Bob 3

This week a council approved a solar farm on two hundred and thirty-five acres of grazing, and the family who had run cattle on it for generations said it would probably finish them. The panels will be there for forty years. The cattle were there for four hundred. The land is not the developer's. It belongs to an estate or a pension fund, and the developer offers a rent per acre no cow has ever earned. The farmer gets a letter. The council, told to triple solar by a minister who has never kept a beast, finds that the loss of a herd is not a planning consideration. So the field goes under glass. In Britain a solar array produces for about one hour in nine. It makes most in June at noon, when the country needs it least, and nothing on a January evening, when it needs it most, so a gas station is kept idling behind every one. The panels are made in China from polysilicon out of a province the government will not name. They lose output every year they stand there, and at the end there is no plan and no bond for taking them away. A quarter of a million square metres of glass, aluminium and copper cable, in a field, with a thirty-year lease and a company that will not exist when it ends. Under the panels the grass dies for want of light, the soil compacts under the plant, and the hedges go because the fence has to be electric and the fence has to be straight. The sheep in the brochure are for the photograph. The cattle were a solar panel already. Grass takes the light, the cow converts it, and the output is beef, every day of the year, on no cable, no subsidy and no inverter, for as long as there is rain. They have replaced a power station that makes dinner with one that works on a sunny afternoon and sits dead the rest of the time, and the family who ran the first one are being evicted to make room for the second.