COVERING GOOD FOOD GROWING LAND WITH SOLAR PANELS?

GeorgeC1

Member
Solar farms are hideous.
I’d rather live next to a housing or industrial estate. At least they are providing jobs and/or housing. Put them on roofs for goodness sake.

Massively affect the public perception of farmers too- a farmer near put one in and ten years later half the village still won’t speak to them. It’s not a big community either. Is it really worth it?

Who cares what ignorant nimbys think, they're the cause of quite a few problems
 
The way these things work, the only people who have got their money , will be the original developer. They will then have sold the farm on to a pension fund, or some such, who will have paid a phenomenal sum in the expectation of a 20-25 rock solid return.
If the government do chop the subs it will be future pensioners who take the hit .

Even those ones are profitable if you take the subs out. Not by a lot but they’ll still make 10-15% annually after all costs.
 

Exfarmer

Member
Location
Bury St Edmunds
Even those ones are profitable if you take the subs out. Not by a lot but they’ll still make 10-15% annually after all costs.
Depends how much you paid for it. These things are sold on as going investments and the rate of return is some times negiligible. A lot of turbines were sold on by a certain company and bought by a hedge fund. I know what they paid, I don’t suppose they will return the investment if they had a hundred years of FIT.
 
Depends how much you paid for it. These things are sold on as going investments and the rate of return is some times negiligible. A lot of turbines were sold on by a certain company and bought by a hedge fund. I know what they paid, I don’t suppose they will return the investment if they had a hundred years of FIT.

We shouldn’t really be quoting ‘acres’ thinking about it because it should be income per MW. Some sites have more panels per acre than others due to location and topography.

They’ll no doubt be bad examples but if these agreements were done properly then the landowner/landlord should be returning £25,000/MW/YEAR (approx £5000/ac/YEAR) over the duration of the panels being in place.

The developer/owner would be in the region of £130,000-£150,000/MW/YEAR (approx £25,000/acre/YEAR).

All before costs.
 
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Highland Mule

Member
Livestock Farmer
Nuclear is expensive, government guaranteed Hinkley point at 11.3€ Cents kwhr my solar is generating at less than 4cents.
But not much good at night

You never really finish paying for nuclear.

How much did your solar generate last night? And your solar is poor at that too - I know of plenty making 50p/unit on a Government guaranteed rate
 

Veryfruity

Member
How much did your solar generate last night? And your solar is poor at that too - I know of plenty making 50p/unit on a Government guaranteed rate


I was just making the point that solar has become very competitive.

My tenant gets 12,4 cents from EDF. The simple single axe tracker panels can produce for a cost of 3.8c in my region. These are 2016 prices.

Here in France they have moved away from guaranteed FIT and now do a sealed bid system, with different ‘guide’ prices depending on the technology, latitude and system. They want innovation as well as power.

All the different methods of power generation have their drawbacks.
 

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Red Tractor drops launch of green farming scheme amid anger from farmers

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As reported in Independent


quote: “Red Tractor has confirmed it is dropping plans to launch its green farming assurance standard in April“

read the TFF thread here: https://thefarmingforum.co.uk/index.php?threads/gfc-was-to-go-ahead-now-not-going-ahead.405234/
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