Solar panels have always bothered me because they require such intense manufacturing and usage of scarce resources. TLDR of article: “Many people will argue that if low-tech solar panels are less efficient, we would need more solar panels to produce the same power output. Consequently, the resources saved by low-tech production methods would be compensated by the extra resources to build more solar panels. However, efficiency is only crucial when we take energy demand for granted, sacrificing some efficiency may gain us a lot in sustainability.”
The space we can fill with solar panels and the resources used to build them are not unlimited though.
for a country like France, you would need only 5% of its surface to cover its energy needs (this is at 200w/m²). say the sustainable panels would be half efficient, you would still need only 10%.
Okay, and I see a thousand places where I would consider solar panels well placed. Every house, every shed, parking place, road … should have panels on top. Some mountain areas can have them. They can provide shade for useful crops in more arid places. All of these are small scale and combined uses though, and the companies currently promoting and building solar here in Southern Europe are buying up farm and pasture land instead and filling that with panels, in a way that makes no sense.
I think it has to do with the way subsidies and grants for projects are organized. It’s very difficult and complex to submit a mixed project to ask for EU money for your project. You can’t go and say “I want financing for this project, where I have these few fruit and olive trees, 50 500W panels, blueberry plants and garden under the panels, and fifty sheep on 15ha land.” The guys in the subsidy office will give you that toothache face and go “errr” and what you end up with is projects with 1000 panels and nothing else, or 100000 trees of one kind and nothing else, or 1000 sheep and nothing else. Each business artificially kept alive on behest of enormous energy and work inputs - blueberry plants with elaborate shading structures. Tree rows kept clean with help of machinery and pesticide. Solar panel rows cleaned in the same way. Trees artificially fertilized. Everything separated becomes mega energy intensive, very wasteful, but bureaucracy likes it simple, and people can’t or don’t want to move without EU financing.
tbh there is nothing profitable about building solar farms, since its a ‘socialist’ measure and can only be achieved by a goverment. Utility companies like to intervene only when there is profit to be made, mainly by distributing power. Personally i dont think solar is fit above agriculture land but rather on a remote 0 purpose land. For the french case earlier, it would amount to 277000km², which is still miniscule and some fertile land could be sacrificed for such endeavour. And yea, corporates always like gov handouts: like to take everything and prefer to give back the least possible