I see idiots on the internet every day screaming about how it is so great and everything should run on solar power.
What are the pros and cons? I think this is a big political issue. A lot of them say solar gets less subsidies than coal or oil but is still cheaper energy than both. Since these people all seem to be shitlibs I assume they are wrong.
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Ask yourself this: what's the advantage of relying on oil? It is limited and will run out. Where's the upside?
not as solar panel that as we all know men of Science last for ever.
If I'm not mistaken it's still not cheaper
It just has been getting cheaper and cheaper and has potential
Solar=expensive, requires a shitload of energy and materials to produce, barely produces enough energy terrestrially to offset production costs without major government subsidies.
>BUT WE HAVE TO DO SOMETHING!
pros:
renewable
little cost once operating
almost zero waste
cons:
not as much energy produced as oil
takes a massive amount of space to function on the same level as fossil fuels (relates to #1)
large initial investment
It's not viable for most of america at the moment. Also the meme is that it's cheap and "Green" despite it being massively subsidized, imported from china(another reason why it's so cheap), and having various negative environmental impacts associated with their production.
No competition. Oil will be gone sooner. What then? Next point.
having it is nice, you basically point it at the sun and you get energy
the problem is acquiring the panels and, when they get decommissioned, to recycle them.
to build these panels, it takes rare metals and heavy toxins, which by no means are "green".
this makes recycling them even harder and more environmental "unfriendly".
in the end, the biggest problem is still storing energy.
oil is a very easy to handle, high energy density liquid
and as long as we don't get proper storing mechanisms for electricity solar panels won't do us any good
Oil will run out. This isn't even a debate. What then?
>almost zero waste
Wrong.
There's no such thing as "clean energy" right now. The waste products from solar panel and hybrid car battery production are some of the most toxic shit out there right now, and in many cases are shipped over in gigantic ships that produce more waste in one trip than 100 cars will in 20 years. Wind generator farms take up a shit ton of space that could be put to better use. Spent nuclear fuel rods still have a half life of hundreds of thousands of years, which makes disposal very problematic.
It only works when the sun is out, so it's not ideal for northern or cloudy climates. Power transfer is a big issue too you have to convert the energy then store it. Not enough amps to send it a far distance. Maintenance. Etc.
Fossils fuels are incredibly reliable and energy dense. You just can't beat em.
No, google it.
it's just a low power producer. it takes a shitload of cells to power anything.
>What are the pros and cons?
pros: -it wont run out in like 5 billion years
cons: -making a solar panel is more expensive than the cost of the energy it will produce in its lifetime
-you need to use it along with a big ass battery system
-you need to cover a very large area to generate enough energy
-the area used for solar power cannot be used for farming
-solar panels require maintenance (cleaning) that drives costs up
it really sucks, the reason we use fossil fuels is because they are millions of years of solar power compacted into a very practical format
Solar panel reflect sunlight from Earth and if there are too many of them they will cause a new ice age
Thumbs up and repost from maximum awarness
"Not viable" is a judgment based upon temporal statistics that rely on a constant level of technology, not a fact. Just like gasoline has over time, solar employs advancements in technology to increase efficiency and reduce production costs. The difference is that oil will be gone billions of years before the sun burns out, and once produced, solar panels create zero waste to pollute our environment and bodies, both of which we rely on to remain alive.
but solar panel are made of giggles and rainbows right?
Lol when you fucking faggot? You were lied to, Earth isn't even close to out of oil. By then we'll have better options than meme sun windows that don't do jack shit but waste tax dollars.
>australian
>during summer power companies pay me
>during winter I pay power companies
>end up saving thousands of dollars by getting dirt cheap chinese solar panels installed
If money is your only concern, then get solar panels.
If the environment is your concern get solar panels
If you're a shill for coal and oil companies: you want to save money so you get solar panels
Understand?
it's known that hydrocarbons are created naturally in the Earth's mantle.
>problematic
Strike 1. They are toxic to make
Strike 2. They are toxic to dispose
Strike 3. They don't pay for themselves in terms of generating energy vs spent energy in most cases.
Strike 4. Technology for storing solar power is currently shit.
tl/dr: they are not yet good enough
Pros: virtually unlimited energy
Cons: except when the sun doesn't shine
They're not actually paying you. You're getting "reimbursed" tax dollars for "going green", basically. It's a scam and incentive for these Solar companies (scams) to get government funding and funnel huge amounts of money making meme sun windows.
pros:
>literally energy from the sky
cons:
>takes energy and materials to produce solar cells, the production process produces waste (this is getting better)
>only works during the day and with low/no cloud cover
>use of inconsistent power sources is complicated (eg, you need batteries and the lot to store it)
>takes a ton of space to produce a lot of power
really, if energy companies were actually diligent about maintenance and waste disposal, I'd push for more nuclear plants
Solar panels are dirty to produce. Google it
So by your logic, if a perfect system doesn't already exist, we should stop trying and just accept both the goods and evils of the current paradigm - because it's momentarily cheaper and easier. Of course, we assume that the after-effects of acquiring, refining and combustion of oil will not be so extraordinary that they will not affect the health of every organism on the planet.
