The solar elephant

The solar PV industry is seeking to cover our landscape with large and unsightly panels

While we mechanical engineers debate the complexities of wind farm efficiencies (PE January 2013) there is a more insidious elephant in the room. The solar PV industry – no moving parts apart from the fans to cool the inverters – is seeking to cover our landscape with large and unsightly panels on an industrial scale with a detrimental visual impact. 

I note that Solar PV Companies across the country readily quote figures in their PR literature to suggest that 300 homes can, on a sustainable basis, be supplied with electricity by one megawatt of installed capacity on a solar photo voltaic park. This is to bend the truth in an attempt to hoodwink the public into its acquiescence of the industry’s, often ill conceived, schemes to maximise their profits at the expense of electricity consumers. It is to ignore other factors, including loss of land for agricultural production, that need to be taken into account in assessing the quality of their proposals.

A 10 mw solar farm, covering some 50 acres of countryside, will produce nothing at all between the hours of sunset and sunrise. Indeed it will only produce the rated 10mw for a few hours either side of mid-day during the three summer months when the sun is at its zenith and the sky is a cloudless azure blue. At all other times the output is severely degraded. Apart from cloudy summer days, the maximum degradation will be during the winter months between the autumn and spring equinoxes when the sun sinks below the equator.  When the sun is low in the sky and the time it is above the horizon shorter, even on the sunniest of days the output will be cut by some seventy five per cent. And we worry about the efficiency of wind farms!

Not even a single house, let alone 3000, can be continuously supplied with electrical power from a 10 mw solar farm without back up from an alternative source available around the clock for 365 days a year. This all begs the question as to whether it is realistic to allow the landscape of some of our beautiful countryside, often in tourist regions to be despoiled by such huge and inefficient industrial schemes.

Ian Brannam, Tiverton, Devon

Next letter: Public perception of wind turbines