{"id":103639,"date":"2026-07-17T03:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-07-17T07:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=103639"},"modified":"2026-07-15T11:39:09","modified_gmt":"2026-07-15T15:39:09","slug":"why-solar-power-is-not-the-answer-for-britain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2026\/07\/17\/why-solar-power-is-not-the-answer-for-britain\/","title":{"rendered":"Why solar power is not the answer for Britain"},"content":{"rendered":"

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter<\/em>, Sama Hoole<\/a> looks at a recent World Bank report that shows very clearly why solar power should not even be on the power options list for Britain:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The World Bank ranked every country on earth for practical solar potential.<\/p>\n

Britain came second from bottom. Not second from bottom in Europe. On the planet. Out of everywhere they measured, the only place with worse conditions for a solar panel is Ireland. Norway is above us. Norway, where the sun clocks off entirely for part of the year, is a better bet than Lincolnshire.<\/p>\n

The reasons are not a mystery. We sit at 53 degrees north, the same line as Edmonton, Alberta. The sun in December gets about as high as a first-floor window and then thinks better of it. And there’s the cloud, which is not a detail, it is the national personality. A square metre of London gets 0.52 kilowatt hours of sunlight a day in December and 4.74 in July, so the panel does nine times less work in the month your heating is on than in the month it isn’t. Across the whole of 2024, British solar ran at 9.5% of what it’s rated at. The other 90.5% is a photograph of a power station.<\/p>\n

Now the other column.<\/p>\n

The ground we’re bolting it to is Trent valley silt and Lincolnshire fen. Some of it took three hundred years to drain. It grows wheat at yields that most of the planet cannot get near, in a climate so reliably damp that grass grows here without anyone asking it to, which is the entire reason this island has cattle and cheese and a butcher.<\/p>\n

So we are, measurably, one of the worst places on earth for sunlight and one of the best on earth for food.<\/p>\n

And we’ve had a good long look at both of those numbers and gone with sunlight.<\/p>\n

Somewhere in Namibia, which the same report ranked first, there is a patch of absolutely nothing, in full sun, wondering what it did wrong.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Sama Hoole looks at a recent World Bank report that shows very clearly why solar power should not even be on the power options list for Britain: The World Bank ranked every country on earth for practical solar potential. Britain came second from bottom. Not second […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[4,25,65,53],"tags":[640,497,156],"class_list":["post-103639","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-britain","category-economics","category-environment","category-politics","tag-alternativeenergy","tag-electricity","tag-fail"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-qXB","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103639","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=103639"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103639\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":103642,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103639\/revisions\/103642"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=103639"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=103639"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=103639"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}