Anyone live close to a Solar Farm?

fretmeister

Of course it's daft to put it all in one place, it's the point about the capacity of the sun that is important.
If there is only 1 location it would be getting terrorist threats every day for power cuts.

But solar power works well even in places that we don't view as being bright enough.

ICBM

fretmeister said:

Of course it's daft to put it all in one place, it's the point about the capacity of the sun that is important.

Exactly - this is also why I still think that spending billions trying to build (what I believe to be impossible) nuclear fusion power stations on Earth is a waste of money, when there is a perfectly good natural one with far more capacity than we will ever need operating already.

VimFuego

isn't the sun supposed to be burning out in a few billion years? I think it's a mistake to make long term infrastructure plans on something on inherently unsustainable. 

RiftAmps

There's one just two fields down from the workshop. Most of the time I forget it's actually there. The farmer said there is a problem with the soil in that field so struggled to grow crops (yields were always down compared with the adjacent fields), so put a solar farm in instead.

strtdv

I'd have no real objection as long as it's got a hedge round it. I don't buy the "we should be using land for sheep" argument (having previously worked on a sheep farm). There's plenty of poor quality land that is very inefficient for livestock use (either simply unsuitable or requiring large amounts of fertiliser) which can easily be used for solar farms. Even using actual reasonably good farming ground is probably fine as the total area will be fairly tiny in the grand scheme of things. 

(I'm all for putting panels on roofs etc as well, unfortunately our house has no south facing roof or I'd have both PV and hot water panels up)

VimFuego

RiftAmps said:

There's one just two fields down from the workshop. Most of the time I forget it's actually there. The farmer said there is a problem with the soil in that field so struggled to grow crops (yields were always down compared with the adjacent fields), so put a solar farm in instead.

if I can be serious for a moment, we have a lot of solar farms round here (NW Devon), most of them seem to be on boggy, culm grassland. It's useless for crops, and not even that much good for sheep (makes for tasty lamb, but can't support many of them) so may as well use it for something more profitable and useful. 

LuttiS

I pass one on the way to work, the field had been empty for years before the solar farm went up. Was only a few weeks to put the whole thing up, no heavy construction just a small crew digging some shallow trenches and putting frames together etc. I'd expect minimal disruption.

crunchman

VimFuego said:

RiftAmps said:

There's one just two fields down from the workshop. Most of the time I forget it's actually there. The farmer said there is a problem with the soil in that field so struggled to grow crops (yields were always down compared with the adjacent fields), so put a solar farm in instead.

if I can be serious for a moment, we have a lot of solar farms round here (NW Devon), most of them seem to be on boggy, culm grassland. It's useless for crops, and not even that much good for sheep (makes for tasty lamb, but can't support many of them) so may as well use it for something more profitable and useful. 

There is a bigger issue around land use.  There is a lot of marginal farmland that would have had trees on it two thousand years ago.  We need to be planting more trees on a lot of that land.

I'm not saying we shouldn't have solar farms, but the best place for solar panels is on buildings.  There is no reason that you couldn't put solar on the roof of the office where I work.  Based on the output from the solar panels on my brother's house, a roof that size could easily generate 20kW plus.

There is a school next door to my office.  Between the main school building and the sports hall, they could generate huge amounts of power from solar.

Even if a lot of houses aren't suitable, there will still be millions that are.

Ideally, those are the places where we should be building solar.  Agricultural land should be used for food to reduce food miles, and land that isn't much use for agriculture should be re-forested.

VimFuego

crunchman said:

VimFuego said:

RiftAmps said:

There's one just two fields down from the workshop. Most of the time I forget it's actually there. The farmer said there is a problem with the soil in that field so struggled to grow crops (yields were always down compared with the adjacent fields), so put a solar farm in instead.

if I can be serious for a moment, we have a lot of solar farms round here (NW Devon), most of them seem to be on boggy, culm grassland. It's useless for crops, and not even that much good for sheep (makes for tasty lamb, but can't support many of them) so may as well use it for something more profitable and useful. 

There is a bigger issue around land use.  There is a lot of marginal farmland that would have had trees on it two thousand years ago.  We need to be planting more trees on a lot of that land.

I'm not saying we shouldn't have solar farms, but the best place for solar panels is on buildings.  There is no reason that you couldn't put solar on the roof of the office where I work.  Based on the output from the solar panels on my brother's house, a roof that size could easily generate 20kW plus.

There is a school next door to my office.  Between the main school building and the sports hall, they could generate huge amounts of power from solar.

Even if a lot of houses aren't suitable, there will still be millions that are.

Ideally, those are the places where we should be building solar.  Agricultural land should be used for food to reduce food miles, and land that isn't much use for agriculture should be re-forested.

yup, agreed, a more joined up use of land is needed, including changing upland use away from sheep to trees etc. However, that requires leadership from government, as at the moment there's not a lot of money in trees and fairly easy money in solar.

