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Comment by FirmwareBurner | Hacker News Reader

>removing heat from the ground

You're not removing anything, you're just transforming kinetic energy into electrical energy. Energy transforms, everything transforms on earth, as per the laws of physics. When you die, your body doesn't get "removed", it gets transformed into worm food. It's the cycle of matter and energy. "Yeah science Mr. White!"

I doubt human devices that capture wind and water wave energy are enough to negatively impact the climate in a meaningful way, considering how powerful nature is.

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"In a closed system entropy always goes up

That's the second law, now you know what's up

You can't win, you can't break even, you can't leave the game

Cause entropy will take it all 'though it seems a shame"

-MC Hawking

> I doubt human devices that capture wind and water wave energy are enough to negatively impact the climate in a meaningful way

Exactly what we used to say about industrial gas emissions.

And to take this to its ultimate conclusion, that electrical energy eventually gets turned back into heat one way or another.

If you drive an Nvidia 5090 and an Intel i9-14900KS then yes, it gets converted back to heat but that can also be reused like in some dorm rooms in Finland that are heated by the waste heat of the Nokia networking equipment.

During transfer, the source experiences removal.

Covering the ground in non transparent panels removes heat from the ground.

That's why you install solar panels where covering the ground has little to no impact, like on top of urban buildings or deserts where nothing lives or grows.

Yes.

The side effects of solar panels is indeed a cooler ground underneath. Plants have difficulty growing in the shade.

Panels have a darker shade than most ground they are covering, so they might actually absorb more heat than the typical ground they are covering. They are distorting the local albedo.

I think for geocooling by solar panels shade, the effect is completely local and only surface deep. After all stone/ground is an insulator, and geothermal energy is considered renewable.

If anything on average solar panels will warm the earth, because they are on average darker than whatever they're covering. (this effect is much less than due to CO2)

It prevents some heat from reaching the ground there (solar panels are ~20% efficient: most of the energy still reaches the ground). The energy (energy + heat is generally more than would normally be absorbed by heat in the ground) gets used and then turns into... heat. Which either makes it into the air or the ground, which is where it was going to wind up anyway.

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