Quote:
Originally Posted by Bibio
if what you are saying is fact then if every roof in Scotland had solar panels there would be no power stations or very few. so why dont the gov pay for them instead of wind turbines?????
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A fair question. Ignoring others' jibes about Scottish weather stereotypes, the sun doesn't shine when it's night-time in any location, yet the wind blows virtually 24/7 (on a national scale). So solar is very useful as a top up but doesn't work as a 'renewable' source on it's own.
Also, the land take for large scale solar farms is almost as controversial as windfarms. I'm not sure off the top of my head which is the more efficient generation method on a kW/m2 basis and I'm too lazy to research right now. (Of course, both wind and solar outputs are variable due to weather.)
Solar was encouraged with decent economic subsidy for a while, but you're right that wind has generally had greater support and take-up, at both industrial and domestic scale.
I agree that we should make better use of roof tops for solar - distributed yet large scale potential