A: Yes, and wind. Wind has a reasonably good energy ROI, but it's not possible to collect enough energy from it without covering the country in turbines, and people don't want that. Offshore is interesting, but the costs (financial and energy invested in building them) are much higher.
B: Market at work, sure, but the end result is the same: They are claiming low CO2 by simply sending the CO2 to China.
C: It is true - look it up if you like. It takes about 20 years to return the energy (forget about the money). And when you have: "the skies are often gray and his roofs aren't all optimally oriented" then those solar cells will never return their energy investment (they will degrade before they are able to do that). Germany is spending money to increase CO2 emissions - brilliant plan: waste money, increase CO2.
> Particularly considering technological progress, this will soon be even more laughable.
You make me laugh. People have been researching solar for decades, and it's always: "soon". I've seen those graphs on how the cost of hydrocarbon fuel is going up, and eventually will go higher than the cost of solar. I'm sure you've seen them too.
Looks great right? You know what they forget? The biggest expense in making solar cells is energy - that exact same hydrocarbon energy who's price increase is being celebrated. When that price goes up the cost of making a solar cell also goes up.
D: Maybe, but that's how it's being sold. And it doesn't help that most renewables are net negative on energy.
E: The research on solar is basically finished. You can't gain any more energy from it that is already being done. The only thing left is reducing the cost. Those super special solar cells that you read about? They use hard to find elements, and we simply don't have enough of those elements on earth to create enough solar cells! Crushing ignorance indeed - you know nothing about me, or how much I know about the field of solar. I know nothing about you either, but you certainly don't sound like you know much about it except for the breathless prognostications from science rags.
Photovoltaic: It's dead. It's pointless, it takes more energy to make them than they produce for a huge time. Solar thermal? Now we are talking, but no one hardly builds them since you need HUGE areas (instead of small incremental installations). You also need an excellent power grid, (but that could be done).
F: No it's not working, it's just costing them money, and increasing CO2 emissions for the rest of the world. Nuclear is it - everything else is just little "feel good" incremental bits. Maybe solar thermal.
Your claim about 20 years required to return the energy to produce a solar panel is false. Googling a bit after "energy returned on energy invested" (EROI) indicates that there aren't really any reliable ways to measure this number. Wikipedia quotes 1.5 for the US, which seems ridiculously low.
A conservative EROI of 6.5 would indicate that it takes about 4.5 years to earn back the energy to produce a panel, assuming static energy output and panel lifetime of 30 years. In short, the data I can find indicates that you are wrong.
You are misreading that number. It's not years, it's how much energy is returned compared to invested. i.e. 6.5 times as much energy returned as invested over the entire life of the device.
For comparison hydrocarbon fuels have numbers in the 30 range, and nuclear is 60 and up (depending on how long the plant lasts). So 6.5 is quite poor. And they list no numbers on expected lifespan - lifespan is the number one thing that controls the EROI on solar.
Also, these numbers usually use very sunny areas and ideal angles to calculate the return. In Germany the results will be much worse.
You sure I'm reading that number wrong? EROI=6.5, expected panel lifetime 30 years => 30/6.5=4.6 years to earn back the energy required to create the panel. Expected panel lifetime of 20 years gives a payback time of 3 years.
For instance, panel lifetime of 20 years and EROI of 1 would give your number, 20 years, to pay back the energy required to produce one panel. Regardless, your original claim of 20 years to get back the original energy investment is greatly exaggerated.
If the EROI is indeed 6.5 then yes you are correct.
But last time I looked at EROI they always cherry picked the best results. (Bright sun, perfect angle, clean new panels, etc.) They also usually ignored installation costs (inverter, wires, framework). Additionally as the cells age they produce less energy.
In more typical installations the number I remember was 20 years after including everything. Although it you told me it was really 10 years I wouldn't argue much.
