Vocal Voices

Step forward Environment Secretary, Liz Truss. She has said that large-scale solar farms are "a blight on the landscape" and has also confirmed a cut to the subsidy farmers and landowners get for installing them.

Good for her. Her thinking is that a country which imports more than half of its food cannot afford to turn over good agricultural land for solar farms, and she hinted that there is plenty of roof space availabe where they could be installed instead. That is pretty far-outthinking from a politician, let's hope it chatches on.

Next up could be a Housing Minister who says that we cannot go on building hundreds of thousands of houses on green belt year on year to cope with an ever increasing population.

Near where I live they are going to build over 200 new houses. There is already a queue of traffic nearly two miles long in the morning into town. There is a set of traffic lights and the roads are nearly always congested as one of them leads to the M6. Glad we only use it in the evening or at lunch time.

Why haven't solar panels been put on the Houses of Parliament and use the hot air from the debated to warm the building.
How long will the solar panels last and what happens if one is damaged? I am surprised some haven't been stolen and sold for scrap metal.

cruiser2 wrote:Why haven't solar panels been put on the Houses of Parliament and use the hot air from the debated to warm the building.
How long will the solar panels last and what happens if one is damaged? I am surprised some haven't been stolen and sold for scrap metal.

Politicians practising what they preach? It would unprettify their lovely building. If they did that, they would have no excuse to ban every other listed building from doing the same.

How long do they last? Current cells have a guaranteed life of 10 years with an expected degradation of 50% after 20 years with final failure of most of the cells in 40 years.

Why haven't they been stolen and sold for scrap? Well mainly because that apart from the tabbing wire and the aluminium frames, they are pretty worthless. Just glass and silicone cells. Much more value in going into a BT access point, grabbing a mess of cables, wrapping it round a towball and driving away. Faster too. Or stealing the power cables for the lights on the motorway, even more value. Millions of £ of copper are being stolen every day in this way. You could steal every solar panel in the country and the scrap value would not reach that.

It has been one of my bugbears since day 1 with "green" power. That the systems with the most support are those with the highest visibility but much lower delivery of power for the investment. I've been pretty consistent in stating that we need 3* current baseload power, all renewable, before we can even begin to talk about a green country with a green economy.

Just glad that someone else is pointing out the same inconsistency. Needless to say it was the Blair/Brown government which popularised these systems. Even if Cameron is too daft to realise the fact and change it.

I wonder if the minister is feeling the heat from the Greens as well as UKIP???

Cruiser, re breakdowns: The panels and arrays will be connected to each other in a mix of parallel and series to allow for some breakdowns and repair without losing the whole super array.

It is amazing reading through the comments on the BBC how many people got hooked on her "a blight on the landscape" statement and missed the whole message about farming and food and agricultural land and food security. She also said that there were plenty of other places to put solar pamnels. There are lots of: "I would rather live next to a field of solar panels than a nuclear power station". Well maybe so, but I bet you would like to eat as well. We could cover all of Somerset, Devon and Cornwall in solar panels and they wouldn't produce as much as Hinkley.

I am actually prepared to give her credit for speaking out and saying something not to the liking of the Tories, the greenies and "Green" industries.

Can't stand the woman, her stance on the badger cull is disgraceful

With the way the population is increasing we will soon need every sq metre to grow food on, GM too. I do not allow panels here they are so ugly and make roof maintenance more difficult.

Solar panels can also affect mortgageability!! When we bought this house, the vendors put in an offer on a house a few miles from here. They were refused a mortgage on it, due to the state of the roof after having solar panels installed Luckily they offered on another almost identical house in the same street, so our move was unaffected, but it has put me off the idea of solar panels