In Denmark, the spread of solar panels has become a divisive issue
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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".
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
So far a few attempts have been made, lots of investments, but unfortunately it hasn't worked out yet.
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...
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.
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.
How is that supposed to work with cloudy days with barely 7 hours of daylight in winter?
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."
Americans tend to forget how far north Europe is compared to the US.
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.
Data from 2025.
Nuclear 32 TWh, Wind 22 TWh, Hydro 12 TWh, Solar 1 TWh.
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.
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
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.
But in winter, you'll have something like 2-5% load factor on your solar panels…
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Where did you get your morning shade fixation from?
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.
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.
> where the sun often don't show up once
Nah.
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.
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.
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.
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.
On other hand I would not find replacing all energy production with government run nuclear plants as unreasonable.
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.
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.
They almost suffered a catastrophic shutdown a year or two ago and the situation has not improved
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_Europe_Synchronous... exists for good reason.
But they did get a big warning shot in 1989 and 2011, and ignored those lessons for cost reasons. A couple hundred people died.
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.
In their powerless homes?
I don't doubt people get lost in the woods. But that's not some systemic failure.
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.
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...
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.
Personally I like the panels
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.
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.
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.
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
Farms are industrial estates.
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.
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).
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.
It's similar to the telephoto shots of wind farms taken from far away that make them seem really close together.
Its the Guardian so that is a very unlikely motivation.
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.
P.s I am pro renewable and pro-solar/wind/nuclear just to clarify that this is nothing about my personal beliefs.
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/...
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.
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...
> 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
I bet makes the person dealing with the outcome of being surrounded by them feel a lot better.
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
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.
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.
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.
- 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. )
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.
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.
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Norway
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.