For panels mounted as depicted, I’m with you 100%. I do want to mention though that vertically mounted panels seems to increase harvests and from the farmer (singular) I’ve spoken to who is testing this with the help of academia I’ve understood that there is a debate about moisture retention. And as far as I’ve seen, there are more than university coming to the same conclusions. Having said that, we’ve still to see this tested large scale…

I agree, multiple land use is the way forward. Solar panels for their own sake is seldom good enough land use, even if may be cheaper to set up.

I agree wholeheartedly. Solving the issue of high wintertime electricity use is not about adding capacity, it is about driving down demand. High winter time electricity costs is unfortunate, but it will help making that change. High winter electricity costs will incentivise innovation in energy/heat storage to help reduce electricity needs. And that in turn will help keep electricity costs down for everybody. The municipality im in is currently building 2 heat storage facilities to try the technology. Fingers crossed it will pan out well! For a country like Sweden with approximately 2-2,5 million small houses, if each had a 10MWh heat battery on-prem that’d approximately equal the energy output of all nuclear sites in the country for the sunless 5 months…

Well… there should be a “right now” included in all discussions about birth rates. Case in point: Sweden. There is birth data from 1749 and examining that data show 2 distinct time periods, roughly before and after ww1. Before ww1, fairly even birthrates, after early 1800 increasing (to rather high level). Swedens last war ended 1812. After ww1 decline in birth rates, but an obvious 25 year long cycle instead. Last time there were black headlines about birth rates was 1999-2000. Sure enough 25 years ago and nothing to suggest that the long time trend has been broken. When the most recent slump in birth rates began all preschools and schools were full to the brim.

I’m not sure those conclusions can be drawn by that article. I mean, there was one solid regression in there which clearly showed a near perfect linearity between less gas-hours (that is more fossil free power) and lower electricity cost. And in that regression Sweden and norway was even omitted, had they not been the correlation would be even stronger.

As for the other regressions presented they were not apples to apples comparisons and no conclusions can be drawn because of bad methodology. Sure enough R-square was very low as well, but that would be expected.

The issues with the methodology are that A) the cost of electricity isnt decided by what is produced in a country, but by how much is in demand in neighboring electricity regions. For instance, the price of electricity in sweden is closely tied to demand in Germany. Thus will wind and solar in Sweden have very little explanative power on price. And B) the meassured price is t the true mean price as met by the consumers. If 5% of households has a solar installation it will skew the mean price by alot. Not only will their price of electricity inversely follow production as they will first use there own production, they will also see negative prices when the installation delivers more electricity than what is used by the household. Both mechanisms skew the price of the mean bought kwh electricity And neither is accounted for in this comparison.

But the main conclusion stands. Any reduction in gas-hours will lower the price of electricity.