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.