I like the little old windmill, reminds me of the little engine that could by Watty Piper.
I guess you could place solar panels under the windmills as most of the technical equipment is probably already in place. But is the area below useless? I believe the farmers in Norway use the land under the windmills for crop.
Right! there is a lot of land under the mills used for crop, but in other areas, more in the North of Netherlands, there are a lot of fields that contain no windmills and are cropfields or meadows. A growing number of these fields are now turned into solar parks, whereas the people around do not like that a lot: they like more to see cropfields obviously.
But the farmers get more money out of the soil by turning it into solar parks than using it as meadows or cropfields....
At the same time: the fields with the windmills on them are in my opinion more suitable for solar parks because they are not attractive for people to look at or to spend their sparetime.
If they put the solar panels under the mills, the other fields in the rural areas can stay quiet and rural instead of being used as solar parks.
I see your point of view but I always assumed the farmers where happy with the combination as the windmill doesn't take up all that much area and they can harvest crop for their livestock more or less as they used to. But then again a windmill makes a lot of noise and that might be negative for the animals. I support your view even more when it comes to some of the windmill parks they put out on the mountains here in Norway as that area around has to totally useless for anything once they put windmills there.
Like this one: (Picture belongs to Midtfjellet Vindkraft AS)
I took a picture of that once from a distance and if you zoom in a bit on the right you can see them all:
Yes...
I have Always been a huge fan of clean energy and I Always thought that windmills were one of those sources. But lately I start to question this.
Here in Holland people have made a lot of money by building these wind parks with subsidy ( money given to private companies by the government ) I heard that a lot of windmills are build not to produce clean electricity, but to get hold on thes subsidies....
The maintainance of windmills is a lot more complex and expensive then the maintainance of solar parks I guess.