Under the Tory government, “solar” was a dirty word in the UK. But now the Brits have finally awoken from their post-Brexit funk long enough to elect some actual adults to run the country. One of them is energy secretary Ed Miliband, who has lit a fire under the country’s renewable energy ambitions, particularly with regard to rooftop and grid-scale solar.
Another way of saying this is that a photovoltaic panel is almost astonishingly efficient, McKibben says. “It is 20 times more efficient than the solar collector we call a corn plant. If that wasn’t true, then we’d be in even deeper trouble on an overheating world. But it is true, which makes it our best single hope for dealing with the climate crisis.
Second are the “straight up NIMBYs,” he said. “Some of the worst are progressives. They always begin by saying ‘I’m a big supporter of renewables, but not here. I moved out from the city to look at corn,’” says Sprague, who has clearly heard this line too often. Increasingly, says Carson, they’re now seeing a third category he calls. “The other night at a hearing we had a lady reading straight off her phone from some website. ‘Solar panels will poison the groundwater.