Not every home can usefully be fitted with a solar array, but I've often wondered why farm-land is considered of so little value that covering it with solar panels is the way to go. Grass will grow under them, and can be grazed by sheep, but that's all.
An interesting idea in a letter to my local paper recently, was that of giving large car-parks, roofs covered with solar panels. Ideal, perhaps, for supermarkets and the sprawling motorway services; where more panels could be put on the buildings. Though I have read it's possible the prefabricated steel sheds that most of both buildings are, would not be strong enough.
You can't blame the farmers for taking the money offered by electricity companies and remote housing speculators; but there seems just no coherent, long-term thinking by the policy-makers.
I suspect part of the problem is that too many politicians, of all parties, and "green" campaigners, have dangerously little, even lay levels, of science and engineering knowledge. E.g. do they even know the units of, and relationship between, energy and power? Or of two equivalent modern vehicles, petrol and diesel, which is the less polluting and why?
The Welsh Government is allowing major companies having no real connection with agriculture, forestry or electricity-generation, to buy large tracts of hill farmland to cover with serried ranks of alien-species conifers excused by "carbon trading". A policy probably far more damaging than such schemes as one recently authorised in East Dorset, to build a huge solar-powered electric-car charging centre on prime arable land.
