Quote:
Originally Posted by Merlin66
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My daughter looked at the total carbon footprint of digging the ore converting it to silicon and producing the panels v's the life and energy production....she concluded they were worse than Yallourn power station and should be banned from sale!!...
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About 15 years ago now, when I was at the Telstra Research Labs I was talking to one of the guys who was a recognised expert in the field of solar panels and he also said the overall net equation for solar panels is negative...heavily. If you factor in the energy required to dig up or manufacture all of the materials (silicon, aluminium, glass, copper, solder, pvc etc) ship them from all over the country/world and build a panel. Then transport this to where it is needed, you need more energy than you will EVER get out of the panel before it needs replacing. This was true back then, and I suspect still is now.
The "payback" period is only artificial as they are HEAVILY subsidised, if you had to pay full price, they would probably never pay for themselves.
If you are doing something like this ONLY to be green, you should at least do the equations first as I think you will find they are anything but green.
Having said that, I believe in the affirmative action of subsidising such projects as the technology needs to be tested on a large scale to see if it works and getting production going is the only way to potentially get the equation into the positive. However, if we were to switch to solar panels for all our energy production, we would probably need to burn all of our fossil fuels in order to do so, and still wouldn't have enough panels to replace the fossil fuels we have just burnt!
Enough raving....time to get back to work
