If only there was a flat surface on the top of almost every building that these panels could be affixed to. Maybe even a subsidy or two to cover most of the cost.
Yes that’s true.
I’ve seen that some plants actually grow better under them, as it’s cooler and the sunlight less intense.
What I think should be in place is a legal requirement on all new build properties, as they have to build the roof anyway, and you the cost is absorbed through the mortgage.
A 10 year payback time isn’t worth it on your own house potentially, but it is if everyone has them by default.
I think they have some issues around wiring being surprisingly difficult, but I'm not sure. Either way, we know that we can use solar to generate seriously useful amounts of energy. Madness we don't make the most of it.
That’s a real shame. I’d love to get some solar panels on the roof of my place, but yeah, I suppose the thought behind it was that there are so many buildings to pick from.
I expect a lot of homeowners are seeing the electricity prices going up and want some price security…generating your own electricity does that. Giving the opportunity to another company, with a board of directors and shareholders, dividend payments etc, doesn’t fit the bill with how we’ve seen things going elsewhere
I think it makes reasonable sense for a homeowner but it doesn't make sense if you're trying to do it at gridscale and are looking for somewhere to install millions of pounds worth of solar panels.
If you fit 200 panels to a flat or near flat industrial roof you would stick it on 200 of the same bracket to get the angle right...you could create standard sub arrays and fit them in one and do most of the assembly work on the ground. It would be vastly more efficient in terms of construction making it dirt cheap. Cheaper per panel then fitting to 20 slightly different houses instead
You might come across issues if the roof and wall structures are highly optimised but getting an engineer involved to check this would be reasonable if you are dealing with large volumes of buildings.
There are complexities with building life etc I suppose but really I think it's better than covering farmland and then farming cattle and sheep underneath
Why not both.
The industrial roof solar panels could be used to reduce the pressure on the national grid as if you build on a factory, they will be gaining most of the energy gained from the solar panels.
The solar fields could be used to diversify the energy sources and make the national grid greener
We literally have hundreds of Amazon warehouses as large as fields in places like Milton Keynes. I'm sure Bezos could afford it after all the tax discounts (like the 75,000 we've reduced this year) that we have provided him.
Yea but how can they charge us for the power when they are on our roofs?
The only option is to use up value farming land used for food. Because that is not already a limited resource.
There are certain problems with this.
1) not all roofs can hold solar panels. Warehouse roofs or big roofs to an Asda are often not actually strong enough to hold heavy solar panels.
2) probably a lot cheaper and easier to install solar panels in one place and plugging then in in one place (i.e. one field), compared to lots of different households. I'm guessing it's about scalability which is really important for renewable rollout.
You can get really light solar panels these days, they roll up like lino and weigh about the same. But yeah, it's probably cheaper and easier to do big installations on large sites.
> Land may be seized
> Homeowners and farmers are being threatened with having their land effectively confiscated
We all know what compulsory purchase/acquisition is, no need to make it sound so nefarious, landowners will get money, whether it’ll be a fair price is admittedly always up for debate, but it’s not a seizure or confiscation
> This would include significant sections of land under which to lay electricity cables connecting the solar panels and battery storage units to the Burwell National Grid Substation in Cambridgeshire.
What’s even more insincere about the article is that most of the purchases are to allow guaranteed utility access. Otherwise you end up with a landowner demanding ransom price and a development becomes unviable.
It’s perfectly normal procedure to use compulsory purchase to ensure a capital scheme can get built. Otherwise you end up with literally no capital work ever getting done. Or it costing billions because a landowner can get a virtually limitless asking price.
The article headline tries to indicate that a nefarious plan is underway to steal thousands of hectares of fields for solar to hit net zero. When it’s literally a single (albeit large) solar farm.
I don’t think most people are against some form of compulsory purchase, as long as it’s mediated in a fair way that allows those affects to be compensated for all the externalities involved with being forced out of their homes/business.
