In Denmark, the spread of solar panels has become a divisive issue
theguardian.com

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77 points

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PaulHoule

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17 hours ago

175 comments

jeppester ・ 13 hours ago

I live in a small Danish town that would have very likely been surrounded by solar panels by now if we had not put up a fight.

The problem is that these projects are pitched to land owners, to be placed in areas they can't see from their own windows. Those who live nearby are not involved until the approval is a formality (or presented as such). Often times the investors will also pay certain house owners for their silence, making the locals suspicious of each other.

They do this because obviously no one likes someone from the outside to take away the green* surroundings that are a big part of why people live there - and in the process lowering the value of everyone's houses.

I can't comprehend why someone would think that this was a good way of rolling out solar.

I agree that we are going to need solar as part of the mix. It would just be much better to start with the locations where people do NOT want to live, for instance next to motorways.

Luckily I think we are slowly moving in that direction due to all the resistance.

*I'm well aware that fields are heavy industry, but they are plants and rarely 2,5 meters tall.

  • shibapuppie ・ 7 hours ago

    What's the over-under on tire and brake dust settling on panels next to (presumably) high-speed motorways?

    • jeppester ・ 4 hours ago

      Thank you for bringing this up. It's not something I've thought of as a problem before.

      It does in fact - based on my 5 minutes of research - seem that it can be an important factor, especially if the panels are placed within "splash range" of the road.

      When I mention solar panels near motorways I'm not picturing them right next to the road, I'm thinking of larger strips, perhaps 30-100 meters from the road and in areas that have already become unattractive due to noise pollution. There are many such areas.

      I think the main issue with using them is that there are many land owners involved. It's easier to get fewer land owners to commit larger fields, than many land owners to commit small strips. But that is IMO a solvable problem, not a good reason for placing the panels next to where people like to live.

    • cucumber3732842 ・ an hour ago

      I'm betting the effect is a rounding error compared to road salt build up.

  • garte ・ 4 hours ago

    You know that all that "nature" you desire is synthetic? Living in rural areas without actually working there is as far from a natural state as it can be: the whole lifestyle is based on subsidies by cities and technology: your concrete, your car, your heating, your power, groceries... it's all getting brought to you by fossil fuels and plastics.

    So maybe accepting some part of that technology to stand on your "natural" grass in your front yard might be necessary to at least offset _some_ of the costs you're imposing on the environment living your lifestyle.

    • jeppester ・ an hour ago

      It seems as though you are antagonizing a certain imaginary group of people that I do not belong to, just because I chose to live in the country side.

      There was a reason I used the phrasing "green surroundings", I'm well aware that it's not "nature" in the sense of being untouched by humans. There are hardly any such places in Denmark.

      Nevertheless people live here because they like these surroundings, it doesn't make any sense that they should "pay" for living here by having those surroundings taken away.

      Whether or not it's feasible to have people living in the country side is a whole other discussion, which I do not think can be boiled down to city = good, countryside = bad.

      Another related discussion is what is the natural habitat for a human being, at this point in time a slight majority of humans might live in larger cities, but that is historically a new development. I don't have the answer here, but my guess would be that a small town in the country side is more similar to the environments humans have historically lived and evolved in.

    • cucumber3732842 ・ an hour ago

      > it's all getting brought to you by fossil fuels and plastics.

      Which come from where? Last I checked there weren't many pump jacks in Copenhagen.

      Pretty much all material wealth of modern society comes from raw materials sourced in rural areas. Those then get processed locally (e.g you don't waste money shipping logs, you mill them and ship boards) and post processed in increasingly urban areas. It's the paper pushing (engineering, finance, etc) of the supply chain and distribution that tends to be centered around urban areas.

      I hate these sort of macro-economically ignorant takes and their peddlers. Acting like either part of the economy could exist in anything like it's current capacity without the other is an exercise in lying with numbers to obfuscate the lies.

deaux ・ 8 hours ago

The Guardian here using the word "climate" 6 times. They mention prices and economics zero times. They talk about energy sovereignty zero times. While the US attack on Iran has massively increased fossil fuel prices.

Framing solar expansion as being for the climate rather than the number one way reduce cost of living for everyone, boost the economy through cheap electricity, _and_ decrease dependency on other countries (a proper nationalist goal), is simply propagandizing for fossil fuel and capital interests. That's what the Guardian is doing here. Choosing that framing in an article less than 3 weeks after the attack on Iran is deliberate.

jmward01 ・ 14 hours ago

We are at a moment where we are finding more and more ways to integrate solar in. It is likely we will go 'too far' in some ways but hopefully over the next few decades we will see a lot more well integrated solutions like vertical panels complementing farming and solar integrated, potentially with lower efficiency but also less impact, into things like building surfaces and other non-traditional places. Getting a diversity of options out there, and iterating on them, is key to the next phase where solar is everywhere reasonable by default and well integrated in to daily life.

  • iso1631 ・ 13 hours ago

    I live in the UK in a town of 10,000 people, so say 4,000 houses (probably far higher than there are). If every house had a 10kWp (way more than most installs) that would be 40MW generation.

    On the outskirts of town we have a 40MW solar farm about the same size as the golf course. Most people have no idea it's there, it uses barely any land compared to the rest of farmland around here. That generates about 40GWh a year.

