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The part that boggles the mind is that the forecasts are still terribly wrong, in the same direction, 10 years later.
The forecasts from the IEA are my favourites, predicting a decline in PV expansion every year. https://www.pv-magazine.com/2018/11/20/iea-versus-solar-pv-r...
Is solar just a stopgap tech? Like, do they still require fossil fuel energy to create, not to mention maintain and rebuild? And I know we’re now strip mining the ocean for battery metals. I don’t yet sense the sustainability in this amid all this economic hand-waving of “it’s getting cheaper”. (forgive my tone, i have a hard time of making sense of the big picture of renewables, hoping to eventually see how it actua…
Until there exists 100% clean options for the entire pipeline of resource extraction, transport, assembly, distribution, etc., there will still be fossil fuel involvement in 'clean energy generation'. Can't really make clean energy cleanly unless we have clean energy to make it in the first place. Resource extraction / recycling is a whole other issue of course.
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Sounds like a bullshit purity test.
Yeah :) . They can't see those machines using electricity instead of diesels, they can't see steel making without atmospheric pollution, and same goes for cement. I guess some people have hard times adjusting to some novelties. Their arguments don't stand, and they don't see that.
I recently watched the documentary "Planet of the Humans". For context, the writer of the documentary is an environmentalist. One of the stated points was that solar and wind cannot be relied upon 24/7 -- to account for the lack of reliability, you need to have a backup power generator (e.g. coal power plant) running. The thing about coal plants (does it apply to natural gas plants too?) is that if you "idle" them, t…
Some examples:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/apr/28/climate-...
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/05/05/real-problem-m...
https://medium.com/@btincq/10-reasons-planet-of-the-humans-g...
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I don't understand your comparison at all. Given that the primary problem that a wind turbine seeks to solve is environmental, the environmental costs in making the turbine have to be considered. There's no relationship to computers here, it's not a question of philosophical purity, but of correct evaluation of the costs and benefits of a technology.
> the environmental costs in making the turbine have to be considered. Of course it is considered, and few short decades ago that was a valid counterargument. Not anymore - and not later, given the pace of development in efficiencies and breadth of applications.
You can't just wave away legitimate criticism by talking about "rapid innovation" that does not exist, mostly because it runs into physical limits.
Another aspect of this is the cost of the physical solar cells have dropped low enough that other costs have become significant. This is pushing companies to increase efficiency which opens the door for other applications. A hypothetical cheap ~30% efficient solar panel could add something like 40 miles of range per day to a car in ideal conditions. That starts to look actually useful vs a simple gimmick.
A 100 watt solar panel, producing the full 100 watts, would take 80 hours of perfect sunlight to produce enough power for an extra 40 miles of range.
Assuming best case (unrealistic) conditions, if you get 8 hours of perfect sunlight in day, and your solar panels produce 100% of their rating for all 8 hours, it would take 1000 Watts worth of solar panels to produce that extra 40 miles of distance over 8 hours. It seems kind of unrealistic to fit 1000 Watts of solar on top of a car. And that's an absolute minimum, under best case conditions.
If you had, say, maybe a more realistic 300 watts worth of panels on top, and they got 4 hours of full sunglight, you'd be producing an extra ((300W * 4h) / 200Wh/mile) = 6 miles. And that's still assuming best case condition for power consumption per mile.
[Edit] - And like the other commenter stated, those few extra miles get cut down when you consider the weight of hundreds of watts of solar panels added onto the vehicle.
These kind of articles rarely calculate the price to dispose old solar panels.
Our country recently found that current methods for disposing solar panels pose a grave danger to the environment and imposed strict regulations for it. As a result the price for disposal quadrupled. Because consumers of the solar panel, which are mostly individuals, can't afford those prices, the government is preparing for a law that charges manufactures up front for the price of disposal.
It is assumed that solar will be more expensive than natural gas after the changes.
This tells me that until fossil plants are mostly shut down (and perhaps afterward), we will continue to have negative electricity prices at times. It might be a profitable idea to buy extra energy storage capacity to get paid for storing energy at certain times, then sell it when it is high demand.
Cheap for the economy, not so cheap for the environment. These kind of articles rarely calculate the price to dispose old solar panels. Our country recently found that current methods for disposing solar panels pose a grave danger to the environment and imposed strict regulations for it. As a result the price for disposal quadrupled. Because consumers of the solar panel, which are mostly individuals, can't afford tho…