| ▲ | danw1979 4 days ago |
| I took a stroll recently through the countryside around Swindon, UK, where there’s a massive new solar farm on formerly arable land. One thing I only just realised was how the view from the ground is so badly affected when you’re down amidst the endless rows of panels - they reach well above head height. 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. |
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| ▲ | teamonkey 4 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| Are you sure it’s arable land? The majority of solar farms in the UK are built on low-grade land that aren’t suitable for growing food. |
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| ▲ | cjrp 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | I wonder if that will remain the case. The input costs for farming are increasing (seed, fertiliser, energy), the output is becoming less predictable (flood, drought) and the grants from DEFRA which are meant to smooth things out have dried up somewhat since Brexit. If farmers are offered a guaranteed income for a field, I suspect they'd take it. | | | |
| ▲ | ghighi7878 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Green grass is still good to look at. | | |
| ▲ | teamonkey 4 days ago | parent [-] | | There is grass. Grass is allowed to grow around the panels. It’s great for biodiversity. |
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| ▲ | teamonkey 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I can no longer edit my comment to add this, but this article really hammers the point home. 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... |
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| ▲ | asdff 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| So much spare land in flat roofs in industrial and warehouse space but solar installations there, if they are there, seem to be limited to covering utility bills for the building over generating surplus for the grid. Much of the roof will remain uncovered, along with all the periphery lot, parking, truck yard, and access roads. No one would be complaining about any view there... |
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| ▲ | pjc50 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| How much extra on your electricity bill are you prepared to pay to not see it? |
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| ▲ | danw1979 3 days ago | parent [-] | | I seem to have come across as a nimby in my comment… 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. |
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| ▲ | Animats 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Needs a beauty strip of trees around the panels. |
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| ▲ | 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Most of the new solar farms do plant them, it just takes decades for trees to grow big enough to hide the panels Personally I like the panels | |
| ▲ | dylan604 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Yeah, 'cause shade is precisely what's needed for a solar farm | | |
| ▲ | swsieber 4 days ago | parent [-] | | Around, not over. Trees are a well studied thing where can you pick different species for different characteristics, like height, and growth speed. | | |
| ▲ | dylan604 4 days ago | parent [-] | | TIL shadows from trees only project down directly under the tree and never project away from the tree itself. My entire life experience has been rendered useless. | | |
| ▲ | fluoridation 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Ultimately, everything we build we build for ourselves, and people will generally prefer something that's nice to look at, if slightly inefficient, over the thing that's optimal at the cost of every other parameter. | |
| ▲ | ben_w 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Assuming they're talking about this one: https://www.thisiswiltshire.co.uk/news/25299826.swindon-sola... 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. |
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| ▲ | hattmall 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Ok, but why are you down among the panels? We have solar farms near my house and I don't hang out in them. You only see it when you drive by the place. I would much less prefer a giant windmill obstructing an otherwise scenic view. |
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| ▲ | deaux 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > Give me an onshore wind farm over this. 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. |
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| ▲ | simmerup 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Climate change is an existential threat, it's switch to green power asap or burn the world our kids will live in |
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| ▲ | asdff 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Would be nice if we started with the actual marginal land and not the marginal land in real estate terms. Roofs for a start. Parking lots next. Really no reason why any and all industrial land shouldn't look like a pure sea of solar from orbit. Every square inch is low hanging fruit no one would complain about a solar panel going in there. | | |
| ▲ | hattmall 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | But it's literally not low, it's up on a roof. The ground installs are preferable because they are low and easily accessible. | | |
| ▲ | asdff 3 days ago | parent [-] | | They still do rooftop solar like I say, it is just at a scale that seems to only pay for the lights in the building and not generate surplus. So a guy still has to be up there no matter what every now and then even right now. |
