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Comment by fpgaminer | Hacker News Reader

If I could install solar today I would, regardless of cost (apartment living prevents it). That may sound crazy, but I theorize that when you consider externalities the cost of grid electricity already far exceeds the cost of solar. It's going to cost humanity a whole lot of money to both survive and fix the damage we're dealing to the environment today. I'd rather pay more now for solar, than pay through the nose later for the environmental equivalent of a triple bypass surgery.

I doubt others see it that way, so I guess I'll pay the cleanup cost later like everyone else regardless. Such is the human condition.

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I used to think this way until I started dating a geologist. She brought down my optimism when she detailed the ways that the environment is ravaged to extract the materials necessary to create solar panels, wind turbines, and so on. Rare earths are great for handling high heat, but their resistance to reaction also means it takes a LOT of nasty chemicals to purify the ore. Not that we should keep on burning fossil fuels, but we shouldn't kid ourselves into thinking that renewables are a one-way street to environmental prosperity.

A one-time dirty process for a future steady source of clean energy. Isn't it still much better than continually burning fossil fuels? And if we're counting extraction costs, don't discount the extraction cost to get fossil fuel and build fossil fuel processors (car engines, power plants, etc).

> A one-time dirty process

If only it was. Neither solar panels nor wind turbines last for a very long time, and the recycling processes don't exist on an efficient or clean scale for either yet.

Most panels have a rated life of 25 years and deteriorate slowly. That provides plenty of time for the recycling to be built. It's also comparable to the design lifetime of most types of non-renewable power plant.

I'm not qualified to answer either way.

But my grandfather worked at a coal fired plant. I've been to the strip mine. I've seen the trains that run continuously to truck it in.

From a layman's perspective it seems like an incredibly efficient process. Is there any chemical refinement going on at all? All that I saw looked mechanical (but I was very young).

I would guess that it would take many years of Solar before it broke even, in an environmental impact sense, with "cleaner" coal.

I think ultimately solar probably wins. But the initial cost seems like it must be orders of magnitude higher.

That said, I'd get solar if I could. Just not my highest home-improvement priority and I'd have to do something about the trees shading the south side of my roof. I like my trees. :-(

OTOH it would be nice if there were a high power (~2KV), affordable (<$2,000?), silent wind turbine solution to supplement our grid power.

Deciduous trees on the south side of your house are great for energy efficiency. The shade reduces summer cooling costs, and then the leaves drop so you get solar heat in the winter. You should definitely think about it carefully before cutting them down to install solar panels.

Unless you live in the southern hemisphere, in which case you want to plant them on the north side of your house. On a somewhat related note, rooftop solar panels have also been shown to have good insulation benefits[1]. [1] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0038092X11...

True, you want the trees and panels on whichever side of the house is sunniest.

Since the GP was talking about "trees shading the south side of my roof" I'm guessing that he's in the northern hemisphere. Or maybe he's just really bad at siting solar panels, but I was giving him the benefit of the doubt. :)

There isn't chemical refinement in the same way as there is with oil. But there are mine tailings, ash, a surprising amount of radioactive thorium in the ash(1), sulphur (usually neutralised by trucking in limestone and out gypsum (2)), and of course vast quantities of carbon dioxide. "Clean" coal does not and cannot really address the CO2 even if it has been cleaned up in the other ways.

There are various estimates of the breakeven time, but even the most conservative ones put it under ten years.

You don't have to get your own solar if it's not convenient, that's what the grid is for.

1: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-r...

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flue-gas_desulfurization

Anything we do we have to undo, and undo always costs more. It's not a perfect solution (nothing ever is), but we really ought to be bridging the gap with nuclear.

You're right, we will have to bite the bullet to have enough renewable capacity in the future. All I'm arguing is that we know both the risks of action and inaction. It's hard to get a sense of environmental damage from inside a comfortable air-conditioned building.

The thing is, exactly the same is true of all the other methods of power generation and mineral extraction. You have to at least compare the size and nastiness of the tailings piles. Not to mention CO2 produces carbonic acid when dissolved in oceans; the least "nasty" acid, but still enough to very very slightly change the pH and damage a lot of ocean life.

Not all PV panels, wind turbines or EV car designs use rare earths e.g. Tesla doesn't use any in their motors.

Also, lots of other things that aren't good for the environment use rare earths. Kind of weird and illogical that people only care about it when you're trying to do good.

People are terrible when dealing with large scale diffuse issues. Coal might be 30 times as bad as solar, but that's not zero and most of coal’s harm is spread over a large area.

In 2003, China had 4,143 coal related accidents that killed 6,434 people. But, installing rooftop solar also kills some people so it must be the great evil.

PS: A report by the World Bank in cooperation with the Chinese government found that about 750,000 people die prematurely in China each year from air pollution. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_in_China#Accidents_and_de...

I would rather have 0.1% of the Earth be made toxic enough to kill me in 600 seconds than have 100% of the Earth be made toxic enough to kill me in 600 months.

The pollution from solar cell manufacture is mostly near the mines and chemical processors, and the effects are mitigated if you don't go near there or live downstream. Pollution from coal burning affects everyone who lives downwind of any furnace, and those are located near the users to cut down on transmission losses.