We're discovering new oil reserves all the time, and as technology advances more if it will become available.
You have no idea how solar farms work do you? It's literally a fuckton of mirrors that boil water which moves a turbine.
I'll concede the point that they do take up a massive amount of space which wrecks the environment, but any sort of bullshit about batteries does not get to be lumped in with solar energy production. That's energy storage, and while it's a downside that I forgot to mention (because it's fucking obvious, need sun to make solar power), the act of generating power has next to no waste.
Cons: Can only transform energy when there is sun.
Say that to Helios 1 you faggot scum
pros
no pollution
less work hours
renewable
cons
ineffective but its getting better all the time
The real question is why are we wasting our time and energy with pointless stop-gap measures instead of building massive tanker spaceships to suck up all the sweet, sweet hydrocarbons from the surface of Titan?
Only reason it is working out for you in Australia is because the government is subsidizing your ass.
In countries where they don't (spain for example), solar power is absolute shit deal
Expensive.
Return on investment for solar panels compared to hydro is like 25 years, fuck that.
>They're not actually paying you.
We're arguing over semantics, but ok.
During the Summer months, I produce more power from my solar panels than I use, so I send my power back into the grid and the power companies pay me.
Call it whatever you want, though.
>Solar man, Weed grows from solar maan
>t. herbal jew not even once
I'll call it you participating in a scam.
Still haven't reached peak oil, fuckface, but keep slurping that (((green))) dick.
Currently.
Previously, horses were abundant, easy to acquire and easy to maintain. Their waste even fertilizes crops. In a pinch, you can eat them to survive. How is oil better than animals again? I've never seen an Arab horse magnate before. Not sure why we ever switched in the first place. Fuck solar. Clearly the way things used to be done is better because someone else already figured out how to do it well.
>no pollution
Literally the same reason we're arguing about solar power.
Future opportunity cost vs marginal cost of switching today.
t. chink shilling his panels
>You have no idea how solar farms work do you?
Do you know how solar panels are produced?
iv'e been seriously thinking about getting some panels and batteries and all that. got more reading up to do though.
Those types of farms are crazy inefficient for the size they take up, and are really bad for the local wildlife as well.
How about an idea that doesn't cause more damage than the status quo?
>lithium mining intensifies
It took a shitload of ancient creatures to make oil - and millions of years to make it - clearly, there can't possibly be a downside to turning a blind eye to the future.
Solar energy in its current state isn't functional by any definition. It's incredibly inefficient compared to oil or solar. Society, in it's current state, can not survive on this meme green rhetoric bullshit.
Nuclear is the current king.
>we have to change what isn't broken because I said so
Progressives need to be barred from life.
I support it if only so the technology can continue to improve. Personally though I'm a bigger fan of nuclear although some solar and wind isn't a bad thing. We shouldn't really have our energy in one basket.
Horses don't scale and smell like literal asses.
that's hilariously space inefficient, more so than using photovoltaic panels (which is what everyone else is talking about)
depends on which state you live in it may make sense.
Not because sun panels are not shit, but because the government in some states is giving out sweet ass deals because demtards are in power.
Did a shorter research project on this subject in University (Royal Institute of Technology). I was all for solar, but then it turns out that the panels cost more energy to produce than they will generate over their lifespan.
Also, placing them in deserts like in your picture means they will often be covered by sand and have to be cleaned up. This is usually done by spraying them with water, which is again a high energy cost. Doing it manually by hand with a piece of cloth or other cleaning method is also energy inefficient. With this background, it can easily be stated that solar panels in their current form is a meme.
Solar is great when you dont want reliable energy.
You can spend enormous ammounts of money and build a battery array for it,then its more reliable,but enviromental changes,like smoke from a forest fire , can bite big chunks off from the solar panels efficiency.
I'm one of those renewable energy students before I changed field to civil engineering, ask me anything about tidal power. Or wind, wave, sun, bio, hydro or geothermal.
Solar boilers are the only feasible method of solar power generation. Everything else is literally a meme
Not to mention it's not even a good idea and it would cause society to collapse in on itself if we actually switched tomorrow. They don't live in reality. They have never read anything about nuclear energy, they just think it's bad. Oil's bad beecuz muh dinos. Solar just can not compare to nuclear and anyone who works in the energy sector knows how much of a meme solar is.
