Hacker News Reader

What are the by-products of manufacturing and maintaining batteries and solar panels? I'd like to learn more about the inputs and outputs, then maybe I can learn a better comparison between fossil fuels and solar.

What are we transforming in order to create, store, and consume solar energy and fossil fuel energy?

View on HN

You would want to look at lifecycle analysis studies (here's a few [1][2]). The big problem with fossil fuel is that it takes fuel to extract new fuels (high cost sources like tar sands have a ratio of like 1 fuel unit used to extract 2) AND they have a cost for each unit of power generated. Most renewables (excluding biofuels for example), have a manufacturing cost, but little to no energy generation cost (solar and wind have none, hydropower basins have something like 1/1000th the emissions of coal).

[1] http://phys.org/news/2014-10-first-ever-global-life-renewabl...

[2] http://www.nrel.gov/analysis/sustain_lca_results.html

Whats worse is the waste left over after a battery is past it life span.

Not for Musk's Tesla at least:

https://www.tesla.com/blog/mythbusters-part-3-recycling-our-...

https://www.tesla.com/blog/teslas-closed-loop-battery-recycl...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com