They almost suffered a catastrophic shutdown a year or two ago and the situation has not improved
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_Europe_Synchronous... exists for good reason.
But they did get a big warning shot in 1989 and 2011, and ignored those lessons for cost reasons. A couple hundred people died.
but it doesn't look like there actually is a major issues. A look at satellite images it looks more like a problem for a handful of people across all of Denmark which then is misrepresented by populist, to push anti-solar propaganda.
(Oh, and we don't even know how much the people in Hjolderup do resent it. Like seriously, they might even have put the solar panels there them-self to make money, idk.. Because conveniently the article shows pictures of Hjolderup to invoke a felling of how terrible it is, but never any interviews or options with anyone _from_ Hjolderup. )
more interesting is, if that is actually true. Or only true because idk. the investors also bought the land and they profits are used to amortize the land buying cost etc.
I actually live in Denmark, and we can produce solar energy just fine. My dad installed rooftop solar 10 years ago, and that thing has 90% of his electricity usage since then. It's still producing at around 85% capacity too.
EU has enough areas with sparse population and not that much nature which also are south enough to have it work out well with solar panels of the current generations.
And besides that even most EU countries have enough places in them to still put a lot of solar panels without much issues and/or replacing fields.
going as far as North Africa is a bit too far to be convenient for power transport
That’s kind of what we do today for pretty much everything. Most of the population on the planet doesn’t live near oil rigs, refineries, solar farms, power plants or wind. In fact most of the population doesn’t live near where we produce our food or most of the things we need for survival.
the issue is less the transport distances but changes in "from where to where" sometimes needing some extensions/improvements to the power grid. Through commonly in ways which anyway make sense and all pretty much "standard" solutions well understood. Through there are some more complicated exceptions to that.
EDIT: "distances we speak about" assumed less many local less dense populate/suitable spots across the EU, not a mega project like a energy pipeline from North Afrika.
- that village is the exception, not the norm at all
- that village is in a "small" (on agricultural scale) strip of solar panels, around which there are green fields over green fields over green field ....
- the photos are deceptive, the first is from the start of the strip to the end and contains the huge majority of all solar panels in like a 50km? 100km? radius. The second photo does not show the village but a separate house up the street, if the photo where in a bit more flat angle you would see a normal filed behind the solar panels. The village itself has a "strip" of (small) green fields around it which should make it less bad to live there.
I mean don't get me wrong it probably sucks for the home owners in Hjolderup. But it's not representative for the situation in Denmark at all.
Though the recent election is slight swing to the left, and the newly created right wing parties are already undergoing various forms of internal meltdowns, making a center left government friendly green energy projects most likely.
the images in the article looks bad
until you take a short look at satellite images and realize:
- it's not the norm but the exception
- the photos are made to make it look maximally bad in a deceptive/manipulative way,
and that is even in context, that Denmark is a special case in that it both quite small and has little "dead" (not agriculturally efficiently usable land). And many old "culturally" protected houses where fitting solar on top of it is far more complicated/inefficient. Don't get me wrong it isn't the only special case, but there are very many countries which don't really have such issues.
Also quite interestingly this "iron fields" can be "not bad" from a nature perspective, at least compared to mono-culture with pesticide usage. Due to the plant and animal live below them. Through that is assuming people do extra steps to prevent that live.
Its the Guardian so that is a very unlikely motivation.
It also presents the draw man that solar can only go in huge fields that would otherwise grow food.
There are plenty of rooftops and car parks that can be covered in solar to excellent benefit.
Ie https://www.eventplanner.net/news/10582_largest-solar-carpor...
> There are plenty of rooftops and car parks that can be covered in solar to excellent benefit.
It's worth calling this approach out too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agrivoltaics
It's similar to the telephoto shots of wind farms taken from far away that make them seem really close together.
honestly that always sounded very misguided to me
fields are not perfectly renewable, biomas gets removed from them and fertilizers can only help so much in any given time frame
mostly corn/raps mono-culture can make that easily far worse
and not needing to import food can safe a lot of energy too
also as you mentioned, modern solar panels seem overall more efficient
in difference to solar or wind, biodiesel just seem a very bad choice
doctorpangloss•1h ago