Untapping the full potential of solar farms in the UK: different approaches to land management

• Autor(a) principal: Esteves, Ana Maria Rodrigues
• Data de Publicação: 2016
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10198/14052
• topic: Land management; Solar PV; Development; Construction; Operation and maintenance; Agriculture; Domínio/Área Científica

The United Kingdom (UK) Government’s strategic to meet the target of 15 per cent renewable of primary energy from final consumption by 2020, and help the delivery of carbon reductions, have introduced support mechanism. These support mechanism includes: Feed-in Tariffs (FiT), Renewable Obligation (RO) and Contracts for difference (CfD). The increase installation of utility-scale photovoltaic (PV) plants and the competition between food and energy brought an important topic for discussion the full potential of solar farms. Once after installation of the infrastructure around 70% of ground remains available, so this project proposes and analyses the different approaches to land management. The land management suggestions are agricultural use (crops, grazing and beekeeping) and biodiversity use (hedgerows, security fencing, field margins, grassland (wildflowers meadow) and nest boxes). A number of impacts during the solar development cycle (development phase, construction phase and operational and maintenance phase (O&M) and the environmental, land-use, biodiversity and socio–economic impacts, are studied and analysed for each of the possible options for ground. The suitable use is selected by developers, so the impacts of the different land management studies on are devices to help them in this decision. Therefore any land management option, however expensive is their implementation or maintenance is preferable than just cutting the vegetation, where there is no land management use.