Europe has survived 3 energy shocks in 4 years. The only way out is to stop buying power from its enemies | Fortune
https://fortune.com/2026/03/25/europe-3-energy-shocks-in-4-years-what-to-do-next/
Europe has survived 3 energy shocks in 4 years. The only way out is to stop buying power from its enemies | Fortune
https://fortune.com/2026/03/25/europe-3-energy-shocks-in-4-years-what-to-do-next/
In Denmark, we have been investing heavily in solar panels and windmills the last few years, which is awesome! Electric car purchases have also exploded.
Now we just need to do away with out pig production and we will have more fields to place solar panels on and there will still be plenty of space to turn former pig feed fields into wildlife reserves so our nature can recover from the damage these pig farmers have done to our country. It’ll take time, but I’m optimistic about our green policies in the future. We are heading in the right direction.
Do you know what the penetration percentage is of urban solar is in Denmark? Think of applications like rooftop solar, parking canopies/carports, façades, etc. Or even applications like brownfield?
Asking because there are many land uses in the world where solar could serve as a secondary function, all the while providing power exactly where it’s needed: in urban load centers.
Ground-mount solar on fields across the countryside would certainly help, but many solar installations rely on gravel to cover the ground underneath the panels, or low-growth native seed to reduce the amount of mowing needed over time.
Placing solar in urban contexts allows our countrysides to be rewilded and made polycultures supporting native wildlife. Ground-mount solar can introduce monocultures that don’t support native wildlife.
I don’t know a lot about the subject so I asked my boyfriend who knows way more about solar energy.
Paraphrasing him, the short reply to moving solar panels into cities is a no.
The longer answer is a multitude of reasons, but the main one is weight. Most house roofs, especially in older buildings will not be able to carry the weight of solar panels. The return from having solar panels on roofs in the city will also not be as good as if they are in the fields because the panels can’t move and maybe some roofs are placed in bad positions for optimal sun intake.
He also mentioned higher risks of fires due to the space between the roof and the solar panels, potentially feeding a fire with oxygen and making harder to put out the fire.
Due to the nature of a city layout, the solar panels would also be peppered out in a bigger area than if they were all collected on one plain field. This also means difficulties with maintainece which also costs more time and money than if you keep them in a field.
Keeping them in a concentrated area in a field is the most optimal solution for now. Maybe in the future, if solar panels have their weights significantly reduced, it will be a viable option to place them on roofs in cities. As for now, the best we can do with urban solar panels is to have them in mind when new buildings are raised and several contracting companies apparently work on this already, so things are happening. But many big Danish cities have old buildings, some are hundreds of years old. Its not uncommon to find houses here that are between 200 ans 400 years old.
I would like to add, that if we did like they have in the Netherlands and close down one third of our pig production, we would be able to secure more wild life areas that we have had in a hundred years and still have land for solar panels to spare.
To me it isn’t an either or with solar panels and nature. We could have both. Currently we barely have space for either because the pig farmer take up all the space to grow pig food.
I don’t think people understand how actually insane it is with the farming here. There is not one place here where you don’t see fields. They take up all the space. If we shut down their industry, there would be more space for nature while the space needed for solar energy wouldn’t even take up a 10th of land. I don’t have the actual numbers of space needed for solar panels, but it would be ridiculously low. I am way more interested in having the pig food fields confiscated by the state and made into protected nature. That is where the true gain for nature lies.
Also: According to my boyfriend, the current energy production in Denmark which is covered by solar panels and especially windmills is around 60%. We aren’t far from having reached our goal for sustainable green energy so the solar panel fields are literally nothing in the grand scheme of things.
Rebutting your LLM’s points:
“Older” houses in much of Europe are often made of stone, newer are frequently cinderblock, and the roof beams in both are massive. They’re holding up tile and slate roofs - the weight of solar panels is a rounding error, and not the concern it is with shoddy US stick-frame construction. So if that’s the “main reason” we’re doing pretty well already.
Sub-optimal angle just means the panel doesn’t produce AS MUCH power as it theoretically could. Not that it produces none, and many sub-optimal placements are still financially viable. Beyond that, any south-facing roof available is going to do very well.
