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Comment by blondie9x | Hacker News Reader

I wish it was this simple. All energy is still borrowed. Mining and producing and disposing of solar panels is still very energy intensive.

Renewable energy is a piece of what needs to be a much larger effort to fight climate change.

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Yes, you have to analyze the embodied energy, but solar panels are energy positive within 1-2 years these days: https://www.quora.com/How-much-more-energy-do-solar-panels-p...

It's really a no-brainer up to a certain amount of your grid mix (and that amount can be quite high).

This is an old trope that's not longer accurate pretty much across the board for renewables/batteries.

Also.. Mining for solar panels has never been the major energy cost. Solar panels are primarily silicon (re: sand). The actual energy expensive part for them is/was melting the sand into glass. Even the next major element, aluminum for the brackets, accounts for far more energy expenditure than the mining of the doping agents.

Even for windmills, the major energy cost isn't mining, it's the smelting the steel for the tower.

Renewable energy is a piece of the puzzle and not everything. It's a major and important piece. Switching the grid away from fossil fuels accounts for a huge portion of emissions and renewables are some of the fastest and cheapest to deploy solutions currently.

Sure, it's energy intensive, but if that energy comes from the sun, who cares?

I don't understand we keep using "energy intensive" as a euphemism for "emits carbon". The two aren't synonymous. Energy-intensive processes aren't a problem at all, the problem is dirty energy generation processes. Fix your energy generation, and there's no problem.

There's a (diminishing) correlation that shouldn't be ignored. I'm not saying we should abandon solar because of that correlation but it should at least be factored in.

For example, I think it's a dumb idea to turn every road into a "solar road" just because "who cares".

I was replying to a specific argument: That producing solar panels is energy-intensive, and thus bad (this part was implied). My counterargument is that energy-intensive is irrelevant when you've got basically-free, clean energy.

If your energy is dirty, fix your energy. Don't make downstream consumers feel bad instead.

I don't disagree, just taking the conversation a slightly different direction as I think you'll agree that the "it takes energy to make renewables" argument is generally made in bad faith.

I think there is irresponsible consumption of solar panels, particularly when it's done more as a performative action rather than actually producing power to be used.

Yah. I am glad we are deemphasizing residential solar.

Utility-scale solar has better capacity factors and installation economics.

I think it's going to be barely possible to keep our current quality of life and reach a low-CO2 economy. We have limited resources, and even if a residential solar panel "pays back" its energy in 2.5 years, we are better off putting it in a desert where it will pay back that energy in a year.

What about the economies of scale? Does/did residential solar create enough demand to ramp up utility scale production?

> did

I think residential solar was a decent bridge to get things going, and the installed capacity we have is helpful.

Now, though-- at midday we have a glut of power. Residential installations are more expensive per kilowatt hour and don't do as well in reaching into the late afternoon when we need power most. There's no need to add more capacity like this. Better for those panels to go somewhere else.

There are still times that non-utility scale solar make sense-- it's usually when you get some kind of non-normal-generation related benefit that tips it over into worthwhile, e.g.

- getting a shade structure for a parking lot as part of the rollout

- if you want power backup for your house, adding a bunch of storage and solar

etc.

Are there benefits to distributing generation? If I can top up my car on a sunny day the grid doesn’t even have to know.

There were some early benefits to grid stability, but not to the extent we've done it, no.

At this point, there are a lot of residential neighborhoods that need more distribution and even transmission capacity (because their peak power movement is now exporting power at mid-day rather than the previous smaller peak loads used). And operating the grid has become a much more complicated task.

Does a battery system solve this mid day export problem?

Yes, it prevents the house with the battery from being a tax on the grid. However, the capacity factor of both the solar and the battery is less than if they were deployed centrally.

Again: residential solar isn't worthless, but in many places we've reached the point of diminishing returns where any additional capacity is much less useful-- unless there's an ancillary benefit that justifies it (like backup power for your house when deploying storage).

The oil companies all rebranded themselves as energy companies over a decade ago, my presumption is it was a convenient part of a long term promotional plan to mix up the definitions to get the environmental movement to fight itself. Same as how the idea of a "carbon footprint" was sponsored out into the world by the same people.

The trick to good propaganda is to create something that makes you say "well I know it's propaganda, but this doesn't seem so wrong..."

It is that simple. "Energy intensive" is irrelevant. On average, a solar panel will capture more energy in its lifetime than the amount used to create and eventually recycle it.

So please stop repeating that useless whine.

This is easy to refute. Take the commercial price of power for the location of manufacture and divide your retail price by that amount. The result will be the upper bound in MWh that could have possibly gone into the creation of that panel.

Chinese solar panels cost less than 15 cents a watt. In the NW with residential prices at 10 cents per KWh, it takes 1500 hrs to break even. With 4hrs of "full sun" per day on average at PNW latitudes, about a year. This is just the panel not the system. The BS that panels take more energy to produce than they generate is disproven.

https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/In-Stock-TRINA-Vertex...

The tariffs on solar are stupider than the Iraq war. If China can produce panels at 10 cents a watt wholesale, we should give them billions of dollars to make as many as they can. Train everyone in the military to install them.

Energy-intensive is fine, as long as the energy is renewable.

Smelting aluminum and silicon or mining aluminum and iron ores with electricity produced by solar and wind is ideal: else that energy of light and air motion would be wasted.

Steel and concrete are harder to produce in an emission-free ways, but steel smelting in arc furnaces is very much a thing, and can be powered by renewables, at least partly.

A lot of misunderstanding about this comment. I think adding solar energy capacity to the energy supply mix is helpful. What I want to clarify is this, adding all energy supply has costs. Rare earth metals and other mining and habitat destruction that goes into increasing renewable supply needs to be considered. Like I said all additional energy supply has a cost.

The real problem is we need to reduce consumption. We also need to rework our energy supply chains with renewables when appropriate as well as nuclear that isn't vulnerable to meltdowns.

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