Re:Chasing utopian energy: How I wasted 20 years of my life
by dpierce9 on Thursday June 23, 2022 @08:39AM
(#31848193)
MARGINAL. I will try one more time because a stranger is wrong on the internet. It is the difference between how much a car costs and how many miles per gallon it gets. Once you have paid for the car, the only thing that matters with respect to fuel efficiency is MPG. The MPG of solar is infinity because there are no gallons to buy/use once you have bought the car. You are confusing purchase price with MPG for some reason. There is no additional material used once the panels are installed and nothing wasted. For a car, 65% or more of every gallon you buy is wasted.
There isn’t a lot of demand for panel recycling because most panels have been installed in the last 10-15 years are not end of life. When there is demand there will be recyclers, you don’t need to centrally plan it.
There actually is NOT a lot of room to improve with monocrystalline silicon and other single band panels. The theoretical max efficiency on them is 40% so they are currently more than 50% of their max, room but not a lot. The technical efficiency (how much of the energy hitting the panel is turned in to electricity) is subsumed by the economics. For ROOFTOP, small systems can offset residential load 100%. I am not sure what is inefficient about that on any definition.
No, it isn't. There's literally materials consumed to build the solar panels, and a 0.4-0.8 deaths per TWh generated. To your own point a 1-2 year recovery period on panels that last 20 is 5-10% loss in energy off the mark. We don't really have a recycling plan, but we better get one, because solar generates a ton of waste materials. To power the entire United States, we'd need 20,000 square miles of solar panel - the entire landmass of West Virginia. Replaced every 20 years, we'd need almost 100,000 square miles of solar panel in my lifetime. That's the entire surface area of Colorado.
But that's ok because I'm not arguing against rooftop solar lol. I never was. That doesn't change the fact they're not particularly efficient, and there's a lot of room to improve. I was arguing in favor of nuclear, which, with seawater extraction, can be completely renewable.