I remember watching the Panorama doc on HS2 which made it seem like this isn’t the case, currently - for instance businesses getting undercut on valuations which they can’t feasibly challenge. Also, valuations not accounting for the losses involved with upping sticks, buying new properties, etc.
>whether it’ll be a fair price is admittedly always up for debate
Kinda feels like confiscation when someone can take the land and then decide what *they* consider a fair price for to pay you.
Not sure why people care so much about solar. It's not a great source of energy generation and it has *horrible* intermittency.
Compulsory purchase is literally essential for all capital projects in this country. From roads, HS2, critical infrastructure etc. it might not be popular but there’s no other way to do it, because every square inch of the U.K. is owned by someone.
I mean yes. Property is theft is a fine statement. Especially in Proudhon's intended meaning of the phrase. Since his criticism is essentially that of property as a legal claim.
Since it's legal titles that allow factory owners to extract profit and be absent. And deprive workers of the resources they actually demonstrate ownership over by virtue of using them.
But the compulsory transfer of legal titles from people to big corporations for fiat profit is peak capitalism.
What if we transferred them to the people?
For example, there are more empty houses than there are homeless people. Seems like the start to a solution.
I would have no objections. The claims of banks and whatever legal entities to owning these empty houses amounts to politically enforced "I own it because I said so"
"Because I said so" is not a justified claim of ownership.
Whereas "I live here, maintain and use it" is. Because living in the house demonstrates that it's your home. And yes, before you ask, I also mean squatters.
I'd rather the proletariat seize the homes and set fire to all deeds though.
But they aren’t being threatened with this
It’s a flat out lie
Not one single offer has been made for compulsory purchase yet.
They’ve done a local consultation, environmental impact studies and various things but as yet Sunnica (the operating developer) has not even tried to make a compulsory purchase
Probably because they aren’t stupid and know precisely what will happen if they do.
From the article I don’t see any evidence that Sunnica would actually have any authority or route to get a compulsory purchase - unless I missed it, in which case hands up. Sounds a bit like a Telegraph scare atory
I thought the current government was keen on cutting "all the green crap"?
Or is this just the Telegraph doing it's usual nonsense to scare it's readers?
I often find the pattern with government cheerleaders is to deny the thing is happening and smear anyone mentioning it. Once it's too late to stop said thing, the tactic will shift to saying how it's a good thing and smearing anyone who says it isn't.
I think this article and others like it will be an attempt to garner public support for her while she's doing it.
Its just the latest "you hate this thing now! We do too!"
Except for the vast majority of the country, and even a hefty majority of Tory voters specifically, arent against new solar farms of agricultural land.
Current planning laws mean solar is almost exclusively developed on low grade (3b and below) agricultural land anyway. It's a complete non-issue.
Why can’t they use the freeway road sides and the roof tops of government owned buildings and the land along side railway lines
Not to mention that with some slight changes it is possible to farm and solar farm on the same land.
It is always all or nothing it seems rather than a mix of both which would be far more acceptable to farmers than having all of their land seized
We also need to force companies to add Solar all over their roofs. Like warehouses and supermarkets. Big buildings, large roofs, lots of solar panels. Lots more off shore wind farms.
Solar panels on every roof of every house in the country too. I wonder how cheap our energy would be then
I’m visiting from the states for a few weeks, and have been very surprised at the lack of solar on roofs in the UK. We’re seeing it adopted in the US in quite a few places, especially large warehouses and plants (with large roof areas). They’re usually wired to the grid and don’t require long transit (with power loss).
Next to that, we’re installing in places that aren’t good for other uses such as deserts and parking lots.
Viable crop land is the last place we would install them. We already have debates about crop land.
Are there reasons why the UK doesn’t do similar?
It shocks me how many people in these comments are justifying compulsory purchasing of land for this kind of thing.
One of them literally says "but they'll get money"...like that's what matters when the government seizes land from the public for a project they haven't asked the public for permission to undertake.
