On solar power

Last week a journalist used me as an example of a politician being anti-solar. I have two confessions. First, I’m not. Second, I can understand why he levelled that accusation.

As Conservatives many of us seem to have an inbuilt aversion to renewables and it’s something I’ve always struggled to fully understand. Is it because we think it’s a bit fluffy? You know, birds singing in trees, lambs playfully dancing around solar panels, a rainbow in the sky overhead as power magics its way down wires and into our homes. Is it because we can’t own wind or sunshine? We like owning stuff and making a profit out of it, we want to clearly see where our energy comes from and better yet be able to transport it and manfully pump it into vehicles. Is it because we can’t control it or rely on it? Which is part of the argument I deploy, when arguing for an energy mix, ‘what about when the wind isn’t blowing or the sun isn’t shining’. Or is it because people we don’t like, like it? If the bearded lefty down the road drives an EV, then it’s all a con.

Energy is a weirdly tribal political issue. It basically goes something like this: far left – renewables only and nuclear will kill us all, left – renewables plus nuclear and decarbonise really fast, centre – renewables and nuclear but decarbonise a little slower, right – nuclear, hydrogen, cynical acceptance of renewables but let’s hang on to oil and gas for a while, far right – it’s all a globalist conspiracy and we’re weeks from George Soros and Bill Gates instigating  ‘climate lockdowns’. I would wager that I could determine who someone traditionally votes for simply by chatting about energy for less than a minute. There are few other areas where one could say that. Immigration, perhaps.

Photo by American Public Power Association on Unsplash

Returning to the accusation that I’m anti-solar, why has this come about? Well, I’ve led the charge against the Sunnica solar farm from a political perspective for some years. I won’t rehash the arguments but it’s a bad scheme that never should have been approved. In addition, I’ve sounded off about the scale and quantity of solar schemes in the pipeline for Suffolk. In fact, I referred to it as a ‘tidal wave’. Taking these two things together it’s not an unfair leap to have made.

There’s more that I’ve said publicly that could see me further painted as anti-solar. I’ve highlighted, repeatedly, how inefficient it is compared with other forms of energy generation. Taking a broad brushstroke approach, what I’ve dubbed the ‘Ronseal factor’; Nuclear does 95% of what it says on the tin (it has some downtime for maintenance), off-shore wind does around 65% (maintenance plus sometimes the wind isn’t blowing hard enough or is blowing too hard), on-shore wind does around 50% (the same reasons but the wind blows less hard generally) and solar in the UK…14%. Why is solar so gloriously inefficient? Straight out of the blocks, for three months of the year the sun isn’t high enough in the sky for it to do anything and for the remaining nine months there’s a good deal of cloud cover. Therefore, when people say six Sunnica solar farms generate as much energy as Sizewell C, what they mean is the generating capacity is broadly the same – not the actual output. In reality, you’d need around 40 Sunnica solar farms to be sure of generating the same amount of energy annually as Sizewell C and, even then, you’d get nothing for three months of the year. To put that in terms of acreage, you’re looking at 80,000 acres of solar to match the output of Sizewell C. The new nuclear power station at Sizewell will need 80 acres or, to be absolutely fair, 900 acres if you included everything through the build, maintenance and operation. How big is 80,000 acres? It’s bigger than the metropolitan borough of Birmingham. Looking at this in tandem with duration of consent, which is typically 40 years, and the rate at which technology is evolving – is greenfield solar really a good use of land?

Then there are the supply chain issues. There is, as yet, no guarantee around where solar panels are produced and how the workers are treated. In fact, quite to the contrary, dig into the subject and you’ll get increasingly alarmed about forced labour in Xinjiang, the appalling treatment of – in particular – the Uighur minority, and the wider production of polysilicon (an essential component in solar panels and 75% of the global supply is made in China). Back in 2022, members of the UK solar energy industry condemned and opposed ‘any abuse of human rights, including forced labour, anywhere in the global supply chain’ and went on to commit to  ‘the development of an industry-led traceability protocol’. Not too much happened until the Solar Stewardship Initiative (SSI) was launched in December of last year. What does this actually do? Apparently independent assessors will be able to evaluate compliance with ‘robust sustainability and Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) criteria within companies active in the solar value chain’. That word salad aside, the mission still seems high level and vague – ‘establish mechanisms to create supply-chain transparency’, for example. You would think somewhere between 2021 and 2024 someone would have figured out how to give this transparency, the industry must know where it is buying its panels from, but it has yet to come and nor has the government really pressed the issue. Perhaps they know the answer but don’t really like it.