    The cost of renting the land it's on each year is about £20k a year, or 50p per MWh, basically nothing. Land is effectively free compared to the value from "farming the sun", it's far cheaper than the scaffolding to put 8kWp on a roof

    • Gibbon1 ・ 2 hours ago

      I like make the point that solar farms produce 30-100 times more energy per acre than farming plants.

      Lot of 'nature' is actually land that has been or being completely trashed via agriculture. But it's so normalized people don't get that.

SoftTalker ・ 17 hours ago

Denmark is a poor location for solar. They are pretty far north and don't have a lot of sunny days that are good for solar generation. When they do, those peaks drive energy prices negative. From the article: Over the next 10 years, the official expectation is a very large rise in the amount of solar produced. But that kind of clashes with the reality on the ground – they can’t make money

  • ZeroGravitas ・ 16 hours ago

    Far north places have long summer days. This doesn't align well with the winter heating needs but it does balance really well with wind generation which peaks in winter.

  • torginus ・ an hour ago

    Thing is, panels are so cheap that if you put them on your roof, it very well might cost the same or less as roof tiles per m2.

    You can also put more panels on than the rated peak of your inverter. As long as you don't surpass voltage limits, if you put on more panels, youll get more generation during non-peak hours, and it wont even affect your inverter negatively.

    Usually you can easily put 2x+ the peak wattage, as your inverter likely has 2 strings, and each of them can take the whole capacity of the inverter alone.

  • ninalanyon ・ 13 hours ago

    Latitude is not everything. Oslo, which is further north than all of Denmark gets more insolation than Hamburg, which is further south than all of Denmark.

    And don't forget that storage is getting cheaper so it will get more and more practical to save a some of that midday solar energy to be used in the evening.

  • fritzo ・ 14 hours ago

    If it's a poor location for photovoltaics, it's exactly as a poor for photosynthesis

    • amarant ・ 13 hours ago

      It's very seasonal for both. But we're currently better at storing wheat for 6 months than we are at storing electricity for a similar period.

    • PaulHoule ・ 12 hours ago

      In most places photosynthesis is limited by (1) the availability of water and (2) the availability of bio-available Nitrogen. Sunlight is less limiting by far.

  • _moof ・ 7 hours ago

    I don't understand why energy production must be profitable.

    • leonidasrup ・ an hour ago

      Energy production doesn't have to be profitable, but no private investor would invest into a unprofitable business.

      If energy production in Denmark would not by profitable, the Government of Denmark could nationalize the energy production, or push households to install more solar and sell the energy at predefined price to the grid, or increase taxes to pay out subsidies to make energy production profitable again for private investors. Or combine all this approaches.

    • Ekaros ・ an hour ago

      For it to be market based the investment must generate positive return.

      On other hand I would not find replacing all energy production with government run nuclear plants as unreasonable.

    • samrus ・ 7 hours ago

      It does at least need to be feasible

  • dathinab ・ 17 hours ago

    from the article which uses intentionally deceptive photography angles to paint a very different picture, yes

    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.

  • delusional ・ 16 hours ago

    That's a terrible argument on the face of it. "They can't make any energy, but also they make so much energy they can't use it all".

    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.

    • littlestymaar ・ 15 hours ago

      > that thing has 90% of his electricity usage

      How is that supposed to work with cloudy days with barely 7 hours of daylight in winter?

      • t-writescode ・ 14 hours ago
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        Solar has always been a part of a wholistic strategy. We’ve known this ever since the sun went down at night and we had to compensate for it.

        • logifail ・ 7 hours ago

          > strategy

          Umm, so we still have to build enough traditional (and, ideally, dispatchable) generation capacity to make sure we can cover our electricity needs during those periods in winter where it's very cloudy and it's not windy?

          eg Jan 2025

          https://www.theguardian.com/money/2025/jan/22/weather-bomb-e...

          "Cloudy and still weather has caused Great Britain’s renewable energy output to fall to near zero this week"

          "Britain’s wind power output fell to just above zero on Wednesday, which, combined with the cold, dark weather, caused the market price for electricity to climb to almost £250 per megawatt-hour at auction, or almost seven times the average price before the pandemic"

          "The sudden drop-off in renewable energy due to dull windless winter weather, known as dunkelflaute in German, has also forced the system operator to pay gas power stations more than £500/MWh to run on Wednesday evening when household demand is expected to reach its peak.

          The weather conditions – the third dunkelflaute of the winter so far – left Britain’s electricity grid reliant on gas-fired power stations. They accounted for more than 70% of power generation at points on Wednesday."

        • littlestymaar ・ 6 hours ago
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          True, but then why claim unrealistic figures like op and their "90% of his electricity usage"…

      • detourdog ・ 14 hours ago
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        In New England it works fine and we project 3 hours of production during the winter months. Not sure what Denmark’s latitude is, but 7 hours of production is not needed.

        • littlestymaar ・ 14 hours ago
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          New England is Spain in terms of latitude.

          Americans tend to forget how far north Europe is compared to the US.

          • 2000UltraDeluxe ・ 6 hours ago
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            We have solar in Finland as well, like everyone else. Yes, it's useless in winter. Yes, the expansion has slowed down, because there is no storage and limited export options.

            The Nordic power market is a mess, and it's not because solar doesn't work in winter but because the grid needs massive investments on all levels and nobody wants to be left holding the bill for it.