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| ▲ | seanmcdirmid 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | The best land for solar farms tends to be in the desert where there isn’t enough water for industrial use. | | |
| ▲ | asdff 3 days ago | parent [-] | | But we already have land set aside for industrial use, why not make use of it? Desert isn't free land either. There is a whole ecology there. | | |
| ▲ | seanmcdirmid 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Desert ecologies are often boosted by solar (turns out animals spend lots of time in the shade so they aren’t roasted, and solar panels are shade). Industrial areas, at least where I live, tend to be pretty dynamic with respect to structures, I guess you could do it, but you would have to redo it a lot. | | |
| ▲ | asdff 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Manatees like when you leave a freshwater hose leaking into the saltwater. Ecologist tell you it is bad though because the animal develops a dependency towards human intervention that might not be a long term phenomenon. 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. |
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| ▲ | m4rtink 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I would actually phrase is a "fossil fuels are an existential threat" - regardless on how climmate change will impact us, it is IMHO enough to see the destructions people are capable due to fossil fuel money & it makes 100% sense to get ridd of any dependency on fossil fuels ASAP. | |
| ▲ | carefree-bob 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | [flagged] | | |
| ▲ | nixpulvis 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | I don't think you're qualified to make this assessment. If a large majority of the scientific community is treating it and calling it an existential threat, I'm tempted to agree. In fact, I think most widely held scientific stances on this are meant to be balanced and as agreeable as possible, so I personally believe it's likely to be worse than the mainstream opinion. Climate migration is already an issue. Extreme climate events are already increasingly problematic. Will civilization collapse in the next 50 years. Almost certainly not, but will we be better off then than we are now? Unless we rapidly increase the rate at which we address this issue, I don't see how that happens either. | | |
| ▲ | carefree-bob 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Of course I'm qualified to make the assessment, as the respectable scientific community has been warning people to not make such bombastic statements, and similar warnings were in the IPCC. You really aren't doing yourself any favors by pushing hysteria into scientific disciplines. This is exactly why the climate movement has lost so much credibility and suffered so many policy setbacks. No, the world is not ending. The clouds are not burning. There is no risk to life on earth. These are technical discussions about whether sea levels will increase by 2mm per year or 3mm per year. | |
| ▲ | JumpCrisscross 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > large majority of the scientific community is treating it and calling it an existential threat I haven’t seen evidence of this. What I see is scientists making measured predictions about massive costs in human life, economies, refugee crises, and wars. Extinctions. Like, horrible stuff. But not extinction or even civilisational collapse. | | |
| ▲ | nixpulvis 3 days ago | parent [-] | | So extinctions, but not extinction? | | |
| ▲ | JumpCrisscross 3 days ago | parent [-] | | > extinctions, but not extinction? Yes. Extinctions are horrible, but they aren’t an existential threat to us. Climate change simply isn’t an existential threat. That doesn’t mean it isn’t urgent. Like, the Bronze Age collapse and black plague and WWII weren’t existential, doesn’t mean they’re fine. But raising the stakes beyond what the science says like this undermines the credibility of the real warnings. | | |
| ▲ | nixpulvis 2 days ago | parent [-] | | I think it's really naïve to realize that climate change is an existential threat to many species, but not connect that we are part of the ecosystem which is being put in danger. You are experiencing survivorship bias. Even if we don't go extinct. It's still an existential threat to our way of life. Which is also a totally valid interpretation of the phrase. | | |
| ▲ | JumpCrisscross 2 days ago | parent [-] | | > You are experiencing survivorship bias Ex ante survivorship is literally the delineation between existential and not. > Even if we don't go extinct. It's still an existential threat to our way of life You see why this comes across as bullshit, though. It’s needlessly redefining a word to seem more punchy. We have plenty of perils we massively mobilize against without imagining they’ll exterminate the human species. |
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| ▲ | nslsm 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | > I don't think you're qualified to make this assessment. The scientists aren’t, either, given how many times they have failed. |
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| ▲ | simmerup 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | It is 100% an existential threat, but the existential bit happens in 100 years so of course you're not going to see it materialize over night | | |
| ▲ | JumpCrisscross 4 days ago | parent [-] | | > It is 100% an existential threat, but the existential bit happens in 100 years No, it’s not, and no, we don’t know that. Humans will survive climate change. Rich countries will survive, too. We will all suffer. Economically, healthwise and aesthetically. But that’s not existential. Framing it as such is disingenuous and counterproductive. | | |
