The difficult balancing act when expanding photovoltaics: "Food doesn't grow on the supermarket shelf"

Created: 01/26/2022, 19:00

By: Markus Schwarzkugler

Anton Wollschläger advocates, among other things, PV on municipal roofs.

© Stratenschulte/dpa (symbolic photo)

"Successful energy transition cannot consist of simply, quickly and easily expanding scarce agricultural land and making far too little use of the huge potential of already built-up areas," says Anton Wollschläger, organic farmer and district and municipal councilor of the Greens.

District – An important component of the energy transition is photovoltaics.

But how should the use of solar energy be expanded?

Above all on the roofs of municipalities and citizens or rather on agricultural land?

Toni Wollschläger, who is deeply involved in the matter as an organic farmer, Green Party councilor in Langenpreising and district councilor in Freising, also finds it a difficult balancing act.

He is certain that "a successful energy transition cannot consist in simply, quickly and easily expanding scarce agricultural land and, in my opinion, making far too little use of the huge potential of areas that have already been built over," he emphasized in a letter the press.

Green district and municipal councilor Anton Wollschläger.

© private

Wollschläger himself operates several PV systems with an output that can theoretically supply around 20 households with electricity. For him, open-space solar systems are definitely a building block, especially "after a lot has been missed in the past few years when it comes to renewable energies, it will not work entirely without such systems in order to make faster progress". However, you have to "master a balancing act between the need to advance the energy transition quickly and the interests of landscape protection and agriculture".

A major problem in the construction of supposedly cheap and problem-free PV systems on meadows and fields is the competition for land, with regard to food production and landscape protection.

"Agricultural land and open, undeveloped landscape have become very scarce and therefore valuable goods, especially in the area around the Munich metropolitan area," says Wollschläger.

"Our food doesn't grow on the supermarket shelf."

"Many of us forget that in Germany alone we need the yield of over 50 million hectares of agricultural land to maintain our lavish standard of living, but that we only have about 17 million available," calculates Wollschläger.

The rest will be imported.

In addition, areas are "used far too intensively", fertilizers and pesticides lead to species extinction and groundwater pollution.

"But a more extensive, ecologically oriented cultivation also requires more space," says Wollschläger.

In order to avoid competition for space, he relies on more intensive PV use on sealed ground.

Wollschläger unpacks the calculator again: "If, for example, all German car parks with more than twelve parking spaces were used for photovoltaics, this alone would allow for an increase in PV capacity of around 60 gigawatts - and thus a doubling of the previous total PV capacity in Germany."

There are also unused roof, building and facade areas, industrial halls and other buildings in the district - "a huge potential that must be exploited," emphasizes the Green politician, who can also imagine open-space PV in certain areas of landscape protection areas.

He sees politics and responsible property owners as having a duty to advance savings and energy efficiency.

MARKUS SCHWARZKUGLER