            Electrification? Sure, I'll buy an EV when the _local_ grid operator makes sure my lights don't flicker when the neighbor uses an angle grinder. The last update was that they plan to replace the old transformer station from the 60's "when it breaks".

            Local generation? Can't get rid of the excess generation if I wanted to.

            Is Denmark's power grid expansion still geared at selling Swedish electricity to the Germans?

            Sweden? No internal transfer capacity so their consumers have constant high prices while power is exported cheaply.

            Norway? Geo-blocked by Sweden.

          • t-writescode ・ 13 hours ago
            ・ 2 more

            Great Britain, even more North, has viable solar on its Southern edge.

            • littlestymaar ・ 6 hours ago

              As a complementary source of energy, yes, especially in summer (because the flip side of being north is that your summer days last longer).

              But in winter, you'll have something like 2-5% load factor on your solar panels…

      • Dylan16807 ・ 11 hours ago
        ・ 6 more

        Those days add to the 10%. Is that not obvious?

        • littlestymaar ・ 6 hours ago
          ・ 5 more

          How do you only consume 10% of your total consumption in 1/3 of the years? Mining bitcoin in summer yo drive total consumption up?

          • Dylan16807 ・ 5 hours ago
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            Are you saying it's cloudy for four months straight?

            And the panels are still making power during the winter.

            A detailed chart would be nice but a good starting point to imagine is 60-70 days that average 50% solar power and the rest of the year is full solar power minus a couple particularly bad days.

            Edit: In winter, in denmark, the amount of sunlight you get per square meter of flat ground is absolutely awful. But the amount of sunlight you can catch on a highly tilted solar panel is still pretty good, about half of the average output. So if you space them properly and overbuild based on the average, the 90% number isn't crazy.

            • littlestymaar ・ 2 hours ago
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              > Are you saying it's cloudy for four months straight?

              No. But it's cloudy most of the time for four month straight (in average there's only 200 hours of sun between November and February in Copenhagen. Yes, you read it right, that's not even 2 hours per day in average!).

              > A detailed chart would be nice but a good starting point to imagine is 60-70 days that average 50% solar power and the rest of the year is full solar power minus a couple particularly bad days

              That's an insane assumption! An average of 50% solar power during the day is the higher bound of what you can expect in the middle of the Nevada desert! (Because you know, the sun rises and falls during the day, it's never going to give the full power during daytime). And because there's night half of the time in average, even in Nevada you end up with load factors around 25%! (Go check the figures!)

              In winter in Danemark, the situation is obviously far worse! A 2-5% load factor is to be expected depending on the weather. (Just check the live data: we're in April, it's 11am and solar panels are delivering just 10% of their power right now https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/DK-DK1/live/fifteen... )

              > the 90% number isn't crazy.

              If this number doesn't sounds crazy to you, it's just because you're completely off in terms of orders of magnitude involved. 90% is likely achievable in southern US with great effort, lots of storage for night times and significant over-paneling, but it's pure science fiction in Denmark.

              • Dylan16807 ・ an hour ago
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                > That's an insane assumption! [...] load factor

                No no no no, that line has nothing to do with load factor. I'm talking about half the kilowatts for the house coming from solar, and half coming from the grid.

                > Just check the live data

                There's no way those panels are optimally angled and out of shade if they're making that little. Are those panels installed in rows on the ground? Rows that are pretty close to each other? Panels on a roof, the steeper the better, will see a much higher load factor in winter.

                I'm other words, a home rooftop install will do much better in winter than a standard commercial install. That's a mixture of chance and optimizing for different things.

                A thought experiment: You have one big solar panel mounted very high, with a multi-axis aiming system that points it directly at the sun. Do you think the amount of power you can make is going to be that far off a linear relationship with the number of hours of daylight?

                • littlestymaar ・ an hour ago

                  > No no no no, that line has nothing to do with load factor. I'm talking about half the kilowatts for the house coming from solar, and half coming from the grid.

                  Assuming consumption isn't correlated with sun hours, these are equivalent unless you over-panel. With a load factor of 5%, you need to over-panel 10x to achieve 50% of your energy supply (in fact it's more complex than this and you'll need even more of that but that's an OK simplifying assumption).

                  > There's no way those panels are optimally angled and out of shade if they're making that little

                  Those are commercial solar farms, optimally angled under the constraint that the cost must be reasonable.

                  > A thought experiment: You have one big solar panel mounted very high, with a multi-axis aiming system that points it directly at the sun.

                  Do you have an idea of how much it would cost?! With Materials + installation + maintenance, such a mechanism would dwarf the price of the panels. There's a reason we don't deploy those at scale in practice …

                  > Do you think the amount of power you can make is going to be that far off a linear relationship with the number of hours of daylight?

                  In a country where 80% of the winter is cloudy, it's going to be very far, yes. The 10% power happening right now is because it's cloudy (light clouds, no rain, but still). It peaked at 40% in recent days with proper sun, but it happened only a handful of times in the entire winter.

mikaeluman ・ 17 hours ago

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

  • ethan_smith ・ 17 hours ago

    The Nordic grid was designed to work as an interconnected system though - Danish wind exports and Norwegian/Swedish hydro imports balance each other out. Calling it a "dirty secret" makes it sound like a failure when it's actually the intended architecture. Denmark is frequently a net electricity exporter.

