I am really hopeful about solar energy in general, and hope it will soon replace fossil fuels. However, a friend of mine recently told me that solar panels, besides being very expensive to produce, are dangerous once they are thrown to garbage because of the materials from which they are made (a little bit like batteries or old computers)
Well, unless they leak some chemical that’ll drastically lower habitation levels (like used nuclear fuel rods :)), I think the amount of energy saved (in the future when they’re more effecient) would outweigh the pollution… if they do. Which I don’t know.
geograf, welcome to the board. We have discussed this topic in depth in the past so you may want to do a search. There is no short answer to this. Complex problems most often require complex answers so I do not think there is any way to say just yes or no to your question.
The very short answer is that solar energy is not competitive yet.
Uh, actually, solar panels do cause pollution. When they’re made, and then you’ve got the problem of disposing of them when they’re broken. The real question is: Do solar panels create more pollution than they elimanate? That, I don’t know, but a WAG would be “no,” provided they were manufactured in environmentally friendly fashion and were recycled at the end of their life.
I assume you are asking about photovoltaic (PV) solar panels because regular, thermal, solar panels are just metal and glass.
The main problem with PV panels is they are extremely expensive and ineficient but I do not know that they present any specific pollution problems. They are made of Silicon or Gallium Arsenide. Silicon sounds non polluting but I have no idea about Gallium Arsenide. In any case it should not get free and can always be recycled or disposed of properly. I cannot see why the panels themselves would be a pollution problem but I have heard the argument that the energy spent on their manufacture is polluting.
One site claims that manufacture of a 1 square meter solar panel produces 450kg of CO2. However it doesn’t list the source and I can’t find a cite to back it up.
And of course if you’d like to use the energy they produce at night (for lights??) you need storage batteries which are an environmetal headache at the end of their lives.
Not entirely correct. One could use the energy generated during the day to split water into hydrogen and oxygen and then burn that when the sun wasn’t shining. Or you could simply have lots of solar cell “farms” spread out around the globe shipping power from the day side of the Earth to the nightside.
You could also combine the solar collector type panels sailor mentioned with salt like they’re doing out at the Sun Lab where the sun heats the salt to something like 1000 + degrees during the day and the heat from the salt as it cools is used to run a steam turbine at night.
>> One could use the energy generated during the day to split water into hydrogen and oxygen and then burn that when the sun wasn’t shining.
PV cells are already so economically inefficient that adding this extra step would make it impossible to do economically.
>> Or you could simply have lots of solar cell “farms” spread out around the globe shipping power from the day side of the Earth to the nightside
Wow! I can just see America getting all its electricity from China and while all Americans are taking their evening shower, Uncle Jiang Zemin decides to pull a prank and shut off the lights. Not to mention the big ass extension cord you need to run from China to the US.
>> You could also combine the solar collector type panels sailor mentioned with salt like they’re doing out at the Sun Lab where the sun heats the salt to something like 1000 + degrees during the day and the heat from the salt as it cools is used to run a steam turbine at night.
It still can’t compete with burning coal although it is an interesting experiment.
At any rate, as I have said in earlier threads, solar thermal collectors are a much more efficient use of solar energy that PV collectors.