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"contemporary photovoltaic panels require all sorts of strange metals to make" Certain kinds do (e.g. CdTe and CIGS), but not the kind that you'd put on your
by crdoconnor 10y ago
"contemporary photovoltaic panels require all sorts of strange metals to make"
Certain kinds do (e.g. CdTe and CIGS), but not the kind that you'd put on your house. If modern solar panels required significant amounts of rare earths they wouldn't be as cheap as they are.
"Solar also tends to have quite high carbon dioxide impacts due to the manufacturing process."
About 30g/kwh of CO2 vs. coal's ~900g/kwh, and a lot of that is simply because it is usually currently made without green power (i.e. it will go down).
"It's tough; there's no perfect energy source."
There's a lot of half truths told about really good energy sources.
- mrbabbage 10y agoYeah, coal is obviously WAY worse than solar vis a vis carbon dioxide. I'm not disputing that. But compared to other renewables, it doesn't do as well as you'd expect: - wind: 11 g / kWh [1] - nuclear: 12 g / kWh [2] - solar PV: 45 g / kWh [3] - gas: 450 g / kWh [4] Of course, 12 g vs 45 g is NOTHING compared to 45 g vs 450 g (and coal is another 2x atop gas!), so I'm making a bit of a mountain out of a molehill. [1] http://www.nrel.gov/analysis/sustain_lca_wind.html http://www.nrel.gov/analysis/sustain_lca_wind.html [2] http://www.nrel.gov/analysis/sustain_lca_nuclear.html http://www.nrel.gov/analysis/sustain_lca_nuclear.html [3] http://www.nrel.gov/analysis/sustain_lca_pv.html http://www.nrel.gov/analysis/sustain_lca_pv.html [4] http://www.nrel.gov/analysis/sustain_lca_ngas.html http://www.nrel.gov/analysis/sustain_lca_ngas.html
- crdoconnor 10y agoGas actually contributes more to global warming even than coal does because of the methane (~100x as powerful a warming gas as CO2) also released during extraction: http://inhabitat.com/updated-cornell-study-shows-fracking-causes-more-global-warming-than-coal/ http://inhabitat.com/updated-cornell-study-shows-fracking-ca...
- Filligree 10y agoOn the other hand, methane breaks down fast. It's only an immediate problem; if we didn't release more CO2 than could be absorbed, then we'd have a fairly decent methane budget as well. As it stands, of course, it makes everything worse.