A waste of who’s time and money? If the return from a solar farm is better than that from growing crops, then it’s absolutely not a wast of time and money for the farmer / land owner.IMHO solar farms in the UK are a waste of time and money in addition to environmental damage they do plus the fact that crops cannot be grown under them when land in the UK is needed for other purposes.
Farm roads are used to large machinery. In our area, the predominant agriculture is cereal and Oil seed rape, both of which require combining and tractor trailers for harvest. In my experience, the temporary additional traffic for solar plant building is not much higher than at harvest time.Grazing is also very sparse under the solar panels.
A local farmer wants to change to a solar farm and the environmental impact will be huge during the building stages due to large trucks trundling through small villages on basically farm roads. Also the solar farm is right next to an ancient woodland where wildlife is plentiful.
That is of course locally dependent. Substation deployment and attachment to the grid is dependent on local DNO infrastructure, but has the side benefit improved reliability and the availability for the local DNO to support higher home loads for the likes of car chargers and air source heat pumps.Then there is also the issue of them probably digging up the roads to install cables and impacting at least 3 -4 small villages while doing this.
Certainly some roofs need modification, but all new builds (residential and commercial) should have solar roofing as mandatory during construction.However I agree 100% with you regarding solar panels and sunshine in many other countries around the world and not just the desert where the sun shines for at least 9 months of the year. Also agree about solar panels on the rooftops of factories or office buildings. However to support the weight I would think that extensive modifications would be required to the roof.
My town has a local planing request for some huge warehouses for a number of companies including DHL going into what is currently green belt grazing and pasture. I don’t want to see the loss of that green space to buildings and would prefer it to be become a solar farm. However, if the building is inevitable, it should be constructed with solar roofing as a minimum to reduce it’s power cost and perhaps become a net contributor. Solar power in the UK is 100% sensible in that type of situation.