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> The answer for traditional solar panels is about 2 months IIRC. Do you have a citation for that? A quick Google said normal panels take three years.

bryanlarsen 4y ago
No, I couldn't find it again, it was just from memory. But a check on your number shows that it came from 2004. The price of solar panels has dropped ~90% since 2004, and price is fairly well correlated with carbon footprint.
- wkat4242 4y ago
  > The price of solar panels has dropped ~90% since 2004, and price is fairly well correlated with carbon footprint. Part of that low price was China flooding the market with cheap subsidized cells in other to take the competition out of business. Similar to the way Amazon puts the prices (of products and prime) up in markets where they've already eliminated most of the competition. I don't think actual energy footprint has reduced by that much, I'm sure it has a bit though.
comboy 4y ago
The carbon footprint idea seems flawed to me. It always just depends how far you look. There are machines making machines making machines and so on, the chain is really long and those early machines in the chain, which may have been necessary to create given product, may not even exist anymore. They might have existed before the product was even invented. Note that the whole idea was mostly popularized by BP [1][2]. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_footprint https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_footprint 2. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/23/big-oil-coined-carbon-footprints-to-blame-us-for-their-greed-keep-them-on-the-hook https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/23/big-oi...
Schroedingersat 4y ago
Frauenhofer pv report says 4 months to 3 years EPBT depending on travel distance, grid losses (both in manufacture and generation) and install location. If you install on a single axis tracker in Chile and use the energy DC then 2 months is believable. These lose about half the light, so up to six years assuming the decorative tile part is negligibly higher carbon than what would go there anyway.

bryanlarsen 4y ago

No, I couldn't find it again, it was just from memory. But a check on your number shows that it came from 2004. The price of solar panels has dropped ~90% since 2004, and price is fairly well correlated with carbon footprint.

wkat4242 4y ago
> The price of solar panels has dropped ~90% since 2004, and price is fairly well correlated with carbon footprint. Part of that low price was China flooding the market with cheap subsidized cells in other to take the competition out of business. Similar to the way Amazon puts the prices (of products and prime) up in markets where they've already eliminated most of the competition. I don't think actual energy footprint has reduced by that much, I'm sure it has a bit though.

comboy 4y ago

The carbon footprint idea seems flawed to me. It always just depends how far you look. There are machines making machines making machines and so on, the chain is really long and those early machines in the chain, which may have been necessary to create given product, may not even exist anymore. They might have existed before the product was even invented. Note that the whole idea was mostly popularized by BP [1][2]. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_footprint https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_footprint 2. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/23/big-oil-coined-carbon-footprints-to-blame-us-for-their-greed-keep-them-on-the-hook https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/23/big-oi...

Schroedingersat 4y ago

Frauenhofer pv report says 4 months to 3 years EPBT depending on travel distance, grid losses (both in manufacture and generation) and install location. If you install on a single axis tracker in Chile and use the energy DC then 2 months is believable. These lose about half the light, so up to six years assuming the decorative tile part is negligibly higher carbon than what would go there anyway.