    • Gud ・ 5 hours ago

      No it wasn’t. That has come later.

  • ceejayoz ・ 17 hours ago

    Is that really a "dirty secret"?

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_Europe_Synchronous... exists for good reason.

    • tensor ・ 17 hours ago

      The power grids of US states are similarly linked. Very dirty.

      • crooked-v ・ 17 hours ago
        ・ 8 more

        Except for Texas, which decided as a state that avoiding federal regulation was worth people dying every winter from power outages.

        • karamanolev ・ 16 hours ago
          ・ 7 more

          I'm not a fan of Texan electrical isolationism, but "people dying every winter from power outages" is stretching it a bit...

          • ceejayoz ・ 16 hours ago
            ・ 5 more

            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. A couple hundred people died.

            • gottorf ・ 8 hours ago

              > But they did get a big warning shot in 1989 and 2011, and ignored those lessons for cost reasons.

              Cost is always a valid reason!

              > A couple hundred people died.

              Looks like about a thousand people in the US die of hypothermia every year, on average. So this happens frequently in states that aren't in its own interconnection, too.

            • amarant ・ 13 hours ago
              ・ 3 more

              Which actually works out to rather more than one person per winter, when averaged out.

              • card_zero ・ 13 hours ago
                ・ 2 more

                Like all the Canadians who die every winter in the Halifax explosion of 1917.

          • seanmcdirmid ・ 7 hours ago

            Ya, it was just one winter where people actually died, it was recent though.

  • matthewdgreen ・ 17 hours ago

    That's like pointing out that Rhode Island isn't designed to be a self-sufficient grid.

  • tensor ・ 17 hours ago

    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.

Arn_Thor ・ 16 hours ago

The Guardian continues its anti-solar crusade. For some inexplicable reason

  • Aldipower ・ 14 hours ago

    So, looking on things from another angle is called "a crusade" nowadays. Yep, it is like it is.

    • Arn_Thor ・ 5 hours ago

      Yes, looking at things from the same angle every time and not really representing the alternative view is indeed a crusade

danw1979 ・ 14 hours ago

I took a stroll recently through the countryside around Swindon, UK, where there’s a massive new solar farm on formerly arable land. One thing I only just realised was how the view from the ground is so badly affected when you’re down amidst the endless rows of panels - they reach well above head height.

It’s basically like walking through a industrial estate, just with more grass in between. Really very bleak.

Give me an onshore wind farm over this.

  • teamonkey ・ 14 hours ago

    Are you sure it’s arable land? The majority of solar farms in the UK are built on low-grade land that aren’t suitable for growing food.

    • ghighi7878 ・ 14 hours ago

      Green grass is still good to look at.

      • teamonkey ・ 14 hours ago

        There is grass. Grass is allowed to grow around the panels. It’s great for biodiversity.

  • teamonkey ・ 3 hours ago

    I can no longer edit my comment to add this, but this article really hammers the point home.

    In the UK, by 2050, less than 1% of land will be needed for solar and wind production. Similar to what is currently used by golf courses.

    The infographic showing land use on that page is eye-opening. Considering that the UK would naturally be covered in rainforest and not fields.

    https://www.carbonbrief.org/qa-what-englands-new-land-use-fr...

  • asdff ・ 12 hours ago

    So much spare land in flat roofs in industrial and warehouse space but solar installations there, if they are there, seem to be limited to covering utility bills for the building over generating surplus for the grid. Much of the roof will remain uncovered, along with all the periphery lot, parking, truck yard, and access roads. No one would be complaining about any view there...

  • Animats ・ 14 hours ago

    Needs a beauty strip of trees around the panels.

    • 01HNNWZ0MV43FF ・ 13 hours ago

      Most of the new solar farms do plant them, it just takes decades for trees to grow big enough to hide the panels

      Personally I like the panels

    • dylan604 ・ 13 hours ago

      Yeah, 'cause shade is precisely what's needed for a solar farm

      • swsieber ・ 13 hours ago
        ・ 4 more

        Around, not over. Trees are a well studied thing where can you pick different species for different characteristics, like height, and growth speed.

        • dylan604 ・ 13 hours ago
          ・ 3 more

          TIL shadows from trees only project down directly under the tree and never project away from the tree itself. My entire life experience has been rendered useless.

          • ben_w ・ 3 hours ago

            Assuming they're talking about this one: https://www.thisiswiltshire.co.uk/news/25299826.swindon-sola...

            It's obvious from the scale of it that the fact of how shadows move over the course of a day isn't going to make much difference, even if they go much above the height of the panels, which they don't need to in order to hide them from people at ground level.

          • fluoridation ・ 12 hours ago

            Ultimately, everything we build we build for ourselves, and people will generally prefer something that's nice to look at, if slightly inefficient, over the thing that's optimal at the cost of every other parameter.

  • pjc50 ・ 13 hours ago

    How much extra on your electricity bill are you prepared to pay to not see it?

  • hattmall ・ 8 hours ago

    Ok, but why are you down among the panels? We have solar farms near my house and I don't hang out in them. You only see it when you drive by the place. I would much less prefer a giant windmill obstructing an otherwise scenic view.

  • deaux ・ 8 hours ago

    > Give me an onshore wind farm over this.