Natural sources of pollution, like volcanoes, are not much of a concern, because most of the biosphere chooses not to live near them. So an artificial zone made more inhospitable than the surface of Venus, confined somehow, and situated far from civilization, is a bit less of a concern than the air quality index of Beijing.

Would it help if the raw materials were mined from asteroids, the finished product manufactured in space, and then dropped to the surface by nontoxic ablative shields and parachutes? If the answer is yes, being able to confine the pollution to specific areas on Earth is almost as good. (But the confinement is the hard part.)

Are you sure about Tesla? What material do they use for the permanent magnets in their motors? I know the motor has to contain permanent magnets since Tesla cards have regenerative braking.

http://my.teslamotors.com/roadster/technology/motor

No magnets, induction motors.

You need a magnet for regenerative braking, not a permanent magnet. An induction motor cannot regenerate without a source of electricity, but you can get a lot more out than you put in to generate the magnetic field.

It's funny how the current debate regarding sustainable energy is always about production, not consumption. Somehow consumption is always taken as a given, about which nothing can be done.

It's obvious modern societies are wasteful - energy, food, water, transportation - but everybody is talking about how to increase production efficiency, no one is talking about how to decrease over-consumption.

This is partly because modern societies are struggling to figure out how to enjoy prosperity without growth[1] (some would depressingly argue that prosperity is the growth of consumption).

[1] A big topic for sustainable development: https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?q=prosperity+without+gr...

> I'd rather pay more now for solar, than pay through the nose later for the environmental equivalent of a triple bypass surgery.

That's really generous, however I think it would be the government's duty to compensate for these externalities so you don't have to pay more for solar (or not much more) than for the grid. Otherwise the environment will just stay a huge "tragedy of the commons".

The very least the governments can do is eliminate all subsidies to coal, oil and natural gas. They've had them for decades. I don't think it's healthy for a society to prop up an industry that long with subsidies, especially when it's one of the most profitable.

Australia had a carbon tax. Unfortunately it has been reverted. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_pricing_in_Australia

A politician can make any kind of spending seem bad by just calling it a subsidy regardless of the social benefit. But when it benefits people they like it can just be quietly ignored.

The real test should be if it ensures that people pay a "fair price" for a product. Paying a little more for clean energy is perfectly reasonable.

> The real test should be if it ensures that people pay a "fair price" for a product. Paying a little more for clean energy is perfectly reasonable.

You could argue the other way and say that paying a little more for dirty energy is perfectly reasonable because someone has to come after them to clean things up. There is a cost to that.

Price manipulation in the market in any direction will end up providing an edge for someone to extract value / reduce the fairness to consumers.

Outside of very short term smoothing effects from strategic reserves, "fair price" raises some troubling price-fixing flags, for me.

Especially when those industries are killing us. Imagine government subsidies of cigarettes or heroin.

Could you list the subsidies you're against? All I ever find is general business items or for non-conventional fuels.

This isn't what people normally mean when they refer to subsidies, but the fact that fossil fuel users are allowed to contaminate everyone's air is effectively a massive subsidy for their operations. If the cost of the CO2 and pollution were paid by those producing it, this stuff would be way more expensive.

The IMF recently published a working paper[1] on energy subsidies at global and regional levels that might be of interest. They do use an fairly broad definition of what counts as a subsidy (including cost of damages environmental damages and global warming effect of CO2 emissions).

[1] http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/cat/longres.aspx?sk=42940.0

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/may/18/fossil-fu...

Have you factored in the CO2 footprint of solar panels? Producing pure silicon is energy intensive, then there are various metals involved, so you've got mining, refinement, smelting, and bulk transport costs. The panels also have a limited lifetime so you need to think about the disposal or recycling cost in 15-20 years. Pretty sure I've missed a load of costs too.

One thing to remember though is that there is a reasonable level of CO2 extras around generating traditional non-renewable sources (mining, transportation, materials to build the plant, maintenance of machinery etc).

Could it be said that in order to gain the technology and production methods of a cleaner, more efficient energy source we must expend energy from dirty and inferior sources first? It seems to be the case; we go after the low hanging fruit or the fruit that we know we can do something with. If that is the case, then can that be seen as a optimistic outlook for human kind in regards to climate change? That in order for there to be a clean energy future we have to harness the energy sources available to us to get there.

No. Eventually renewable energy becomes a lower hanging fruit.

This is calculated in energy return on energy invested (EROI). Solar is doing.. ok in that regard: http://rameznaam.com/2015/06/04/whats-the-eroi-of-solar/

The comparable number for fossil fuels (in this case, oil) is 'well to tank efficiency', which amounts to about 25% for oil, if i recall correctly. So 1/4th of energy contained in oil is already spent to bring it to market.

Notably, wind energy has a far more favorable EROI than solar does (currently), but wind power is a relatively limited resource.

Wow. I suppose it should have been obvious, but it's still interesting to see nuclear's numbers so high, considering the enormous material requirements for reactors. Only makes me more sad that the world seems to be closing down nuclear rather than opening it up.

