Hi. This thread is about solar energy. I'm seeing a lot of "oh no, solar panels are terrible terrible things because it takes energy produce them and they have
c h e m i c a l s
in them."

Well. I wanted to crunch some numbers real quick.

A preface;

I am using numbers that I dug up a couple of years ago for a video concept I was working on. They come from stats from the EIA regarding efficiency of power plants in producing kWh from the heat content of their fuel.

Consider a single commercial solar panel. They're usually 250 watt panels. And typically they're warrantied for a 20 year life.

Let's say we have one panel that only gets 2 hours of sun per day. That's 500 watt-hours per day.

Over 20 years, that's 3.65 megawatt hours.

Given the efficiency of a typical coal fired power plant, how much coal would we need to burn to produce that amount of energy?

By my math, using something like 2017 numbers, it's just under 4,000 lbs of coal (1814 kg)

Now obviously our grid isn't entirely coal, but the point remains.

A 20 pound box made mostly of glass and aluminum offsets two tons of coal.

And that was with ridiculously weak output from the panel.

Again, obviously there is an environmental impact in the production of that solar panel. And by all accounts it will need replacement within a few decades.

But I'll tell you that to my number crunching ears, claims that solar panels are somehow these awful things are... suspect

"But what about storage!"

OK, well the video concept I was working on was specifically about cars.

My intent was to demonstrate that our family's trusty 'ol minivan has consumed AN ENTIRE TANKER TRUCK worth of gasoline over the past 18 years.

That right there should freak you out.

One vehicle. ONE VEHICLE OUT OF BILLIONS. Has burned through 9,000 gallons of gasoline.

Sounds super sustainable!

Anyway, while I am not gonna sit here and claim that I have studied the environmental costs of the production of lithium ion batteries, I find it incredibly hard to believe that the battery packs produced today cause the equivalent amount of harm that an entire tanker truck does.

And the last point that seemingly everyone ignores is that, unlike gasoline, the raw materials in both solar panels and batteries remain in place throughout their lifetimes.

The potential for recylclabilty is there, if not yet to scale today.

The same cannot be said for fossil

Now, as I've already seen has occurred, the "nuclear is the answer and it's a shame everyone's afraid of it" crowd will surely like to tell us all about that.

My personal thoughts are that the mere fact people are afraid of it is the single greatest barrier to viability.

A human-caused, emotionally-based problem is still a problem.

And I for one remain unconvinced in our ability to figure out what to do with waste given that we still haven't managed to come up with a solid plan that we can all agree on. Plus... the timescales are terrifying.

Regardless, that's apart from the point that I'm making in this thread.

What I'd like to say is that I find it really discouraging that everyone is looking at the manufacturing costs of solar panels or wind turbines as though those costs are unique to them.

They bloody are not.

I am tired of people being like "oh solar panels use so many chemicals in their production!" as if refining fossil fuels doesn't.

One option is to extract and process continuously. The other is to extract every two decades or so.

And with that I'll conclude the thread.