Solar Electricity Supply and Demand
How much electricity is produced by solar installations? Developers claim that around 300 households can be supplied per MWp of installed solar capacity. Is this correct?
The total amount of electricity per year may be sufficient, but SolarQ discovered that mismatches of times of supply and demand mean that approximately half of all electricity from any solar installation will not be immediately used by the target household number. In the absence of sufficient on-site battery storage, excess electricity will be lost, exported (to houses elsewhere, or abroad) or stored somewhere else in the system (in batteries or in the form of hydrogen). Our analysis uses the proposed Botley West Solar Farm in Oxfordshire as a ‘worked example’ but the results can be scaled up or down to all solar installations.
How much land is taken up by ground-mounted solar?
The industry claims that only 0.1% of UK land is currently taken up by ground-mounted solar, a figure likely to rise to only 0.3% if 2050 targets for solar are met (compared with 0.6% for golf courses).
The Renewable Energy Planning Database (REPD) records the current status of all renewable installations, including ground-mounted solar (at various stages of development). SolarQ’s analysis shows that all these installations will occupy far more land than the industry estimates, for example more than 1% of Nottinghamshire (1.19%), Essex (1.13%) and Lincolnshire (1.01%). These figures do not include most of the large area solar NSIPs that are currently not in the REPD.
What sort of Agricultural Land is ground-mounted solar using?
NPPF and other guidelines recommend that solar installations should avoid the use of Best and Most Versatile (BMV) agricultural land, which is needed for growing food. These guidelines are not being followed.
The green histograms in the above chart show the percentage of English land in the different Agricultural Land Cover (ALC) classes. Best and Most Versatile (BMV) land is in ALC Grades 1, 2 and 3a; the rest is Grades 3b, 4 and 5. Current maps do not distinguish ALC Grades 3a and 3b. We do not have a lot of the very best Grade 1 and 2 land - just 16.9% of the total. The red histograms show the percentage of the different grades of land in ground-mounted solar installations. SolarQ’s analysis revealed that solar installations appear to be avoiding the worst quality land (their Grade 4 and 5 histograms are lower than the overall figures in green) and are using proportionately more of ALC Grades 1 to 3 land.
Do solar installations affect local house values?
No developer acknowledges that ground-mounted solar installations affect the value of nearby properties. There is mounting evidence that they do, but this is being ignored in submissions to the Planning Inspectorate.
SolarQ’s survey of global literature suggests variable impacts of solar farms on house values. The majority of early studies were by American realtors (estate agents), were not peer reviewed and contain flawed analyses. More recent, peer reviewed studies in both America and Europe analyse data from many thousands of house sales at different distances from solar installations. The graph shows the results of such studies (different colours for different studies) and relates the impact of solar farms on house values (vertical axis; negative values mean a reduction in value) to the distance from the edge of the solar farm (horizontal axis, in kms). The closer to the solar farm, the larger the impact. Most studies conclude this effect is larger in rural areas and increases with the size of the solar installation.