    Guess why those aren't common? Largely because the same people vehemently opposing these solar parks, have already been blocking onshore (and even near-coast offshore) wind for more than a decade.

  • simmerup ・ 13 hours ago

    Climate change is an existential threat, it's switch to green power asap or burn the world our kids will live in

    • asdff ・ 12 hours ago

      Would be nice if we started with the actual marginal land and not the marginal land in real estate terms. Roofs for a start. Parking lots next. Really no reason why any and all industrial land shouldn't look like a pure sea of solar from orbit. Every square inch is low hanging fruit no one would complain about a solar panel going in there.

      • hattmall ・ 8 hours ago

        But it's literally not low, it's up on a roof. The ground installs are preferable because they are low and easily accessible.

      • seanmcdirmid ・ 7 hours ago

        The best land for solar farms tends to be in the desert where there isn’t enough water for industrial use.

    • m4rtink ・ 13 hours ago

      I would actually phrase is a "fossil fuels are an existential threat" - regardless on how climmate change will impact us, it is IMHO enough to see the destructions people are capable due to fossil fuel money & it makes 100% sense to get ridd of any dependency on fossil fuels ASAP.

    • carefree-bob ・ 13 hours ago

      It's hysterical claims like this that cause so many problems for climate researchers and policy makers when the doomsday scenario fails to materialize. And then that's when you get newspaper clippings about the melting of the arctic sea ice by the year 2000 and everyone laughs and then discounts the whole thing.

      Please don't do this. It is not an "existential threat" outside of various fundraising pamphlets and political organizations, and they exploit science for political gain at the cost of the credibility of the whole enterprise.

      • nixpulvis ・ 13 hours ago
        ・ 4 more

        I don't think you're qualified to make this assessment. If a large majority of the scientific community is treating it and calling it an existential threat, I'm tempted to agree. In fact, I think most widely held scientific stances on this are meant to be balanced and as agreeable as possible, so I personally believe it's likely to be worse than the mainstream opinion.

        Climate migration is already an issue. Extreme climate events are already increasingly problematic. Will civilization collapse in the next 50 years. Almost certainly not, but will we be better off then than we are now? Unless we rapidly increase the rate at which we address this issue, I don't see how that happens either.

        • carefree-bob ・ 9 hours ago

          Of course I'm qualified to make the assessment, as the respectable scientific community has been warning people to not make such bombastic statements, and similar warnings were in the IPCC. You really aren't doing yourself any favors by pushing hysteria into scientific disciplines. This is exactly why the climate movement has lost so much credibility and suffered so many policy setbacks.

          No, the world is not ending. The clouds are not burning. There is no risk to life on earth. These are technical discussions about whether sea levels will increase by 2mm per year or 3mm per year.

        • JumpCrisscross ・ 12 hours ago

          > large majority of the scientific community is treating it and calling it an existential threat

          I haven’t seen evidence of this. What I see is scientists making measured predictions about massive costs in human life, economies, refugee crises, and wars. Extinctions. Like, horrible stuff. But not extinction or even civilisational collapse.

        • nslsm ・ 5 hours ago

          > I don't think you're qualified to make this assessment.

          The scientists aren’t, either, given how many times they have failed.

      • simmerup ・ 13 hours ago
        ・ 8 more

        It is 100% an existential threat, but the existential bit happens in 100 years so of course you're not going to see it materialize over night

        • JumpCrisscross ・ 13 hours ago
          ・ 7 more

          > It is 100% an existential threat, but the existential bit happens in 100 years

          No, it’s not, and no, we don’t know that. Humans will survive climate change. Rich countries will survive, too.

          We will all suffer. Economically, healthwise and aesthetically. But that’s not existential. Framing it as such is disingenuous and counterproductive.

          • seanmcdirmid ・ 7 hours ago

            We will go from 8 billion humans to maybe 1 or 2 billion humans, but that is probably going to happen either way. Poor countries will be obliterated, rich countries are likely to see tanking living standards. Long term humans go extinct (or are superseded by some sort of singularity successor) and the earth recovers in a few thousand years as if we never existed.

          • simmerup ・ 12 hours ago
            ・ 5 more

            RCP8.5 is pretty much ruled out by people as unlikely for some reason, even as we have the major super power on the planet pulling out of the Paris agreement on climate change.

            There is clearly a temperature at which this planet will not support human life, and we could definitely get the planet to that temperature if we don't change course and reach net zero.

            Saying its not an existential threat is just wild to me.

            • ben_w ・ 3 hours ago

              > There is clearly a temperature at which this planet will not support human life

              Yes, but that temperature isn't going to be reached by fossil fuels.*

              The reduced brain function from the extra CO2 (if we burned all of it) may make us unable to adapt to the higher temperature, however.

              * Ironically, unbounded growth of PV to tile all Earth's deserts could also raise the planet's temperature by 4 K or so, and 6 K or so if tiling all non-farm land.

              Deserts are huge, this by itself would represent an enormous increase in global electricity supply; but also, current growth trends for PV have been approximately exponential (in the actual maths sense not just "fast") for decades now, so this could happen in as little as 35 years give or take a few (both scenarios are within the same margin for error, because exponential is like that).

            • JumpCrisscross ・ 12 hours ago
              ・ 3 more

              > There is clearly a temperature at which this planet will not support human life, and we could definitely get the planet to that temperature

              There is such a temperature. We are not getting to it in half a century at current emission rates, even with zero curtailment. If you have a source that shows the opposite, I’d be happy to read it.

