You will have heard this: “Solar farms take up too much farm land that we should use to grow food.”
But do they?
How much land is out there, what do we use it for and is there space for solar farms?
There are many inputting factors to land use:
We waste a lot of food in the UK. It’s estimated that we waste 9.5 million tonnes of food annually.
That volume of food, simply wasted, requires a growing area of roughly the size of Wales! Just to throw it away!
Estimates vary, but if the UK achieves its 2050 target for solar farm coverage, giving 90GW of solar, this would cover around 0.5% of UK land. That’s roughly 200,000 hectares. Wales is around 2 million hectares.
If we can use 2 million hectares to grow food to throw away, it’s clear that we can spare 200,000 hectares for solar farms.
If we want to make better use of UK farm land, one thing we need to do is to cut food waste. How much food do you throw away every year?
Another area of land-use inefficiency is… meat eating.
Producing meat as food is enormously inefficient. Switching to a plant-based diet frees up about one third of UK land. ONE THIRD! That’s an enormous quantity of land surface. That third could then be used for growing food for direct human consumption, solar farms and rewilding. For more detail on this, see another of my posts.
Another big impactor of food production is climate change. Farmers in the UK have just had one of their worst harvests. Climate change is the very reason that we need things like solar farms, along with other non-fossil fuel technologies. Stabilising the climate in the long term (that’s decades away, at least) will help improve UK harvests, making better use of land in the UK.
It’s also worth noting that we use a lot of land for biofuel crops in the UK. It varies from year to year, but in 2024, 142,000 hectares of agricultural land was used for bioenergy crops in the UK. That goes into biofuel for transport, anaerobic digestion to make electricity / biogas and biomass for direct burning. That’s a huge area just to grow plants to burn.
We hear a lot about rewilding. Something that people often miss, is that solar farms become a little like nature reserves. Bees and butterflies don’t mind that the solar panels are there. Solar farms are often seeded with wildflower mixes and planted with extra hedgerows resulting in what’s referred to as ‘biodiversity net gain’ or BNG. Solar farms are good to restoring nature and boosting biodiversity in the UK.
Finally, you may also have heard the more trivial ‘golf course’ land area comparison. If the UK achieves its solar farm ambition, the area covered by solar farms would be roughly half that currently covered by golf courses. Trivial, as I say, when there are obviously much bigger issues at play than having somewhere to play golf.
On reflection, it’s clear to see that we have plenty of land in the UK for solar farms. There’s no need to fall for the ‘taking away farm land’ argument. And don’t forget, it serves the interests of fossil fuel companies to push such red-herrings which is why you’re probably familiar with the idea in the first place.
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