Image credit: MIT
Industrialising the countryside is now deemed a plus for the environment by climate obsessives, including the government. Solar power is ineffective in UK winters, when electricity demand is often at its highest during the long hours of darkness anyway.
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Drawing on new data from the solar industry the campaign group Net Zero Watch has revealed that an astonishing 37,000 MW of land based solar PV capacity is in pre-planning.
If built, this would take 150,000 acres of farmland – or 75,000 football pitches – out of production at a time when Britain has less farmland in use than at any time since 1945, and is losing such land to industrial and other uses at the rate of about 99,000 acres a year, increasing import dependency.
Solar energy should not be permitted to add to this serious problem.
However, due to weakness in the planning guidance, little or no protection is offered to ordinary grades of farmland, encouraging landowners to think they can easily secure the conversion of food producing fields into building land. The misrepresentation of land quality in the planning system is suspected.
Net Zero Watch has recommended an immediate and firm revision of the planning guidance to protect the national interest by changing the presumption in favour to a presumption against solar development on any land, leaving the developer to prove their case on its own merits.
Dr John Constable, Net Zero Watch’s Director of Energy, said:
Farmland is already a renewable energy producer, making food from sunlight. Sacrificing that national asset to produce low quality electrical energy from Solar Photovoltaic panels is foolish in itself and will have deep and troubling long-term implications for British food security.”
Source here.
Net Zero Watch: Solar energy and the threat to food security [pdf]
via Tallbloke’s Talkshop
February 14, 2022 at 03:39AM
Iowa Climate Science Education 