Indeed. There’s not good reason why solar farms need have the fencing they have. Local authorities ought to have been preventing it at the planning stage.
I have seen a couple planning applications where the original proposals that went to the council made a big song and dance about public access. It looked like they were being partly sold on the idea that here was land previously locked away, and it would now be made available for the masses to frolick in.
Once they had the planning permission, things changed fast. As they often do.
I’m all for investing in green technology, but as an ecologist, absolutely nothing about solar farms in the UK makes sense to me. There’s absolutely no way the maths adds up if you do it properly.
Loss of productive agricultural land: means the food gets grown outside the UK, increasing transport emissions and quite possibly driving destruction of local habitats.
Embedded carbon in the components, construction and infrastructure.
Carbon emissions from end-of-life dismantling and processing.
Environmental degradation from all the mining and industrial processes associated with both of the above.
Biodiversity loss inside the solar farms, where evidence is already growing that they are largely dominated by low diversity ruderal weeds (docks, nettles, brambles, shade tolerant ferns).
Etc etc.
The whole thing is only enabled by perverse subsidies that mean the real costs are hidden and largely borne by the taxpayer.
My god - I start to sound like a grumpy right winger. You know it’s bad when…
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