Fire risks are again much lower on the very common hard-surface roofs. And that same space that allows the oxygen in also separates the fire from the roof, so the only things burning are the panels themselves and the fire soesn’t spread as it might with a ground-based installation which, by the way, also has air under the panels and are often over grass.
Higher installation and maintenance costs are partially offset by the fact that the cost of land purchase and taxes are €0. That was already covered by the building’s main use. Then you can add the social and financial benefit of keeping those fields in food production. Moving away from animal agriculture would not only mean more food available locally, but also for export as crop yields in other places fall due to climate change.
Finally, the whole framing presents a false dichotomy. This doesn’t have to be an either-or proposition - both-and is an option. We can have solar panels on buildings AND in fields. We can convert growing fields from feed production to food production AND put solar panels on the former pig farms that can’t support crops. Particularly in warmer climates (maybe less applicable in Denmark) we can even raise the solar panels a bit higher AND still grow crops underneath (Agrivoltaics)!
You don’t know what you’re talking about and the fact that you discredit my boyfriend’s words by calling it an LLM is pathetic.
Bye 👋
There’s no reason why panels can’t be in the same fields as the pigs… the lowest point of a panel can be higher than a pig…
The fields are not used to have pigs walking around. They are used to grow pigfood. Pigs in Denmark are being kept in massive indoor industrial compounds where they never see the sun. The sows are strapped to the ground with metal bars to be nonstop feeding machines for piglets.
We are around 6 million people in tiny little Denmark. We have over 40 million pigs who are produced for meat and all of them, ALL OF THEM are being exported to other countries, Italy and Poland, for slaughtering and the meat is sold to other countries. That transportation pollutes the environment and is entirely unnecessary. It is animal abuse and environmentally unsound to send them to other countries to get slaughtered. The farmers do this to save money because slaughter houses are cheaper in Poland.
The pig shit produced is so massive that farmers break the laws every spring and strat fertilizing the fields before the night frost has ended. This is illegal because the frost keeps the shit frozen on the ground, the ground cannot absorb the fertilizer and this means that when everything thaws, the excess nutrients and water will run off and straight into creeks and lakes and pollute the water there.
Pesticides used on the fields that are used to grow pigfood - not human food - pig food is also seepinging into the ground and is now polluting our ground water along with the excess pig shit which is fucking insane because we used to have naturally clean ground water and now we are facing a future were we might have to spend billions to keep the ground water clean if the farmers aren’t stopped.
Every year, thousands, if not millions of pigs die before ever seeing a butcher. They have no space, they get sick. The farmers fill their food with penicillin to the point that now several diseases have started to show resistense to penicillin which has the potential to develop into a health crisis for humans all over the fucking world, bro. If penicillin stops working, we are fucked.
Our coastlines are as good as dead at this point. There is no aquatic life left due to farmers polluting the land with their pig shit. Several species of animals are close to extinction because of the farmers. Especially several types of birds because there aren’t enough insects for them to eat and their habitat has been taken over by industrial farmers.
Over 60% of all Danish areal is being used for farming and most of that is to grow pig food.
But that is not enough. There still isn’t enough food for the pigs. So what do the farmers do? They import soybeans from South America where local soy farmers have to cut down rain forest to grow more soy beans to meet the demand. The soy beans are transported by container ships which we all know are some of the biggest polluters in the world. All to feed fucking pigs that no Dane will ever get to have.
Danes, btw, get to have the bad, left over pork while the prime stuff is sold to other countries.
It is also contributing to the housing crisis in Denmark because the big industrial farms have helped kill the countryside life in Denmark. When everything smells like pigshit in the countryside it’s already not fun to live there, but there are also no jobs because pig farmers will not hire Danes to work on their farms because they would have to pay us more and actually care about our well being. They instead hire guest workers from poor countries to work with the pigs and get ammonia poisonings because the air in those stalls is filled with pig pee vapor. At least the workers can go outside at some point, but the pigs live in that air their whole lives.
Now that you know the basics of industrial pig farming in Denmark you may think: gosh, this must be a super lucrative industry since all this shit is being done to the animals and thr environment to keep up production. They must stand for at least 60% of the Danish BNP, right? That’s what my best friend thought when I told her about how pig farming works in Denmark.
Less than 1%. Less than fucking 1% does this POS industry contribute to the overall Danish BNP.
