use of an almost negligible amount of low grade farmland simply isn't an issue. That's my point, not that land use may change, but the scale means the concern is allayed.



I appreciate we disagree here, but I do want to make it clear I fully appreciate you are genuinely concerned about this issue, I'm not trying to belittle that. I don't believe you, nor anyone else on here with concerns about soilar farms is anti-RE. I am however massively concerned at the amount of concern (if that makes sense) that the issue causes whenever it crops up (pun intended) in any article/discussion anywhere. I'm just trying to say, that in my opinion, the scale/impact is so small, almost trivial, that PV farms are not in themselves a problem. Despite genuine concerns, from genuine people, that they are.

The issue has become pretty huge in the US, where due to it's size, the %age of land needed for that theoretical 100% singular solution, is even smaller, despite around 40% of US land area being devoted to livestock, the vast majority beef, directly or for feed production. So just a 1% reduction in beef consumption would equal any solar farm land. [Been trying to find a figure for farmland (rather than land area), but struggling. I seem to recall beef accounts for 70-80%, but that's sounds high, and I can't find a link now.]

TBH, that's not even needed in the US, since a large amount of land is used to grow corn for ethanol production, to be put into the 'gasoline' supply. So electrifying transport, and probably all US energy needs could be handled via just that land being switched to PV. [Note that's purely for comparative purposes, not necessarily the exact same land areas.]

[NoraBatty]

I think it is also worth noting in regards to being food sustainable, in such a crisis as imports being cut off etc, you would see a return to agricultural land being used much more sensibly to maximise entire yields not just maximise monoculture profits.

Massive fields of never ending polytunnels, that in themselves waste massive amounts of space in the fields, would be better served not growing raspberries and strawberries in containers above the ground for ease of picking but growing nutritious fast growing staples, maxomising every square inch of land.

Those of us who do grow our own, know just how easy it is to get the most out of every inch of space, especially in greenhouses and polytunnels.
Yet agriculture spexialise in monoculture which is excessively wasteful in space and detrimental to the soil.

There would also be an end to all of this supermarket wastage and excess, which in its own right is a travesty.

Such issues, should, in my opinion, change anyway, but in the event of WW3, modern day agriculture would grind to a halt and have to change from monoculture to the more natural crop rotation and polyculture, purely on the basis that Russia and China have a monopoly over the worlds fertilizers.
Our farming practices are so off kilter with nature, that yield would drop off a cliff in year 1, if major changes to more natural farming methods were not made.
It is a dire situation in and of itself, but vast swaths of open farmalnd, tilled to death with zero soil structure or ability to hold any nutrients, would then be reliant on some form of covering or wind break to keep the soil in place.
It may actually help us to have solar over the fields, until soil structure can be organically built back up. Which would take years .