Nice synopsis of photovoltaic solar history.
Below, clip from the Bell Telephone Science Hour production “Our Mr Sun” – 1956.
Nice synopsis of photovoltaic solar history.
Below, clip from the Bell Telephone Science Hour production “Our Mr Sun” – 1956.
You can’t replace a coal plant with a solar farm no matter how confidently and stridently Leah Stokes proclaims how cheap it’s gotten! Solar PV is made in China because they have lots of coal plants (polysilicon is a huge energy hog) and cheap Uighur labor to manually crush the quartz.
As for the Uighurs, manually crushing quartz is a horrific job, and labor exploitation* is a tough fight. It’s worse that Uighurs are being forced into “volunteer” labor by government policy (as opposed to, say, just taking advantage of economically desperate people to do hellish harvesting work in the US).
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*One Chinese polysilicon firm gave up on siting a plant in the US because it was too expensive.
“You can’t replace a coal plant with a solar farm no matter how confidently and stridently Leah Stokes proclaims how cheap it’s gotten!”
And yet here we are with coal plants being replaced by solar farms…
They’re being replaced with solar plus gas and the gas is not optional.
The scientific consensus says you are wrong, Mike. But tell us about how solar doesn’t work at night again. I need to think about that more.
Here we go again:
The issue is how long a PV panel (or wind turbine or geothermal plant or NPP) takes to displace the amount of CO2 emitted during its construction (payback time).
As with BEVs charging with greener and greener power over time, generations of solar panels will be made with higher and higher percentage of renewable energy.
In this International Energy Agency report from October 2022 the country with the worst case has a payback time of under 11 months.
https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/solar-pv-manufacturing-emissions-intensity-and-payback-period
Gotta wonder which country is the best case – under one month.
Sunshinania, which used to run entirely on burning coal?
Their flag in purple and has zig-zag lines on it?
I’d call it “wine-colored”:
https://cdn.britannica.com/76/5776-004-54A070FA/Flag-Qatar.jpg
IMO the best critic of solar PV is B.F. Randall. He’s a lawyer specializing in environmental law and has been publishing a lot of stuff pro bono on Twitter and Substack:
https://bfrandall.substack.com/p/the-dirty-secret-of-the-photovoltaic
The cartoon in the second video shows the scientist refining and re-refining sand. It looks like the big advance made there is prospecting and mining high quality quartz.