Now let’s move on to the ‘tidal wave’ of solar facing not just Suffolk but the whole of the UK, particularly now the Tigger-esque Ed Miliband is excitedly bouncing up and down at the thought of all these highly ethical solar farms arriving by 2030. My major quarrel is one I’ve written about before – how connection offers are made and the fact National Grid ESO are legally obliged to provide one within six weeks. No thought is given to spatial planning and, therefore, vast swathes of solar follow new transmission lines, grid connection points and areas where there’s redundant capacity. It’s not driven by best land use or any wider strategic planning, it’s simply led by where we can plug it in.

So, there you have it, I’m anti-solar. Well, no, actually. I’m all for it. Just not the way we’re doing it. First of all, we need to fix the supply chain issue and that will make panels more expensive and solar, initially at least, less commercially viable but it’s important. We need those guarantees. We must not deliver our nation’s energy on the back of slave labour in China. There are, of course, ethical questions about all aspects of all forms of energy production but, hopefully, we can all agree forced labour and the treatment of the Uighur people is abhorrent. It is resolvable though and despite the industry’s procrastination, it should be pretty simple. It will drive up prices and in turn make the energy generated by solar more expensive but eradicating forced labour from the supply chain, or at least our supply chain, is worth it.

Photo by Watt A Lot on Unsplash

But how, you might ask, do we fix solar’s relative inefficiency in the UK? You can’t, although the technology continues to improve, which is why we need to focus on dual land use. Part of my opposition to the Sunnica scheme was the loss of good quality food-producing land. It’s about now someone pipes up and bangs on about 1% of the UK being golf courses and we only need 1% of the UK to be solar. Well, if you wanted to make another 1% of the UK golf courses, I’d have something to say about that too – particularly if they were all concentrated in the same places around grid connection points. But my real quarrel is this; why would you give over good quality food-producing land solely to something so inefficient. It’s just a waste. If you have a rooftop that’s doing nothing, then putting solar panels on it that generate 14% of their total capacity is a win. It’s a lot more than zero. You give dual use to something you live or work under. The same argument can be made for over car parks, schools, down motorway embankments, the sides of railway lines. The list goes on. The big challenge here is local grid connection points. The local distribution grid, managed in my part of the world by UKPN, isn’t up to snuff and not enough effort is going into upgrading it. This matters because to be able to sell excess power back into the grid and contribute to national energy supply, that local distribution network needs to be there and have sufficient capacity. UKPN are one of six Distribution Network Operators (DNOs) in the UK who between them hold the fourteen distribution licences. Let’s focus on this part of the grid as much as we are the transmission network because, ultimately, it means more decentralised power generation and less big infrastructure.

Photo by Sylvester Sabo on Unsplash

This argument about dual land use can be applied to agricultural land too. Enter agri-voltaics. These are, essentially, panels mounted vertically (rather than pitched), or mounted higher, between or under which you can still farm. This has the added benefit of being able to help reduce water usage by affording shade where it is needed. The panels can be relatively low and robots or casual workers pick crops between or underneath them or high enough – and far apart enough – for full size combines and farm equipment to farm under or around them. Italy is all for agri-voltaics, TotalEnergies in France have been doing some interesting trials and there is growing support in Germany. In effect, they shoot the food security vs energy security fox by allowing land to do both and allowing farmers to make more money out of the same piece of land. Early trials even suggest yields markedly improve. However, agri-voltaics still leave one glaring downside - the changing of our landscape. This is an altogether different argument and if we avoid our most beautiful areas, have the right mitigations, avoid settlements and public rights of way – ie take a constraints led approach, then it’s harder to argue against them. In fact, vertically mounted panels, in the correct location, could arguably have less visual impact than traditional ground mounted panels. We’ve yet to see an agri-voltaic NSIP scale proposal in the UK but I know we’re not far off having the first.

The problem of siting will remain and, at the moment, we’re still in a situation where infrastructure begets infrastructure with nobody watching over the whole. As I’ve mentioned previously, Regional Energy Strategic Plans (RESPs) will likely be coming in 2026, perhaps – with a fair wind – late 2025. Until then, however, we’re in a gold rush situation. I won’t return to it in detail but all of this is another argument for taking a breath and reverting to decarbonising by 2035 rather than 2030. It still allows us to reach net zero by 2050 but allows us to do it better.

I mentioned one argument at the start of this piece that I often fall back on and it remains the case. Sometimes the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine. It’s why we need an energy mix to make our supply in this country resilient. We need nuclear, small modular reactors, ‘pocket nuclear reactors’, hydrogen, methods of storage (battery and hydrogen), wind and solar. If we want to make best use of technology and our geography, while ensuring a fair and just transition to clean energy, then we need a balanced approach.

So, there you have it, I’m not anti-solar. I’m just against doing it badly.