              • simmerup ・ 12 hours ago
                ・ 2 more

                Of course not in half a century, but it's not like the earth just stops getting hotter after 2100 rolls around.

                What about 2200? Humanity at 2300? It's the same planet with the same feedback loops after all.

                • JumpCrisscross ・ 12 hours ago

                  > What about 2200? Humanity at 2300?

                  You literally said “the existential threat happens in 100 years.”

                  And to your questions, we don’t know. I’d love to see the data. I’m still sceptical we hit “existential” levels for human survival. That wouldn’t even happen if we went back to dinosaur levels of CO2.

      • card_zero ・ 13 hours ago
        ・ 2 more

        I've never been able to decide whether it is or not. I'm still vaguely scared of the clathrate gun, permafrost releasing extra CO2, and phytoplankton shrinking under ocean acidification so we can't have as much oxygen as we're accustomed to.

        Edit: one of those crossfire situations where the downvotes could be coming from either direction. I'm going to assume they mean "don't be scared".

        • carefree-bob ・ 9 hours ago

          I don't know who downvoted you, people treat this topic with religious zeal. Yes, basically all the arguments trying to claim that the influence of CO2 has positive feedbacks relies on cascades of things amplifying warming.

          And that's certainly something to discuss, whether there exists a type of rube goldberg machine where higher levels of CO2 cause the permafrost to melt which cause even higher levels of CO2 which cause something else to release even more CO2, etc.

          I certainly wont deny that such a sequence of events is possible, and it's worth studying. But on the other side of that you have basic physics, which shows that the warming effects go with the log of CO2. That really slows things down by quite a bit. It turns a doubling into an additive factor.

          Now, could it be that the cascade of events is such that it overcomes the logarithm? E.g. that it is an exponential or super-exponential chain of events that would release exponentially more CO2. Uhh, maybe, but this is not something to try to terrify the population with. And it sounds extremely unlikely. So you need an extremely precarious set of assumptions -- or just deny physics outright -- to overcome Arrhenius' Greenhouse rule. Logarithms cover a multitude of growth sins.

  • nitwit005 ・ 14 hours ago

    That just sounds like endless corn fields, only solar panels.

    • card_zero ・ 13 hours ago

      I don't much like walking through corn fields either, it's heavy going, all that trampling. Farmers should just grow pretty flowers, small ones.

      • asdff ・ 12 hours ago

        That is pretty much pasture land

chrysoprace ・ 13 hours ago

For decades I've been pointing to Denmark (partly out of national pride) as a successful model for renewables as Australia dragged its feet on the issue due to fossil fuel industry lobbying.

The positive I take from the article is that Denmark is successfully diversifying its renewable energy sources, something that's needed while battery infrastructure is built to scale, and I sincerely hope it doesn't become a serious political issue like it's been here in Australia for decades (and continues to be today).

gritzko ・ 17 hours ago

Lived there. Baltic weather, not too sunny. Must be a great place for wind generation though.

  • ahartmetz ・ 17 hours ago

    The world's largest wind power company, Vestas, is from Denmark.

erelong ・ 8 hours ago

Sounds like America... I could see panels being thought to take up farmland and not look that great but if it could use other lands and be out of the way idk what the remaining objections are

aaronbrethorst ・ 17 hours ago

One interesting detail about Denmark's renewable energy infrastructure mix is that Vestas, the largest wind turbine manufacturer in the world, is a cornerstone of Danish industry. Note in the article that wind supplies about 40% of Denmark's electrical needs, and that the populist right party mentioned in the article doesn't attack wind turbines, despite the antipathy that other (supposedly populist) rightwing figures do in other countries.

lofaszvanitt ・ 2 hours ago

Why not make transparent panels? And put them on the top of houses everywhere, since actually nobody uses the top of their house for anything. And prohibit putting panels on fertile soil.

dathinab ・ 17 hours ago

not buying that this isn't anti renewable propaganda for the US

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.

  • ZeroGravitas ・ 16 hours ago

    There is an art to taking pictures of solar farms from exactly the right angle so that the panels seem continuous, often making use of deep shadows to cover the gaps.

    It's similar to the telephoto shots of wind farms taken from far away that make them seem really close together.

  • mellosouls ・ 17 hours ago

    "not buying that this isn't anti renewable propaganda for the US"

    Its the Guardian so that is a very unlikely motivation.

    • Arn_Thor ・ 16 hours ago

      _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

      • andor ・ an hour ago

        That's just your reading comprehension.

        They are reporting on an anti-solar NIMBY movement and mention how the far-right is pushing the issue. That doesn't mean they share the same opinion.

    • deaux ・ 8 hours ago

      Haha, the Guardian is just as much in bed with the capital class.

    • zipy124 ・ 14 hours ago

      The guardian have previously been found to generate a significant amount of ad revenue from fossil fuel companies. They aren't politically aligned with it, but are financially. Remember that a large portion of the left in the UK are also anti-solar since they are pro-green nature and they have yet to make a choice on this.

      P.s I am pro renewable and pro-solar/wind/nuclear just to clarify that this is nothing about my personal beliefs.