Horses were abandoned because of “horse pollution”. Don’t Believe me? Read some history.
no, I'm saying that abandoning oil based systems now is ridiculous without a proper replacement available.
acquiring energy with solar panels is very inefficient and, as I said, not very "green" at all.
there are better solutions available, like algae reactors which also require the sun's energy to work and don't use any precious metals, however they are even more inefficient (but work is getting done to improve that).
also, the new carbon ion battery looks very promising, but it's still in development.
as it stands now the car industry solely focuses on electric advancements because of upcoming government regulations.
the only company which will release a more efficient engine being Mazda.
pushing for a switch now is very risky and it will hamper global development.
it's better to wait a bit more, maybe 10 years and we have better options available
>the total amount of disposing ancient creatures is low enough to use uo in less than 200 years.
>millions of years worth of organisms
>used in 200
Stay in school, kids.
oh absolutely, don't get me wrong, I'm not saying solar power is what we need (at least until we get some sort of reliable orbital transport to start flinging them around in orbit).
The cons absolutely outweigh the benefits, but I fucking hate how nupol refuses to look at any benefits of things they disagree with.
>What then?
Nuclear. And lots of it.
Pretty sure we'll burn through all the oil on the planet in less than 5 billion years. Earth may actually be a scorched wasteland before then due to sun expansion.
What people seem to forget when they mention energy storage is that we currently waste all of the extra energy. We produce assloads of extra energy that goes nowhere simply because there's no way to store it. The battery system is only more necessary with solar because night exists. A global solar system would eliminate he need for batteries. Everyone will say "Ha! It'll take a hundred years to make a global solar-power system! You're a fag for thinking that way!"
It took a hundred years to bring electricity to the globe anyway. We still haven't really accomplished that. For some reason, people think that anything that's hard to do isn't worthwhile these days. The world we live in wasn't born of instant gratification.
They're a net energy loss and unviable. Solar panels are a meme.
>Importing tons of cheap Chinese solar panels.
>Forgetting Rule Number One of doing business with the Chinese.
No matter what, they will try to screw you over.
>Substandard solar panels with limited life
>poor construction, poor design,unreliable, break easily, inefficient, contain toxins, will not function for long.
Also you are passing onto the Chinese peasants who will pay the environmental cost of producing these shitty solar panels. But considering China's environment is very much fucked now anyway, I guess it doesn't matter too much.
Ruthenium doesn't grow on trees.
>-solar panels require maintenance (cleaning) that drives costs up
Power lines and power stations also require maintenance. Everything does. Bad argument. Menial labor and things that could be accomplished with machines aren't good arguments. Cleaning a flat surface is like immigrants 101 material.
>china jewed so hard they jewed themselves out of their chance at global hegemony
Feels good, man.
Oils/gas is cheap af
i'm not digging the nuclear they seem to have accidents. while burning coal and oil never has accidents.
That's not photovoltaic, which is what OP was referring to. That is a solar concentrator, works by collecting light to heat up a single point to create steam to turn a turbine
The biggest issue that I haven't seen mentioned is consistency of power. Hydrocarbons, nuclear, and hydropower are relatively consistent with some ability to ramp up and down. With solar and wind you are completely at the mercy of variability. What happens if it's cloudy with slack wind for a week? You either have to have a big ass battery facility or backup hydrocarbon sources which defeats the point of having them in the first place.
Solar panels in space would be nice and send the energy down to a reciever,eliminating the need to store energy worth a single night.
Yeah, the problem is, even with maintenance factored in nuclear and oil remain incredibly viable. Solar remains a meme.
If you're in the southern western states it's already cheap enough.
Yes.
I love how everyone assumes the opposite argument is always being delivered by moronic idealists who just happen to overlook the fact that solar panels aren't created through divination and magic tricks, without any waste whatsoever. The difference is that once the panels are created, they stop polluting. Oil is a trapped pollutant to begin with, then it pollutes as it's pumped from the earth, pollutes as it's refined and pollutes when it's burned. If it's leaked, it pollutes even more. There's never a time when oil stops polluting the only planet we have to live on currently.
Solar Farms, using mirrors don't have any of these problems.
Furthermore you're an idiot for thinking shipping tankers use a ton of fuel. They are fucking NUTS efficient.
Finally you are correct that solar panels, the photovoltaic kind, actually do produce a ton of waste by products to make and the materials are extremely toxic to mine.
Its a scam. A way for democrats to legally steal tax money.
