ARE fields full of solar panels a blight on England鈥檚 green and pleasant land? Some figures at the top of the UK government certainly think so.
鈥淚 think one of the most depressing sights when you鈥檙e driving through England is seeing fields that should be full of crops or livestock full of solar panels,鈥� said Liz Truss, then UK prime minister, in August. 鈥淎gricultural lands鈥� should be used for food production.鈥�
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This is an issue in many other countries too. .
In England, existing rules already exclude solar farms on the most productive agricultural land. Nevertheless, the UK government was reportedly planning to .
With Rishi Sunak, who has previously , now having replaced Truss, it is unclear whether the UK government will pursue this, but opponents of solar on farmland must know three things.
First, a lot of food is being turned into biofuels 鈥� even though food-based biofuels increase greenhouse emissions, harm biodiversity and push up food prices.
Second, plants aren鈥檛 great at capturing solar energy. Crops typically turn , whereas solar panels convert about 20 per cent of light energy into electricity.
Third, farming is very polluting, responsible for a third of global greenhouse gas emissions as well as many other pollutants. In the UK in 2020, rather than food. That is five times as much as the . (Golf courses cover 126,000 hectares.)
To see which is a better use of land, let鈥檚 compare what we get from solar panels and biofuels. Per year, , Simon Evans at the climate site Carbon Brief has calculated. For sugar beet, it is 53,000 kilometres.
A hectare of solar, by contrast, can produce enough electricity in a year for an electric car to drive 2,570,000 kilometres. So a hectare of solar gets you 50 to 110 times further 鈥� and with much less pollution along the way.
This is why it makes no sense economically or environmentally to ban solar on farms, while continuing to allow farms to grow foods and turn them into biofuels.
Why can鈥檛 solar just go on roofs, you might ask? There are several reasons , from having solar panels facing the right direction at the right angle to the costs of installation and maintenance.
We need to expand renewable capacity as fast as we can to have any chance of stopping the rise in average global temperature from greatly exceeding 1.5掳C, not add .
It is also worth pointing out that the land under solar farms and grazing or managed for wildlife.
That said, when it comes to food, our aim should be to do away with conventional farms. It is estimated that producing food directly from solar electricity 鈥� food from air 鈥� would let us produce as much protein as we currently get from crops on a tenth of the land. This would have huge environmental benefits, like allowing us to reforest vast areas.
This year, the UK got a glimpse of the future when large parts of the country became parched, temperatures exceeded 40掳C (104掳F) and wildfires destroyed homes. It is astounding that some leaders still don鈥檛 seem to grasp that global warming is a far greater threat than a few solar farms.
Michael Le Page is an environment reporter at 麻豆传媒
