Farming and solar panels can work but right sites needed - Yorkshire Post Letters

I AGREE entirely with your article by Jason Reed (The Yorkshire Post, March 28). We are seeing a dramatic increase in the number of solar applications in the country.

The reason the public, and now thankfully many local MPs, are becoming more aware of these proposals is that developers so often choose inappropriate sites for solar.

Developers must take full account and satisfy the criteria in the national and local planning policy and not simply choose land that’s easiest or most financially profitable for them or the landowner, in the hope that local planners will agree because councils have declared “climate emergencies”.

This means focusing on low-grade land, brownfield sites and rooftops which will enable agriculture and solar to thrive.

Our food security has never been more important. It makes no sense to cover best and most versatile land that grows good crops in solar panels. Solar panels do not benefit from good land. Crops on the other hand, depend on good soil. We need urgent regulations to control or a complete prohibition of solar on our good farmland.

Agriculture and solar energy are not mutually exclusive, provided solar parks are appropriately sited. Why can’t government understand this simple fact?

From: Charles Wardrop, Viewlands Road West, Perth.

Wind turbines, both on and offshore, are a vastly costly confidence trick, with no real benefit for us or for planet Earth.

Boris Johnson’s plans for giant offshore windfarms in the Irish Sea are, like onshore turbines, essentially a confidence trick.

They are virtually devoid of value to anyone except virtue signallers and foreign manufacturers.

The climate cannot benefit.

With account taken of manufacture, demanding fossil fuels, steel, concrete, plastics and lubricating oils, the turbines are anything but “green”.

Installation, maintenance and ultimate disposal demand vast resources in return for only intermittent electricity generation.

Constant fossil-fuelled back-up is essential.

We will have to meet the costs, including subsidies, for one of the most disappointing wastes since the South Sea Bubble in 1720.

Why, then, propose such a plan? It can only be to gain votes for politicians from a duped public.

There are words which fairly apply to products not doing “what it says on the tin”. There are also words for theìr pushers. Readers can choose suitable terms for such misleading and unaffordable dishonesty.