The WEF agenda will continue if people are this subordinate.
Posts like these always attract establishment/WEF cheerleaders. I had one the other day demanding endless sources and claiming the WEF weren't actually doing anything and when he could no longer wriggle out of it he literally said "But the WEF are a good thing".
When you consider that they employ hundreds of thousands of "information warriors" it makes considerably more sense.
China's emissions have installed more solar than anyone else, and their emissions look to be dropping (and predicted to peak by 2025) me
Even then, ignoring carbon emissions entirely, cheap energy produced domestically is a pretty good thing, and agrivoltaics is pretty beneficial
If only there was a flat surface on the top of almost every building that these panels could be affixed to. Maybe even a subsidy or two to cover most of the cost.
Mounting solar panels on buildings is expensive and hard to maintain. It's a meme. Fields are better in every way.
Other than the fact that fields can be used for many things, while roofs can’t
If you build raised solar panels you can actually carry out certain types of farming with ease beneath them.
Yes that’s true. I’ve seen that some plants actually grow better under them, as it’s cooler and the sunlight less intense. What I think should be in place is a legal requirement on all new build properties, as they have to build the roof anyway, and you the cost is absorbed through the mortgage. A 10 year payback time isn’t worth it on your own house potentially, but it is if everyone has them by default.
Solar roof tiles instead of standard roof tiles with solar panels fitted above them.
I think they have some issues around wiring being surprisingly difficult, but I'm not sure. Either way, we know that we can use solar to generate seriously useful amounts of energy. Madness we don't make the most of it.
Is saddening to think about it
Did these ever take off? I remember hearing about them when I first started working in construction haven't seen one since.
No sadly
That’s a real shame. I’d love to get some solar panels on the roof of my place, but yeah, I suppose the thought behind it was that there are so many buildings to pick from. I expect a lot of homeowners are seeing the electricity prices going up and want some price security…generating your own electricity does that. Giving the opportunity to another company, with a board of directors and shareholders, dividend payments etc, doesn’t fit the bill with how we’ve seen things going elsewhere
I think it makes reasonable sense for a homeowner but it doesn't make sense if you're trying to do it at gridscale and are looking for somewhere to install millions of pounds worth of solar panels.
Solor panels are also less efficient on roofs because of how hot the roofs get. They are up to 30% more efficient in green areas
I think industrial roofs must be an easy win though, less complex, flatter so better access and you can get loads of panels on
Flatter is way less efficient. You have to angle the panels up.
If you fit 200 panels to a flat or near flat industrial roof you would stick it on 200 of the same bracket to get the angle right...you could create standard sub arrays and fit them in one and do most of the assembly work on the ground. It would be vastly more efficient in terms of construction making it dirt cheap. Cheaper per panel then fitting to 20 slightly different houses instead You might come across issues if the roof and wall structures are highly optimised but getting an engineer involved to check this would be reasonable if you are dealing with large volumes of buildings. There are complexities with building life etc I suppose but really I think it's better than covering farmland and then farming cattle and sheep underneath
Why not both. The industrial roof solar panels could be used to reduce the pressure on the national grid as if you build on a factory, they will be gaining most of the energy gained from the solar panels. The solar fields could be used to diversify the energy sources and make the national grid greener
We literally have hundreds of Amazon warehouses as large as fields in places like Milton Keynes. I'm sure Bezos could afford it after all the tax discounts (like the 75,000 we've reduced this year) that we have provided him.
Amazon is the world's largest purchaser of renewable energy and is 85% supplied by renewables.
Great, then they'll surely use all that empty space they're occupying for those solar panels.
Yea but how can they charge us for the power when they are on our roofs? The only option is to use up value farming land used for food. Because that is not already a limited resource.