| ▲ | seanmcdirmid 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | We will go from 8 billion humans to maybe 1 or 2 billion humans, but that is probably going to happen either way. Poor countries will be obliterated, rich countries are likely to see tanking living standards. Long term humans go extinct (or are superseded by some sort of singularity successor) and the earth recovers in a few thousand years as if we never existed. | |
| ▲ | simmerup 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | RCP8.5 is pretty much ruled out by people as unlikely for some reason, even as we have the major super power on the planet pulling out of the Paris agreement on climate change. There is clearly a temperature at which this planet will not support human life, and we could definitely get the planet to that temperature if we don't change course and reach net zero. Saying its not an existential threat is just wild to me. | | |
| ▲ | ben_w 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | > There is clearly a temperature at which this planet will not support human life Yes, but that temperature isn't going to be reached by fossil fuels.* The reduced brain function from the extra CO2 (if we burned all of it) may make us unable to adapt to the higher temperature, however. * Ironically, unbounded growth of PV to tile all Earth's deserts could also raise the planet's temperature by 4 K or so, and 6 K or so if tiling all non-farm land. Deserts are huge, this by itself would represent an enormous increase in global electricity supply; but also, current growth trends for PV have been approximately exponential (in the actual maths sense not just "fast") for decades now, so this could happen in as little as 35 years give or take a few (both scenarios are within the same margin for error, because exponential is like that). | |
| ▲ | JumpCrisscross 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | > There is clearly a temperature at which this planet will not support human life, and we could definitely get the planet to that temperature There is such a temperature. We are not getting to it in half a century at current emission rates, even with zero curtailment. If you have a source that shows the opposite, I’d be happy to read it. | | |
| ▲ | simmerup 4 days ago | parent [-] | | Of course not in half a century, but it's not like the earth just stops getting hotter after 2100 rolls around. What about 2200? Humanity at 2300? It's the same planet with the same feedback loops after all. | | |
| ▲ | JumpCrisscross 4 days ago | parent [-] | | > What about 2200? Humanity at 2300? You literally said “the existential threat happens in 100 years.” And to your questions, we don’t know. I’d love to see the data. I’m still sceptical we hit “existential” levels for human survival. That wouldn’t even happen if we went back to dinosaur levels of CO2. |
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| ▲ | teamonkey 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Perhaps we should be using ‘apocalyptic threat’ instead? | | |
| ▲ | JumpCrisscross 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Sure. That’s fair. I still think it’s potentially hyperbolic, but it’s closer to true than false. “Existential threat” is just plain wrong. |
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| ▲ | card_zero 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | I've never been able to decide whether it is or not. I'm still vaguely scared of the clathrate gun, permafrost releasing extra CO2, and phytoplankton shrinking under ocean acidification so we can't have as much oxygen as we're accustomed to. Edit: one of those crossfire situations where the downvotes could be coming from either direction. I'm going to assume they mean "don't be scared". | | |
| ▲ | carefree-bob 3 days ago | parent [-] | | I don't know who downvoted you, people treat this topic with religious zeal. Yes, basically all the arguments trying to claim that the influence of CO2 has positive feedbacks relies on cascades of things amplifying warming. And that's certainly something to discuss, whether there exists a type of rube goldberg machine where higher levels of CO2 cause the permafrost to melt which cause even higher levels of CO2 which cause something else to release even more CO2, etc. I certainly wont deny that such a sequence of events is possible, and it's worth studying. But on the other side of that you have basic physics, which shows that the warming effects go with the log of CO2. That really slows things down by quite a bit. It turns a doubling into an additive factor. Now, could it be that the cascade of events is such that it overcomes the logarithm? E.g. that it is an exponential or super-exponential chain of events that would release exponentially more CO2. Uhh, maybe, but this is not something to try to terrify the population with. And it sounds extremely unlikely. So you need an extremely precarious set of assumptions -- or just deny physics outright -- to overcome Arrhenius' Greenhouse rule. Logarithms cover a multitude of growth sins. |
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| ▲ | nitwit005 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
| That just sounds like endless corn fields, only solar panels. |
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| ▲ | card_zero 4 days ago | parent [-] | | I don't much like walking through corn fields either, it's heavy going, all that trampling. Farmers should just grow pretty flowers, small ones. | | |
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