But how in the hell has it been able to get this far, you may think.
Because of a political party named Venstre who has historically been a farmer party and fought for farmers. The level of lobbying going there is disgusting. The farmers pay them so much fucking money to keep the public ignorant about what is going on and they have been successful in the past, but not anymore. There has been a recent movement to expose pig farmers and they have been successful. The Danish public is fucking outraged because they were lied to.
I have avoided eating pig meat as much as possible for at least ten years because I found pig farming unethical, but even I didn’t know the true magnitude of this insane industry until four or five years ago.
When I learned that they contribute less than 1 fucking percent to the BNP while taking up over 60% of our land to grow fucking pig food for 40+ million pigs whose entire lives are suffering while our wildlife and nature is dying out - I went from being against pork to wanting it absolutely outlawed here. Get that shit out of my country.
Take the pig fields back, turn them into nature and solar parks. Fuck pig farmers.
This is fucking insane and shows that lobbying and the practice of paying for political outcomes should be outlawed and, more importantly, the adherence to the laws needs to be controlled and failure to do so needs prison sentences or at least complete repossession of the offenders business.
Yep. The good news is that our Dutch neighbors whose country has a similar setup to us, have cut their pig production by a third recently and the plan is to further cut into it. That is what we need to do in Denmark too. Cut it down until it is phased out entirely and continue to promote sustainable farming.
In time I also hope we will be able to take a look at lobbying because the farm lobbying is the most extreme case we have here. We just had the election here in Denmark and Venstre has had their worst election result EVER. The party is over a 100 years old and used to be one of the biggest parties in Denmark. They ruled my country all the way up through the 2000s where means were given to farmers, tax money, given to them, special agreements that gave farmers carte Blanche to pretty much do whatever they wanted and even the smallest attempt at putting restrictions on them by left leaning governments had them throw temper tantrums. This is the general case for all European industrial farmers.
Back then it worked because farming is a cultural heritage type of thing and part of the Danish identity so these industrial farmers (and the politicians who support them) who actually helped kill the old farming culture have used the image of the wholesome farmer as a shield against all criticism towards farmers.
The anti-industrial farmer movement in Denmark is huge and multifaceted. A lot of this is also paving the way for Danes to sort of grieve over the identity we have lost which is reflected in fiction and art. There is a lot of authors writing about the shift from farming culture to the modern middle class and the effects it has had on the Danish self image. The fact that this is being reflected in art at the same time as the pig issue has exploded is almost poetic.
It was a matter of time before we would have to recon with all of this and the fact that we are finally here is pretty exciting, because it has really gotten out of hand. I legit remember my dad as early as the early 2000s and maybe even the 90s talk about how farming was going to destroy our country if it wasn’t regulated so I grew up with a pretty intense disgust for big farming while also growing up right next to one of legit, romantic old timey farms where the farmer knows and loves his animals and treats them well. A dying breed. So yeah, I have a complicated relationship with farming, but I hope for an support sustainable farming and want Venstre to actually support those instead of helping indsturial farmers climb to the top and hoard their wealth for themselves while legit farmers end up having to sell their land to the big farms so they can destroy my country for no reasons because it’s not even a profitable industry for anyone but the few hundred pig farm owners in my country. It’s fucking ridiculous.
I’m saying this only because Donny keeps calling them windmills and nobody wants to be like him - they’re wind turbines, not mills. There is no grain being crushed as there would be in a mill.
Donny and the Danes. Yeah, it’s quite amusing but they’re the natural evolution of a windmill. Vindmøller are fine for me
That may be the case in Danish
Dutch, but it’s incorrect to call them mills in English.Dutch = the Netherlands
Danish = Denmark.
If you’re going to be a Poindexter about windmills, then at least get the language right of the country you are criticizing.
I’m also terribly sorry that we don’t call them wind turbines and that it triggers you that we call them windmills because of trump. We called them windmills decades before Trump even knew what they were and we will continue to do so.
Language corrected. That was an unintentional error.
As for the rest of your heavily sarcastic post though, here’s my middle finger, which is all you deserve for posting such a deliberately assholish comment.
Thank you. I just don’t appreciate to be told that the way we refer to windmills in my country is wrong because trump says it. I found that pretty insulting and gave the energy back.
We call them windmills where I live.