More from my interview with Heather Mirletz, of the Colorado School of Mines Advanced Energy Systems Program, and NREL.
Solar energy EROI (Energy Return On Investment) is a healthy 20+ to 1, output to inputs ratio. Fossil fuels are not that good, and getting worse as fossil fuels become harder to access, while renewables just get more efficient as we get better at manufacturing and deploying them.
From September 2022:
New production process could double wafer throughput to up to 20,000 per hour
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2022/09/28/new-production-process-could-double-wafer-throughput-to-up-to-20000-per-hour/
Excerpt:
In the next step of the process, contact with the imprinted electrodes on both sides of the silicon solar cells is formed in inline furnaces. To increase throughput at this stage, the researchers installed a considerably faster belt speed in the furnace, bypassing the standard need for a significantly larger heating chamber. The group compared the quality of the sintered solar cells with today’s standard, and found that throughput increases significantly without compromising the efficiency of the solar cells.