Discussion
‘Yes to fields of wheat, no to fields of iron’: how the world’s greenest country soured on solar
OutOfHere: Denmark could use floating sea solar. It will fix both problems.
mikaeluman: The dirty secret is of course that the Danish power grid would be totally unusable without the base power provided from Sweden and Norway.They almost suffered a catastrophic shutdown a year or two ago and the situation has not improved
ceejayoz: Is that really a "dirty secret"?https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_Europe_Synchronous... exists for good reason.
tensor: The power grids of US states are similarly linked. Very dirty.
tensor: The only dirty secret is that humans are happy to kill future generations as the effects of the oil economy will only minimally affect the people alive today.
darth_avocado: This would’ve been a non issue if human beings worked together as a species, but we don’t. There is plenty of space on the planet where no one lives and nothing thrives that could be converted massive solar farms that power the planet.
SoftTalker: Transmitting that energy from where nobody lives to where people do live becomes the problem with that.
ahartmetz: It could possibly be combined with a solution to the storage problem: store the energy in some transportable chemical form like hydrogen, methane or the electrolyte of a redox flow battery.
dathinab: not buying that this isn't anti renewable propaganda for the USthe images in the article looks baduntil 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.
chvid: Denmark has undergone the same sort of right wing populism that has gone through most of the west. Including rhetorical tricks like this.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.
moffers: We work together pretty well. From a 20,000 foot level maybe it looks like chaos and like a central guiding hand would make everything better. But, two people working together is easier to direct than 100,000 people (or more!). Unpacking this gives us the wonders of the economics and behavioral psychology. I’d say, all things considered, we could be doing a hell of a lot worse on cooperation with each other.
testing22321: 100%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...
Sharlin: Building HVDC lines from North Africa to Europe, for example, wouldn't be a huge feat of civil engineering. Rather standard stuff, really.
mort96: I can't even read it because you either have to accept all tracking or pay a subscription fee. Pretty sure that's against the GDPR? Anyway, not a good look.
crooked-v: Except for Texas, which decided as a state that avoiding federal regulation was worth people dying every winter from power outages.
karamanolev: I'm not a fan of Texan electrical isolationism, but "people dying every winter from power outages" is stretching it a bit...
ceejayoz: Every winter is a stretch, yes.But they did get a big warning shot in 1989 and 2011, and ignored those lessons for cost reasons.
ls612: Regardless of your political beliefs I would hope you could agree that using arable land for solar power is dumb. Denmark is almost entirely arable land and relatively small to boot so they should be using more compact power sources.
ddellacosta: > 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.It's worth calling this approach out too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agrivoltaics
mellosouls: "not buying that this isn't anti renewable propaganda for the US"Its the Guardian so that is a very unlikely motivation.
Arn_Thor: _Something_ motivates them, though. They have been on a wild anti-solar bend the last year or more. Dozens of articles, all with the same anti-solar NIMBY bent
Arn_Thor: The Guardian continues its anti-solar crusade. For some inexplicable reason
dathinab: in the distances we speak about we do so all the time with more centralized energy sources (like e.g. nuklear) due to their centralized naturethe 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.
dathinab: we don't need something that long distance at allEU 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
dathinab: and field which have been damaged due to overuse and incorrect handling and preferable shouldn't be used for the next ~50 year
dathinab: if there where an issue yes,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. )
ceejayoz: "from North Africa to Europe" is, to be clear, ~9 miles in spots.