A large problem with current generation nuclear is that the easily obtainable uranium isotopes are in the process of running out (in no small part due to artificial limitations on e.g. reprocessing of fuel). We'll probably continue to have enough for some time to come, but a large-scale switch to nuclear energy is actually quite unlikely at this stage.

I don't mean to say that this is the primary reason for nuclear's demise - it isn't - but it is a real hurdle against increasing deployments.

Of course, there are very exciting new developments in nuclear technology that solve this - breeding, reprocessing, etc - but they are all (still) at an experimental stage. That's the catch-22 of nuclear: there's an existing, mature industry, which uses it's fuel unsustainably, and there are developments to sustainably use nuclear power, which is quite far from being an industry.

To be clear, the article you link is arguing against the graph at the top.

> Solar panels, according to Weißbach, generate four times as much energy over their lifetimes as it takes to manufacture them. Unfortunately, Weißbach also claims that an EROI of 7 is required to support a society like Europe. [...] For solar, which I know better, this paper is an outlier.

> If we used only the estimates from 2010 on, we’d find an EROI for poly-Si solar of around 15. If we used only the 2013 estimate, we’d find an EROI of around 25.

> In summary: The Weißbach paper is, with respect to solar, an outlier. A more realistic estimate of poly-Si solar EROI, today, is somewhere above 10, and probably above 15. And it’s rising. Solar panels generate many times more energy over their lifetimes than is used to construct them and their associated hardware.

You probably also should include the CO2 footprint of energy storage/batteries if you plan on going 100% solar.

Wildly under-appreciated point. Many of those batteries die out quicker than you might think, and hold way less energy density than gasoline. Plus the environmental costs (much nastier stuff than CO2) of extracting rare earths and elements like lithium are huge. Since most of us on HN don't live in the global south or northwest China, we've never seen the breathtaking environmental devastation that brings us these "green" technologies.

breathtaking environmental devastation that brings us these "green" technologies

Again, this should be compared with the breathtaking environmental devastation of the non-green technologies. Most of us don't live in Appalachia (coal), Canada (tar sands) or Dakota (fracking) either. Or one of the two failed reactor exclusion zones in the world.

Seriously? For real? Lead acid batteries are extremely clean to recycle when done properly, and even though they have a short (~5-8 year life, depending on depth of discharge and cycle count) life, you simply drop into your local auto supply store to recycle them and pick up new ones.

We are literally pumping hundreds to thousands tons per day of CO2 in the atmosphere with coal, not to mention mercury and radium, and people are worried about batteries?

Tesla's Powerwall uses Lithium Ion batteries, so even if you are right, it doesn't apply in that case.

In many places you can pay extra to get your electricity from less carbon intensive generation sources without actually changing anything in your home, it may be worth looking into if you feel strongly about the issue.

In the UK Co-operative energy and Ecotricity are two that I'm aware of.

The other thing you can do is invest in a "community solar garden" project, which basically means you pay for the panels, and get the benefit of their generation, but they don't sit on your roof.

Avista Utilities, here in Washington state, is offering community solar in a nice, self-contained package. You lease a panel in their solar farm, they install and maintain it, and you get a credit on your electric bill for whatever it generates. At the end of the lease you will presumably have a positive ROI from it though that of course depends on actual power generated. It seems like a really nice way to "go solar" that's accessible to anyone with the cash to buy the lease. http://www.avistautilities.com/services/Pages/communitysolar...

Being a good citizen now doesn't reduce my obligations in the future, so I'll be avoiding a solar retrofit as long as possible.

Personally, it would take something like a decade to recapture the capital costs associated with a solar installation. I don't have a 10-year commitment to my home, and don't have a capital gain tax liability to offset. So with solar I save a few bucks a month, and pick up alot of risk that my electric utility bears right now.

Are you sure you can't? Apartment building rooftops in China are typically covered with solar water heating panels. Sure it's not PV, but it's solar and it serves tenants all the way down the building, not just those adjacent to the roof.

Perhaps you just need to check with your building owner.

If you own the apartment, you can formally present to the building board that solar panels should be built on the roof. They would be owned by you, some group of people living there or the housing association.

If you're a tenant looking for an apartment you can keep asking it from landlords. Hopefully they start seeing that it's something that can be a distinct factor.

If you're a company doing real estate software, you can incorporate info about solar panels (and things like energy efficiency metrics) to the software.

Even a few years ago, the amortized price per kWh of installing, operating, and maintaining a solar installation was lower for an end-user than the price they would be paying the utility for electricity, in most parts of the U.S.

In places where the regulatory regime and utilities are sane with regards to metering and feed-in tariffs putting in a solar installation is already a winning proposition.

Even in the UK with a massive government tax break our set of panels will take 8 or so years to break even - and we have an almost perfect south facing roof.

Makes sense if you own the property and have the spare cash to take the free money (8% yield tax free) - though the UK government is reducing the subsidy

For the north american audience, it's worth pointing out that the UK is as northerly as Canada, so its not ideal for solar, though it does have a part to play I think.

We Are not to bad (50 miles north of London) and we do have a perfect south facing roof

If your goal is to reduce environmental harm, why is it necessary that you use the solar electricity yourself?

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