I think claiming that it is an ecological disaster is catastrophizing at best and certainly subjective. The ecological impacts involved in coal mining, oil dril

I think claiming that it is an ecological disaster is catastrophizing at best and certainly subjective. The ecological impacts involved in coal mining, oil drilling et al., are much worse than installing some solar panels that can easily be ripped out and let nature recover the land if we so wanted. Humanity will get the energy in one form or another, solar panels certainly seems less damaging than fossil fuels. The land will either be dug up for resources, or paved away for a power plant regardless. In addition, solar panels can be put up basically everywhere in an urban environment - an area already "destroyed" by human occupation - there are many many viable locations for solar outside of deserted wastelands. replacing it with endless sheets of silicon wafers literally injected with heavy metals of your preference, be it gallium or cadmium or arsenic(PVs are photodiodes; it's created by doping silicon coated substrates), which is polar opposite of environmentalist attitude. Doped silicon is a solid and stable material - it can't leach out into the environment. In addition, the dopants are in very low concentration (on the order of 1 atom per million), you can ground the silicon to dust and not make a significant impact to the soil's concentration of the dopants. Also, gallium/cadmium/arsenic are not common dopants for silicon based photovoltaics, so you might be conflating dopants and GaAs based PVs, which are not used in large installations due to their cost. Silicon is cheap, plentiful, and safe. basically zero environmental resistance too[2] and don't last a year. In case it's not clear, `less than a year` is at most 10% of a decade. This is blatantly false. The vast majority of solar panel installations last longer than a year. Is your point that nature will find a way to destroy a man made creation therefore it is a poor choice? Sorry to say that NOTHING is immune to the whims of the environment. Conversion efficiency of solar panels is also capped to ~30% by "chemistry" of Si-based PV, which is lower than even typical hybrid ICE cars. The conversion efficiency of most power plants are limited by the Carnot cycle - and in practice are about ~40% efficient. So yes - while a Si only panel that only captures that single bandgap is capped at about ~29% - most forms of power generation are not THAT much more efficient relative to the complexity and cost of operation. There are no other commercially viable forms of energy generation that is a solid state material with no moving parts. Solar cells had only ever worked in extremely mild climate such as California, surfaces of Mars, and inner orbits[3] of Solar system. There's no prospect that that will change soon. I would not say Mars has an "extremely mild climate". I certainly would not go outside in my beach outfit. Solar cells work basically anywhere where the sun shines.