Here's some #s for wind as well, though the number of workers per industry are much different according to the shitty WaPo
It would take thousands of years to use up all the oil in the ground. We only talk about peak oil because dumbfuck regulations make it illegal to drill for oil in some places.
>advantage of relying on oil
It's much cheaper than electric cars.
I thought you could use nuclear waste for other stuff and even if you can’t, if you can figure out how to store that shit, nuclear is the god of energies. I bet it’s just cuz they got retard faggots in charge of figuring out how to store the shit or maybe people don’t want it cuz they know it will kill all other private energy businesses
>Furthermore you're an idiot for thinking shipping tankers use a ton of fuel. They are fucking NUTS efficient.
I bet. I bet they're so efficient it makes it ok when we send all our production overseas
Mining the minerals (cadmium and tellurium) needed ends up strip mining and creating a similar amount of environmental destruction as the oil sands
Processing and Manufacturing the panels creates tons of toxic chemicals
Then you have maintenance required costs which requires potentially more of the above
And you have to replace them every now and then because believe it or not, having panels in areas with wind/particles in the atmosphere etc. damages them
Which means go through the first two again
Its expensive as fuck
Nevermind
>it takes up a ton of space - arguably more than coal/oil/natural gas/hydroelectric/nuclear
>its not efficient enough to meet current needs
>batteries aren't sufficiently enough advanced
>solar mirrors require heat engines/generators in order to convert thermodynamic energy to mechanical to electrical
>all of which cost significant amounts of money, have varying efficiency, require cooling, and maintenance frequently
God forbid they use Gallium Arsenide which is used for high efficiency cells.
On top of that, you need the infrastructure to redirect all of the energy they are producing into city centers, rural areas, etc. You would also need to produce a large amount of lithium to contain the energy that they would not be able to produce during dusk. Lithium is a toxic product, and its production creates toxic by-product. In the end of solar power you basically have to dustbowl huge swaths of land to cover the area to produce enough energy for the growing population.
face it it's just better for us to burn coal and oil for now. thats life.
Pros:
>Source is unlimited and will never run out (in humanity's timescale)
Cons:
>Cells are still very inefficient (top of the line models only have a 22.5% efficiency)
>Pretty expensive (however, as more clients use the tech, the cost to manufacture goes down)
>Requires batteries to store power (Tesla "gigafactory" may help drive down costs of batteries in the future and make the tech more viable)
>Does not produce energy half the day
If efficiency is driven up (they go up every year as the technology is used more) and solar is used more, then it will become cheaper as time goes on.
As it stands, it still needs work but may be viable in the near future.
An important thing to note: if every home and building in the country had PV panels installed, we wouldn't have to worry about power or energy needs. Very unrealistic and will most likely never happen.
You're clearly a scientist with a giant brain. Tell me what else I'm blue-pilled on. Also, if you'd be so kind, explain how creating pollutants (things that affect the way everything on the planet lives, and their quality of life - even you) forever is more beneficial than seeking an option that severely reduces that pollution? Hell, the pollutants that currently come from producing solar panels, including the energy costs needed to produce them, could even be reduced farther to include the exclusive USE of solar power to produce solar panels, eliminating oil pollution at any stage of the solar panel production sequence.
You just like paying $2.50 a gallon for the gas you use, don't you? Be honest. Your resistance to change is based completely upon your personal comfort level.
Nuclear is where it be iz at
In GB yesterday solar did 10% of the grid. In fucking October.
20% was wind. Just because muh USA is a stinking pile of shitty burned oil with no wind doesn't make this stuff a meme for the entire world.
>I was all for solar, but then it turns out that the panels cost more energy to produce than they will generate over their lifespan.
Thanks for spending time to do this research
Reading this thread has made me come to the conclusion that recycling is gunna be so goddamn big in the future
In quantities capable of powering the planet? Are you insinuating that organic material isn't required? I call severe bullshit. Provide your source.
When solar becomes more viable than fossil you get to use this comparison. Horses still exist and nobody is trying to legislate away their existence. Make solar more efficient and convenient and people will use it but until then it's oil all day solar-faggot
Someone post the infographic
>Hell, the pollutants that currently come from producing solar panels, including the energy costs needed to produce them, could even be reduced farther to include the exclusive USE of solar power to produce solar panels, eliminating oil pollution at any stage of the solar panel production sequence.
Why don't we wait until that's actually the case while we also fund research in those areas? In the interim, why do we have to subsidize those sorts of products, why do Western nations like France want to make 600 miles of roads made of solar panels?
Are you mocking me? At least it redpilled some normies. Personally I have always placed nuclear first.
well maybe it will work out, a fairly big solar farm just got built near me.