ESBlonde

Having solar around the earth makes sense because that way there is generation 24 hours a day somewhere. In the same way tidal generation for the likes of the UK makes sense as there is always somewhere not at slack tide not too far from the point of energy use.

The removal of grants and Feed in tarrifs for new home solar panels is probably a bit too soon, but it still makes sense to have them for most people if you can stand the up front investment or get someone else to invest and hand the panels back to you after a few years.

revsorg

strtdv said:

(I'm all for putting panels on roofs etc as well, unfortunately our house has no south facing roof or I'd have both PV and hot water panels up)

We have an east-west facing roof and installed a 3.6kW system 9 years ago. It is split into two distinct systems, two inverters, one generates mostly morning, the other afternoon.  It's set to break even in 3 years.

We are now adding a second 4kW system and this uses micro inverters so each panel works individually. It's only costing £7k but unlike the older system there are no government incentives for feed in.

Jalapeno

All for roof panels to be compulsory going forward, and developers should be penalised for NOT creating green spaces and planting more trees.

Rocker

Thanks guys for your input.  All responses much appreciated.  The main fear in the community is of the possibility of noise from the transmission sub-station and a lot of concern about the prospect of the 110Kv line to be installed.

Someone asked about setback distance - usually 250 metres, one house about 50 metres.

To date there are no Solar Farms in operation in the Republic of Ireland.  A quick Google tells me that there are two Solar Farms in Northern Ireland.  It may help allay fears in the locality if a delegation were to visit one of those Solar Farms in Northern Ireland.

There is no question of NIMBYism in this case.  We are all in favour of reducing our carbon emissions but if doing so creates different problems, we want to know about it.  The experiences of those members who live close to Solar Farms is entirely positive, this will be relayed to the people who will be directly affected by the Solar Farm. 

fob

ICBM said:

Exactly - this is also why I still think that spending billions trying to build (what I believe to be impossible) nuclear fusion power stations on Earth is a waste of money, when there is a perfectly good natural one with far more capacity than we will ever need operating already.

Just out of curiosity - why do you think fusion power stations are impossible?

ICBM

fob said:

Just out of curiosity - why do you think fusion power stations are impossible?

Because there is still no evidence that a controlled, sustained net-positive-energy reaction can be produced, even after well over half a century of research - it's always "close", or "in a few years" - and that's even on a test scale, let alone something that could be used to generate useful amounts of power.

It's now considerably longer from the first fusion bomb to now, than it was from the discovery of radioactivity to the first fusion bomb... and that's despite all the huge advances in science and technology since then.

monquixote

ICBM said:

fob said:

Just out of curiosity - why do you think fusion power stations are impossible?

Because there is still no evidence that a controlled, sustained net-positive-energy reaction can be produced, even after well over half a century of research - it's always "close", or "in a few years" - and that's even on a test scale, let alone something that could be used to generate useful amounts of power.

It's now considerably longer from the first fusion bomb to now, than it was from the discovery of radioactivity to the first fusion bomb... and that's despite all the huge advances in science and technology since then.

Still seems worth trying though

RandallFlagg

I have worked in power generation for 16 years, and spent a lot of that time on fossil fuel power plants in close proximity to 400kV power lines.

It hasn't affected me at all, just read some of my posts on here, I am quite normal.

DLM

Do they grow on farms?

Based on the official Instagram, those boxed in this warehouse

seem to have been harvested mostly from gloomy forests...

fob

ICBM said:

fob said:

Just out of curiosity - why do you think fusion power stations are impossible?

Because there is still no evidence that a controlled, sustained net-positive-energy reaction can be produced, even after well over half a century of research - it's always "close", or "in a few years" - and that's even on a test scale, let alone something that could be used to generate useful amounts of power.

It's now considerably longer from the first fusion bomb to now, than it was from the discovery of radioactivity to the first fusion bomb... and that's despite all the huge advances in science and technology since then.

Fair enough, there was just something in the way it was worded (or the way I read it) that made me think you might have a link to the industry. As I understand it, it's more of an engineering problem than a physics problem at the moment and, as monquixote says, it's worth pursuing as the rewards will more than justify the increased effort required.

randella

Rocker said:

There is no question of NIMBYism in this case.  We are all in favour of reducing our carbon emissions but if doing so creates different problems, we want to know about it.  The experiences of those members who live close to Solar Farms is entirely positive, this will be relayed to the people who will be directly affected by the Solar Farm. 

I don't reckon it sounded like NIMBYism - if someone started banging up something like that next to my house I'd want to know what it was about.

Then again I'm a nosy bugger with a background in technology