ZeroGravitas

One overlooked factor is that as well as getting cheaper, panels are getting more efficient. Commonly installed modules are about 50% more efficient than a decade ago.

Just lots of little tweaks continue to add efficiency, even as they are getting cheaper via lots of other little tweaks.

If you installed a panel today, and assumed a bad case panel degredation over time, then the new panel would be as efficient as the decade old panel was on install even after 40 years of use.

If you assume the new panel has good degredation performance it'll outperform the 2015 panel at install time until roughly 2135!

Or to tie it to the current article, vertical panels installed today outperform perfectly pitched panels from 2015.

There are physics-based limits to how high the efficiency can get with one material, but people are already selling modules with extra layers that work around that limit.

It's not a new industry but just time based running of water heaters and water pumps is a common usage and was doing timed usage for decades before renewables was a thing, so they just need to adjust their timings.

Why are environmentalists generally mocked, while "counter-environmentalists" who complain about birds getting killed by windmills, the nasty chemicals in solar panels or EV batteries, or the extreme environmental cost of cotton tote bags(!) not greeted similarly?

My theory is that everyone knows they are lying and don't care about the environment and just want to attack the real environmentalists.

People point out that he's factually wrong but no one would argue that Trump is sacrificing green energy jobs and cheap clean energy for birds, because no one believes he actually cares in the first place.

But I'm open to other theories.

Also, people are surprised by this when he said things of a similar calibre of crazy during an hour long UN speech last week and everyone shrugged because about a third of the US population believe it too.

Funder Google realised this was a dead end in 2011, two years before it was finished construction, here's a write up by them:

https://web.archive.org/web/20130629173557/http://www.google...

It was a good idea when they planned it but solar PV prices dropped dramatically and were predicted to fall further.

Batteries doing the same was the final nail in its coffin.

Michael Moore later executive produced a movie about how wind and solar and EVs weren't green, so maybe he's just a sucker for oil propaganda if they wrap it in unconvincing green credentials.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_of_the_Humans

A couple of UK focused nerd YouTubers pushing back on this narrative:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOtrvBdRx8I

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fuwaOiTHl7U

Tl;Dr charge the producers of packaging for what happens to it after use.

They respond almost immediately to that financial incentive by both reducing unnecessary usage but also improving recycling of what is still necessary because it's the second best option after funding cheap propaganda to pass the buck onto others.

Contrast the latest form of that cheap propaganda, which is to point fingers at oil companies for promoting recycling that "can't economically work" with the reality that when their own money is on the line they adopt it rapidly.

Meanwhile America is doing that "Only developed country that is failing to do this claims it's not possible" thing again.

The 10% figure bothers me for other reasons.

Only 75% of people have clean water.

Why would anyone use that figure to argue against expanding clean water access to 100%? Or for rolling that progress backwards.

And if we can't even sort out clean water for a quarter of the globe then it makes sense they're not going to be recycling.

Perhaps more relevantly, nearly half of all global waste is "uncontrolled" so isn't recycled, composted, incinerated or even landfilled (and that's not even accounting for the quality of any of those systems).

So should we give up on landfills, indoor plumbing etc?

It's such a fundamentally stupid talking point, it could only sustained by propaganda.

The article and video skip the interesting topic of cost and value.

It mentions at the end that tracking the sun is the best way to capture the sun, which is true, but as panel costs fall as a proportion of the system cost there is a general move to reduce other costs like complicated tracking and simply buy more panels with the money saved.

What if the well reasoned, detached take is that you should be angry about this?