  • zolland ・ 16 hours ago

    The satellite photos of Hjolderup look worse than the photos in the article to me... the photos in the article seem like a fair representation of the consequences of installing solar fields like this--your house and town end up surrounded by solar panels.

    • chrysoprace ・ 13 hours ago

      Zoom out a bit though, and you quickly realise it's not the norm. There is vastly more farm land throughout the country and Hjolderup is the exception, not the rule.

  • lukeify ・ 14 hours ago

    > - it's not the norm but the exception

    I bet makes the person dealing with the outcome of being surrounded by them feel a lot better.

  • mort96 ・ 16 hours ago

    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.

    • masfuerte ・ 14 hours ago

      It works fine with js disabled.

    • soco ・ 16 hours ago

      Isn't GDPR an EU thing?

      • mort96 ・ 16 hours ago

        Well an EU/EEA thing. And I'm in the EEA, so it applies when I visit The Guardian.

  • testing22321 ・ 16 hours ago

    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...

    • ddellacosta ・ 16 hours ago

      > 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

    • dathinab ・ 15 hours ago

      and field which have been damaged due to overuse and incorrect handling and preferable shouldn't be used for the next ~50 year

pfdietz ・ 17 hours ago

Northern Europe really is the energy armpit of the post-fossil world, although more so away from coasts.

darth_avocado ・ 17 hours ago

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 ・ 17 hours ago

    Transmitting that energy from where nobody lives to where people do live becomes the problem with that.

    • darth_avocado ・ 16 hours ago

      > Transmitting that energy from where nobody lives to where people do live becomes the problem with that.

      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.

    • Sharlin ・ 16 hours ago

      Building HVDC lines from North Africa to Europe, for example, wouldn't be a huge feat of civil engineering. Rather standard stuff, really.

      • ninalanyon ・ 13 hours ago

        Spain and Morocco already have a 1.4 GW DC interconnect and the XLinks project intends to connect Morocco and the UK.

      • dathinab ・ 16 hours ago
        ・ 2 more

        we don't need something that long distance at all

        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

        • ceejayoz ・ 15 hours ago

          "from North Africa to Europe" is, to be clear, ~9 miles in spots.

    • jmward01 ・ 13 hours ago

      I've been watching the math of batteries and cargo ships and we may not be too far from shipping electrons generated in the Sahara to the UK and Europe at a reasonable price. That totally changes the game if you have cargo ships moving to where the power will be needed. I can imagine these ships going to where the weather is predicted to cause an issue to help even out the grid and just in general creating a responsive base load for the world. It sounds like sci-fi, but with the direction batteries have gone it isn't that crazy anymore.

      • etiam ・ 13 hours ago
        ・ 3 more

        Does it still work out if you take into account the insurance premiums for a cargo ship stacked with batteries? Can't imagine the fire hazard is pretty.

        • solarkraft ・ 12 hours ago
          ・ 2 more

          Wait until you hear what other stuff gets shipped

          • etiam ・ 14 minutes ago

            Oh, there's precedent for shuttling freighter size metal fire hazards intercontinentally to top up charge, is there?

            How does that work out in cost per kWh? Profitable operation anywhere close?

            Crisis relief (as suggested by jmward01 here) may be another matter, but setting up the ability to do this on scale, and maintaining it, can't be anything like easy economically.

    • ahartmetz ・ 17 hours ago

      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.

      • SoftTalker ・ 17 hours ago
        ・ 2 more

        Yeah possibly. Synthetic hydrocarbon fuel that's already compatible with transportation infrastructure and energy consumers might be the best bet.

        • devilbunny ・ 12 hours ago

          We will probably be using that in aviation for a long, long time. Turbines are pretty efficient and jet fuel has a remarkably high energy density for something that does not easily explode.

    • ninalanyon ・ 13 hours ago

      The only real problems with long distance electricity transmission are political and to a lesser extent financial. Technically it is solved problem.

      The Desertec project could have turned a relatively small patch of Libyan desert into a solar farm that could supply all of Europe's electricity except that politics makes it impossible.

    • dathinab ・ 16 hours ago

      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 nature

      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.

    • TimorousBestie ・ 17 hours ago

      Buckmister Fuller envisioned a worldwide high-voltage transmission network implemented with 1980’s technology, there just isn’t the worldwide political will or cooperation to build it.

  • moffers ・ 17 hours ago

    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.

  • dathinab ・ 16 hours ago

    look at satellite images of Denmark or the village in question

    - 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.

dev_l1x_be ・ 14 hours ago

Energy density is a real problem.

chvid ・ 17 hours ago

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.

Flavius ・ 17 hours ago

We currently use vast amounts of land growing corn and other crops specifically for biodiesel. Solar panels produce over 100x more energy per hectare than corn ethanol, even in countries like Denmark with limited sunlight. It makes perfect sense to repurpose some biofuel farmland for solar panels. That's just efficient land use, not an attack on agriculture.

  • dathinab ・ 16 hours ago

    > corn and other crops specifically for biodiesel.

    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

  • PearlRiver ・ 8 hours ago

    Don't forget all the pesticides and fertilizer that they have been pumping into the ground for the last 100 years.

    Farms are industrial estates.

karmakurtisaani ・ 16 hours ago

Yes to progress, no to cheap right-wing populism with no real solutions to any problem. How about that?

OutOfHere ・ 17 hours ago

Denmark could use floating sea solar.

