Cheap, clean energy for the UK and new houses too, why not?
Utility scale solar power occupies a lot of land that could be used to better purpose. Nuclear power can free up that land and solve the energy crisis and housing crisis.
Britain’s Climate Change Committee has a plan for supplying carbon-free electricity to the nation in 2050. The plan includes 106 GW of solar panels.
Utility-scale solar panels occupy about 5 acres of land for 1 MW of capacity. It works out to 530,000 acres for the proposed 106 GW.
Solar panels in the UK achieve less than 11% capacity factors, the 106 GW of solar panels will generate approximately 100 TWh of electricity per year.
On a sunny June day, when demand is at its lowest, the panels will be at their peak production and there will be a surplus of electricity.
If strong winds are blowing, that surplus will be supplemented by electricity from wind farms, to such an extent that demand can be filled without any contribution at all from the solar panels.
Some of the solar power will go to storage (batteries, pumped hydro, hydrogen). It will be regenerated at another time but always with less than 100% efficiency, sometimes as low as 30% efficiency in the case of hydrogen storage. Some of the solar power will be wasted, it will have to be curtailed, or another power source (e.g. wind) will have to be curtailed to allow the solar to operate.
In the middle of winter, when electricity demand is at its highest, solar panel productivity will be at its lowest. The CCC plan includes standby generators that use hydrogen or natural gas (with carbon capture) to cover periods when there is no sun or wind.
After accounting for the wasted power and the inefficiency of the storage systems, the usable amount of solar power will be in the region of 70 to 80 TWh per year.
That amount of electricity could be generated by 10 GW of nuclear power, which could be built on 8,000 acres of land.
Britain also has a chronic shortage of housing. Land for housing sells for as much as £1 million per acre in the south of the country (where most of the solar installations would be built), and £300,000 in the north.
Freeing up just 20% of the land that would be occupied by solar panels and rezoning it for housing would create enough value to pay for the nuclear power plants, and at the same time, it would provide up to 1.5 million new homes.
Is there anyone in the UK government with enough common sense to suggest such a plan?
If your idea made sense maybe they would but it doesn’t. A nuclear plant takes 8 years to build, plus probably 10 years to actually agree location and get planning permission. There’s also the little issue of the cost at £20billion+ which could be used to build hundreds of solar and wind farms far faster.
As for using it for houses instead well that depends on whether people want to live there or not to a degree. But more fundamentally there isn’t a shortage of land. House builders have more than enough in their land bank to cater for demand. They just can’t build them fast enough due to lack of materials, people and planning permission.
I’m also sure that 99% of people that currently own a home don’t want to see the market flooded with housing as the value of theirs would plunge and cause considerable economic issues elsewhere.