Jacky Wilkinson writes:
‘I took this shot in a small town in the southwest of France. This is a simple structure over a small supermarket forecourt.
It serves to generate electricity, collect rainwater and shelter shoppers. Structures like these are to be found in lots of places in France.
No loss of top-grade farmland and everything to like.
The UK has proportionally a lot less land to provide food and biodiversity, so why isn’t the government encouraging this kind of initiative here?’
Impressive! Suggest you copy this to Milliband’s successor!
Even with the current expansion, UK solar PV covers considerably less land than UK golf courses. There is no tension between solar PV and food production, especially as animals are often grazed under ground based arrays (benefitting from the shade of the panels). Car park arrays are a bit of a gimmick in my view. Significant extra steelwork and harder to maintain the panels. Still, if you are building a roof anyway, why not?
Because we’re British! Somebody is making money by resisting initiatives like this although we can’t find out who. Like the big builders resisting putting solar panels on new builds and the privatised water companies don’t like the idea of the idea of their monopolised customers collecting free rain water. What other reason could there possibly be?
We saw the same thing yesterday in Burgundy and had the exact same thoughts.
The other thing that is we have come across in France are traffic lights instead of speed bumps. They turn red if you are going too fast and turn green when you are at the right speed.