  • dathinab ・ 16 hours ago

    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. )

rcxdude ・ 13 hours ago

I always find it kind of ironic when the more allegedly libertarian pro-farmer side of the political spectrum start to get really concerned with how farmers use their land. And a solar farm has to be the most inoffensive thing to live next to, I was frankly shocked that it was something that appeared on a house survey result as "developments nearby you might be concerned about".

jmyeet ・ 13 hours ago

You don't even have to go to the issue of climate change to defned this anymore. The far more relevant factor is the cost of energy as well as national security.

Europe as a whole has engaged in greenwashing where instead of really solving their emissions and energy problems has simply offshored those problems to poorer countries. If a neighbour uses fossil fuels for electricity generation and you buy their excess electrricity, you're not greener. You've just cooked the books.

People who might say "when I go outside at this very specific place solar panels look ugly" should carry no weight when those solar panels (in Denmark's case) covers 0.2% of rural land. Go somewhere else.

Unsurprisingly, China is leading here by making solar panel installations have multiple uses like reversing desertification and use vegetation growth from the shade and the water used to clean the panels as a place for grazing livestock. Obviously Europe in general and Denmark in particular doesn't have deserts, of course.

I'm generally a fan of putting solar panels on non-arable land. In the US, that's much of the southwest, which incidentally also has very good solar yields because of the high amount of sunshine. There are whole areas of grass plains that can't be used for traditional farming as we discovered in the 1930s. It was called the Dust Bowl. There was a famous book written about it (ie the Grapes of Wrath).

What I don't understand is why we don't build more solar around or over highways. This is already public land and it's land not doing anything else. The solar wouldn't interfere with the core purpose either. I guess people want solar panels tucked away where few can see them.

doctorpangloss ・ 17 hours ago

everything that goes into real life is an aesthetic experience. it's not complicated. imo, you can either literally hide things from the public, or aesthetic concerns, like whether or not a piece of infrastructure's exterior is physically beautiful & attractive, becomes the #1 priority.

ls612 ・ 16 hours ago

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.

  • rcxdude ・ 13 hours ago

    It's a hell of a lot less dumb than growing crops for biofuel on it, to start. And it's not even an either/or situation, you can do both on the same piece of land. I think there is plenty of 'arable' land for which the most productive thing it could be doing is solar power.

  • lukeify ・ 14 hours ago

    Agreed. I'm very pro-solar but there should be incentives for residential solar and solar on commercial buildings first. Covering up farmland and natural environments should be a last resort.

  • sophacles ・ 13 hours ago

    Why would I agree to such a stupid position?

    Here in the us we could swap acres of corn used only for ethanol production for acres of solar panels that produce a 100x more power annually.

    • hattmall ・ 8 hours ago

      Yes, but the reason we incentivized ethanol production is to not lose the productive capacity for corn in case we need it to feed people. Having a significant excess of food production capability is incredibly important to long term stability. You really can't overstate the importance of food production capacity.

rasz ・ 12 hours ago

russia really doesnt like energy independence. Right wingers across Europe are supported with russian bribes, last big one caught is Nathan Gill.

l5870uoo9y ・ 14 hours ago

The absurdity of the climate debate is that “we” talk almost constantly about two energy sources (wind and solar) that in no way have the potential to provide the stable baseload power required to electrify society. And unless nature has blessed your country with abundant geothermal or hydroelectric power, that leaves you with the following options: oil, coal, or nuclear power.

  • rickydroll ・ 14 hours ago

    The addition of batteries as an intermittent power source brings us closer to 100% renewable energy and allows us to incrementally decommission dirty plants, such as coal- and oil-fired plants.

    The design goal of adding a battery to grid power sources is to capture energy that would otherwise be lost when demand is lower than generation. In addition to capturing excess production of wind or solar-derived energy, one could capture unused energy from our current baseload generating plants overnight. We could also, this would also let us capture the energy that would otherwise be wasted by unnecessary nighttime lighting.

  • recursive ・ 14 hours ago

    Wind and solar can provide enough energy. You may be referring to their well-publicized variability. Energy storage can solve that.

    • card_zero ・ 13 hours ago

      The next phase in these conversations is usually to argue back and forth about whether energy storage is going to be good enough soon, or never will be, or already is. You're naive if you think your storage solution can handle the massive reserves required, unless you're not naive for technical reasons. Don't ask me, this part is always inconclusive.

      • recursive ・ 12 hours ago

        Ok, I guess we'll never know then.

      • kalleboo ・ 10 hours ago
        ・ 3 more

        > You're naive if you think your storage solution can handle the massive reserves required

        The Scandinavian grid which Denmark is part of has 120 TWh of storage capacity (hydro in Norway and Sweden) which is literally 4 months of electricity consumption.

        • card_zero ・ 9 hours ago
          ・ 2 more

          Yes but (deja vu here) pumped hydro storage benefits from geography, so it's only a solution for Norway and Sweden and other bumpy places.

          • kalleboo ・ 8 hours ago

            This thread was about Denmark, but obviously the solution will be different everywhere. Some places have suitable geography, others have more sun and milder winters where overbuild+batteries are easier, some have existing Nuclear that can be kept running affordably, maybe you even have politically stable neighbors where a HVDC grid can smooth out differences in weather, there are no generic answers.