I'd like to know how much space all these battery and solar farms are going to take up. Where I live in SE England they seem to be trying to take productive agricultural fields out of use to cover them with solar panels.
How does space usage compare against nuclear plants?
[And yes I realise some portion of solar will be domestic, but that's not always allowed if your house is listed].
> Where I live in SE England they seem to be trying to take productive agricultural fields out of use
I think this is an unfair characterisation. Many farmers in the UK _want_ to build solar installations on their fields as it is a fantastic way to get guaranteed income while keeping other land for agriculture. Additionally, you can graze animals with solar panels. And also the solar panel installations are usually temporary (land is leased for x amount of years), they can be removed and used as farmland after.
> how much space all these battery and solar farms
Chris Hewett, head of Solar Energy UK says this:
"We need less than half a percent of UK land, for a fully decarbonised energy grid. That is the amount of land we use for golf courses – and less than we use for airports."
Generally the worst case scenarios for covering all our energy needs with renewables end up with using around 1% of a country's land area. Which is already a small fraction of the land we use for farms. But compared to the worst case scenario there are many reasons to think it will be far less: solar power and farms can use the same land in a synergistic way. It's called agrovoltaics. Solar can cover water reservoirs and canals which reduces water evaporation. Commercial rooftops and parking lots can also be covered. In practice wind power occupies a fraction of the land it does on paper, and can often be placed in between farm fields. And then there's geothermal which could cut land area use as well, especially for winter demand if you build district heating.
Off-shore wind is growing rapidly. Even floating off-shore is gaining traction. These could eventually be co-located with the growing of seaweed for food, animal feed and bio-matter. The ocean out there is basically a desert, not much is growing there, and creating structures where things can grow will essentially act like a "greening" of the ocean, turning more of it into a CO2-sink.
> How does space usage compare against nuclear plants?
Obviously nuclear power plants use significantly less. How much depends if you include uranium mining, which generally happens in other countries.
But nuclear power plants just isn't renewable, and their growth is fundamentally unsustainable. Thermal power plants also contribute to global warming by direct heating. It's not going to take more than a 10x increase in power production with thermal power plants before that becomes a significant concern. With renewables there is at least a theoretical path to full sustainability. All we have to do is to recycle the materials used to build them.
The pinnacle of solar power sustainability is projects like the one to build huge solar power plants in Morocco and transfer the power to UK. You absorb solar energy from a place that has too much of it, and plenty of arid land, providing shade and cooling for a significant area where you could then potentially do agrovoltaics to grow food. Win-win.
Not that I oppose nuclear. We should build what we can, as long as it's economically feasible. It's just that it gets way more attention online than it deserves. It's just not going to be as important as people think.
I was in SE England 2 weeks ago in Knepp Estate, and the current owners farmed it for 17 years and only made a profit 2 of those. If a farm is losing money is it productive? AIUI you need very good soil to run a profitable farm
Many don't understand how little value is created per unit of land per year on a farm. The value of generated power from PV on the land would generally be much higher.
Solar can even help regain space, since it can be put on roofs and replace 30 times more space-inefficient Biogas electricity production.
Further solar plants can be combined with efforts to give nature back some space, since solar farms produce energy without agricultural use of the land, perhaps even the use of pesticides and other poisons.
You don't even have to mowe really, since the modules are usually further in the air than natural grass.
Though you probably have to prevent trees and bushes to grow in areas which used to be forest (hundreds of years ago before humans made farmland out of everything)
We can import food, and we kind of have to anyway, but we can't import electricity. Well, not on quite the same scale; total interconnector capacity is a few percent of demand, and often used for export.
At some point we'll see more agrivoltaics; there's nothing stopping people from planting between/under panels, and for some crops the partial shade actually increases yield.
Nuclear plants of course consume way less space, but cost way more and encounter way more planning objections and cost overruns. I take a "you can have your dessert when you finish your vegetables" policy on this: UK can start another nuclear plant if it wants once Hinkley Point C is actually finished and working.
At some point we're also going to have to have the "listed building mafia vs. energy efficiency" argument, too. I think the most egregious example was someone trying to block a grid connection for offshore renewables using the presence of "grade 2 listed concrete anti-tank cubes".
> I'd like to know how much space all these battery and solar farms are going to take up.
With any luck they’ll be built o top of all the AI data centers and there’ll be enough leftover energy to power your meek human needs. Only half joking, half cynical :(
How does space usage compare against nuclear plants?
[And yes I realise some portion of solar will be domestic, but that's not always allowed if your house is listed].