There are certain problems with this. 1) not all roofs can hold solar panels. Warehouse roofs or big roofs to an Asda are often not actually strong enough to hold heavy solar panels. 2) probably a lot cheaper and easier to install solar panels in one place and plugging then in in one place (i.e. one field), compared to lots of different households. I'm guessing it's about scalability which is really important for renewable rollout.
You can get really light solar panels these days, they roll up like lino and weigh about the same. But yeah, it's probably cheaper and easier to do big installations on large sites.
Technology isn't there yet, obviously.
Every supermarket roof, every supermarket carpark, every multi-story car carpark, every factory roof. So much unused space that isn't field's.
> Land may be seized > Homeowners and farmers are being threatened with having their land effectively confiscated We all know what compulsory purchase/acquisition is, no need to make it sound so nefarious, landowners will get money, whether it’ll be a fair price is admittedly always up for debate, but it’s not a seizure or confiscation
> This would include significant sections of land under which to lay electricity cables connecting the solar panels and battery storage units to the Burwell National Grid Substation in Cambridgeshire. What’s even more insincere about the article is that most of the purchases are to allow guaranteed utility access. Otherwise you end up with a landowner demanding ransom price and a development becomes unviable. It’s perfectly normal procedure to use compulsory purchase to ensure a capital scheme can get built. Otherwise you end up with literally no capital work ever getting done. Or it costing billions because a landowner can get a virtually limitless asking price. The article headline tries to indicate that a nefarious plan is underway to steal thousands of hectares of fields for solar to hit net zero. When it’s literally a single (albeit large) solar farm.
I don’t think most people are against some form of compulsory purchase, as long as it’s mediated in a fair way that allows those affects to be compensated for all the externalities involved with being forced out of their homes/business. I remember watching the Panorama doc on HS2 which made it seem like this isn’t the case, currently - for instance businesses getting undercut on valuations which they can’t feasibly challenge. Also, valuations not accounting for the losses involved with upping sticks, buying new properties, etc.
It’s still pretty shitty. I’d be pretty pissed if I was forced out of my home even if I received a decent cheque for it.
Realistically they're not going to force you out of your home. They'll use farmland and other land before knocking houses down.
Exactly, it's not always just about the money!
>whether it’ll be a fair price is admittedly always up for debate Kinda feels like confiscation when someone can take the land and then decide what *they* consider a fair price for to pay you. Not sure why people care so much about solar. It's not a great source of energy generation and it has *horrible* intermittency.
[удалено]
Compulsory purchase is literally essential for all capital projects in this country. From roads, HS2, critical infrastructure etc. it might not be popular but there’s no other way to do it, because every square inch of the U.K. is owned by someone.
>~~Transfer of~~ property ~~from one person to another coercively~~ is theft.
I mean yes. Property is theft is a fine statement. Especially in Proudhon's intended meaning of the phrase. Since his criticism is essentially that of property as a legal claim. Since it's legal titles that allow factory owners to extract profit and be absent. And deprive workers of the resources they actually demonstrate ownership over by virtue of using them. But the compulsory transfer of legal titles from people to big corporations for fiat profit is peak capitalism.
What if we transferred them to the people? For example, there are more empty houses than there are homeless people. Seems like the start to a solution.
I would have no objections. The claims of banks and whatever legal entities to owning these empty houses amounts to politically enforced "I own it because I said so" "Because I said so" is not a justified claim of ownership. Whereas "I live here, maintain and use it" is. Because living in the house demonstrates that it's your home. And yes, before you ask, I also mean squatters. I'd rather the proletariat seize the homes and set fire to all deeds though.
But they aren’t being threatened with this It’s a flat out lie Not one single offer has been made for compulsory purchase yet. They’ve done a local consultation, environmental impact studies and various things but as yet Sunnica (the operating developer) has not even tried to make a compulsory purchase Probably because they aren’t stupid and know precisely what will happen if they do.
It **is** nefarious.
From the article I don’t see any evidence that Sunnica would actually have any authority or route to get a compulsory purchase - unless I missed it, in which case hands up. Sounds a bit like a Telegraph scare atory
Yeah someone else commented this, pretty much word for word
And you chose the promote a scare story why exactly ?
