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Comment by pkulak | Hacker News Reader

Of course, coal probably isn't cheaper, but no one cares about it's massive externalized costs.

By that logic, solar panels aren't cheaper either, because their production is so polluting and resource-consuming.

At a conference a few weeks ago I was listening to a professor arguing that insulation and PV are the wrong way to go; the least resource consuming system is one with regular brick houses, warmed with geothermal energy, and with much heavier mixing of functions in our urban landscapes (actually, landscapes all together, and make the urban/rural distinction obsolete). So basically growing food on the roofs of houses etc.

He had numbers to back it all up, too. I'm not saying they're correct, but at least he's trying :)

Do you remember who this was? Sounds like someone I'd want to look up.

Looked it up for you - Ronald Roovers. Slides of the specific presentation here: http://www.energie2011.nl/upload/rets%20rorovers-280311-bw.p..., some of his websites

    * http://www.sustainablebuilding.info/districtoftomorrow/
    * http://www.ribuilt.eu/
    * http://www.sustainablebuilding.info/

Brick houses are for locales without earthquakes :)

Yeah OK wood/sheetrock houses then - I meant, traditional, not well insulated.

No, not really. Resource consumption isn't an externalized cost. The pollution is though. But do you really think that making a solar panel creates more pollution than that created by the coal you would otherwise need to make the same amount of energy over the panel's 20, 50, or even 100 years of pollution free existence? There's probably a difference of several orders of magnitude.

Actually in most cases (currently), resource consumption does include many externalized costs (from a practical point of view). All those Chinese-made PV panels, they have caused massive pollution by the time they are done.

(of course resource consumption per se is not an externalized cost, that's obvious; but the price we pay today for many things do not include the full lifecycle ('cradle to cradle') costs.

Regarding the amount of energy used; PV panels have working life of 20-25 years. The links I provided below include numbers (well, somebodies interpretation of them) somewhere on the consumed/produced ratio; I don't know how they relate. I'm just saying that using dollar value cost to calculate grid parity is wrong, from an environmental point of view, and that that goes for both sides (the coal and the PV side of the equation).

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