It’s a technique that’s been used to good effect in Ireland; allowing and encouraging farmers to use renewable energy technology on their land. That windy bottom field with drainage problems – why not get a wind turbine erected there? Experts now say that if farmers throughout the UK were to do this, it would help the UK meet both its food and its energy requirements for the future. The generation of on-farm electricity would be capable of cutting their costs of producing food, by cutting their power bills and by selling excess renewable energy generated electricity to the Grid.
While the UK has great urban conurbations such as London, Manchester, and Birmingham, go a few miles outside of the cities and you’ll find most of the land is given over to agriculture. Indeed agricultural land accounts for almost 75% of the UK’s land cover. Analysis suggested farmers could earn up to £50,000 a year from generating electricity from wind energy.
Nicky Conway is the principal sustainability adviser for Forum for the Future and was a guest speaker at the recent Great British Wind Meal event. She said:
“There are about 300,000 farms in the UK so if you are going to have renewable energy generation at any level of scale, farmers have the land and the capacity to install those renewable energy schemes. Therefore they should be a target audience because they have the land and the resources to produce the energy.”
The event was held on the Devon/Cornwall border in the South West of England and was organised by the trade association RenewableUK and the on-line energy community Energyshare in partnership with the River Cottage food business.
In a Nottingham Trent University survey last Summer, almost 4 out of 10 farmers of the 700 interviewed were already generating electricity from renewable sources. Of those not generating electricity 6 out of 10 said that they were likely to invest in renewable energy generation within the next 5 years.
Nicky Conway said that a project, Farm Power, was attempting to “enable a step-change in the uptake of farm-based energy across the UK”.
The central idea of the project is to make renewable energy generation on farms, not a geeky, niche, odd-hobby type thing, but a serious economic development that would benefit the farm and the UK as a whole. It would be likely that the larger farms would be the ones that could invest in on-farm wind power, to begin with. Smaller farms would be unlikely to have the capital to invest- unless the Government were to grant subsidies, or perhaps persuade the EU to do so.
The event organizers even provided a lunch using products from farmers that had installed wind turbines on their land. Wind turbines appear to have no adverse effects on the livestock and sheep appear to like the quality of grass found under and behind solar panels!
It seems that more and more UK farmers are seeing the wind and the sun as additional “crops” to be harvested.