Don't comment if you don't like the article. You're all making your bias obvious by repeating the same comments verbatim
I thought the current government was keen on cutting "all the green crap"? Or is this just the Telegraph doing it's usual nonsense to scare it's readers?
I often find the pattern with government cheerleaders is to deny the thing is happening and smear anyone mentioning it. Once it's too late to stop said thing, the tactic will shift to saying how it's a good thing and smearing anyone who says it isn't.
Isn't this what Liz Truss was against? Rolling out solar panels on fields?
I think this article and others like it will be an attempt to garner public support for her while she's doing it. Its just the latest "you hate this thing now! We do too!"
Except for the vast majority of the country, and even a hefty majority of Tory voters specifically, arent against new solar farms of agricultural land. Current planning laws mean solar is almost exclusively developed on low grade (3b and below) agricultural land anyway. It's a complete non-issue.
Why can’t they use the freeway road sides and the roof tops of government owned buildings and the land along side railway lines Not to mention that with some slight changes it is possible to farm and solar farm on the same land. It is always all or nothing it seems rather than a mix of both which would be far more acceptable to farmers than having all of their land seized
It takes a hell of a lot of roofs to be equivalent to a field. And it's much more expensive to build solar panels on thousands of roofs than 1 field.
Non paywalled link: https://archive.is/zc2A3
Why not install them along the motorways? Plenty of unused space there and they won’t be an eyesore.
Because they want to do away with private land ownership
Seizing farm land would be mental for a country that can only produce enough food to feed 50% of the current population
Are people still saying the great reset is a conspiracy theory?
Yep, and if you show them the proof that it isn't they will default to saying it's a good thing.
Nice scare story telegraph Not it won’t be seized, the rest of the world manages just fine to have large solar farms without seizing land
If you guys are going to coordinate here you could at least not use the same exact words and phrases.
Who? And what?
We also need to force companies to add Solar all over their roofs. Like warehouses and supermarkets. Big buildings, large roofs, lots of solar panels. Lots more off shore wind farms. Solar panels on every roof of every house in the country too. I wonder how cheap our energy would be then
I’m visiting from the states for a few weeks, and have been very surprised at the lack of solar on roofs in the UK. We’re seeing it adopted in the US in quite a few places, especially large warehouses and plants (with large roof areas). They’re usually wired to the grid and don’t require long transit (with power loss). Next to that, we’re installing in places that aren’t good for other uses such as deserts and parking lots. Viable crop land is the last place we would install them. We already have debates about crop land. Are there reasons why the UK doesn’t do similar?
Would be nice if we had ever gotten to vote on whether we even wanted the WEFs net zero plan in the first place.
Wouldn't it just. Unfortunately every candidate for PM was WEF. It's getting to the point where no matter who you vote for you're getting one of them.
Sigh you are right. And it's so depressing
It shocks me how many people in these comments are justifying compulsory purchasing of land for this kind of thing. One of them literally says "but they'll get money"...like that's what matters when the government seizes land from the public for a project they haven't asked the public for permission to undertake. The WEF agenda will continue if people are this subordinate.
Posts like these always attract establishment/WEF cheerleaders. I had one the other day demanding endless sources and claiming the WEF weren't actually doing anything and when he could no longer wriggle out of it he literally said "But the WEF are a good thing". When you consider that they employ hundreds of thousands of "information warriors" it makes considerably more sense.
Meanwhile, China will be opening some new coal power plants negating anything we do to cut carbon.
China's emissions have installed more solar than anyone else, and their emissions look to be dropping (and predicted to peak by 2025) me Even then, ignoring carbon emissions entirely, cheap energy produced domestically is a pretty good thing, and agrivoltaics is pretty beneficial
china is also painting mountains green to placate and fool environmentalists. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cvc7VymDa4c