“There’s a massive solar boom in Europe.” From Portugal to Poland, the Netherlands to Greece, mammoth photovoltaic plants are spreading across fields and gliding across lakes, each facility providing enough electricity for hundreds of thousands of homes.
, each facility providing enough electricity for hundreds of thousands of homes. Buildings are being constructed with solar-powered water heaters, photovoltaic windows and photovoltaic roof tiles. Solar panels are appearing atop government buildings, grocery stores and schools, and even farms are embracing novel sun-powered technologies to shield crops from hail and scorching sun while producing energy.
But Europe’s dependence on China for solar equipment is a potential vulnerability. “China controls a lot of the minerals needed for solar installations and a lot of the manufacturing, which shifted to China over the last 10 years,” said Thorfinn Stainforth, a policy analyst at the Institute for European Environmental Policy. “The price has gone down — it’s very cheap now to get Chinese solar panels.
Some, including former U.K. Prime Minister Liz Truss, are concerned about solar installations on land that could be farmed. This fall the government of the United Kingdom even briefly flirted with an effective ban on solar farms, based on concerns about arable lands and food security. However, the environment secretary who put the idea forward was fired after Truss’s fall from grace, and the initial signs from the new government suggest it will be more favorably disposed toward solar.
But the biggest buzz in Europe concerns solar’s newest applications in agriculture — namely agri-solar. In pilot projects, solar panels cover crops such as berries and grapes, generating electricity to help meet a farm’s energy needs. They also shield crops from the scorching sun, hailstorms and torrential rains, and ultimately help farmers generate two sources of income from one tract of land.
Currently being tried out in Spanish, French and German vineyards as well as Dutch fruit farms, agri-solar projects provided an installed capacity of two gigawatts of electricity, Berwind estimates, a figure he expects will double in the next year, because projects are getting bigger. “Standard photovoltaic developers are taking it seriously, and starting to install multiple megawatts of systems,” he said.
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