Under 5 years seems unlikely to me. I'll tell you how I know:
Market forces. With a ROI (not EROI - but obviously they are strongly related) of under 5 years you will have people installing the panels as an investment, with no subsidies needed. Yet you don't see that happening, and I suspect it's because the ROI is worse than 5 years.
This is a bit of a backward argument of course, but the fact that you need subsidies to get people to install solar panels tell me the ROI is not good enough.
I would support subsidies only for one purpose: To initially stimulate the market, in order that scale would reduce prices long term. But subsidies long term are wrong.
I agree with you that if you only get an EROI of 6.5, that's in itself just barely worth it. But to be fair, things are changing really fast. The United States has just added import taxes on Chinese solar panels, to prop up the US solar industry, from 30 to 250 percent depending on the manufacturer. This seems to me a really obvious sign that solar cells are getting a _lot_ cheaper. This might or might not change the energy question, but the economic viability of solar cells is getting better. Can't find the source on this, but I read somewhere that the newest Chinese solar panels are clearly economically viable even without subsidies.
Thats an overly useless calculation. The whole point of this exercise is: not all energy is created equal. You can waste many many millions of kWh of Norways free power and then ship the panel to Germany where it will replace energy generated through coal or nuclear. It might not make up for the energy you wasted back in Norway, but that was never the point to begin with.
I mean if you have free power, then yes converting it into something else even inefficiently is good. But what free power?
I know there are some geothermal plants in Iceland that capture otherwise wasted power and use it to refine aluminium, but I've never heard of countries with free power.
Norway generates 99 percent of its power through hydroelectricity. Its power is free in that there's no CO2 involved and no fossil fuels. Of course its not free; there's more to electricity than just generating it, but the prices seem cheap enough that the per capital consumption is three times that of other European states.
Norway happens to be a large producer of solar panels, too, so this example is pretty spot on.
No, because, as has been pointed out to you in another branch of this discussion, it is actually economically reasonable to build a solar cell that will yield more power than you put into building it.
Seriously dude, get over your obsession about solar panels and accept the fact that you simply didn't have your facts straight.
A) I live in that country and I can tell you that we're quite OK with it.
B) Still don't like your oversimplification in terms of CO2 - and we "send around CO2" all the time. I simply don't think it matters.
C) Again, solar power isn't far enough ahead right now, most of the money is in wind development. Oh, and then there are, you know, a lot of other renewable energy sources that you ignore as you're a little to taken with how well you think you can bash solar.
D) Well, that's certainly a reason to buy into the argument, then, I guess.
E) Oh look, solar again. I sure hope the person you were replying to was rather directly indicating that it's not the only thing to talk about or this would make you seem quite overzealous by now.
F) Again, it's an investment and a sound one at that, based on the history of how technology develops in that area. A walking where the ball will be, not where it is right now (coal and, indeed, nuclear) kind of situation.
I'm curious, though - what's your assessment on how much further nuclear energy has gotten in dealing with its toxic waste problem in the half a century it has been around?
B: Market at work, sure, but the end result is the same: They are claiming low CO2 by simply sending the CO2 to China.
C: It is true - look it up if you like. It takes about 20 years to return the energy (forget about the money). And when you have: "the skies are often gray and his roofs aren't all optimally oriented" then those solar cells will never return their energy investment (they will degrade before they are able to do that). Germany is spending money to increase CO2 emissions - brilliant plan: waste money, increase CO2.
> Particularly considering technological progress, this will soon be even more laughable.
You make me laugh. People have been researching solar for decades, and it's always: "soon". I've seen those graphs on how the cost of hydrocarbon fuel is going up, and eventually will go higher than the cost of solar. I'm sure you've seen them too.
Looks great right? You know what they forget? The biggest expense in making solar cells is energy - that exact same hydrocarbon energy who's price increase is being celebrated. When that price goes up the cost of making a solar cell also goes up.
D: Maybe, but that's how it's being sold. And it doesn't help that most renewables are net negative on energy.
E: The research on solar is basically finished. You can't gain any more energy from it that is already being done. The only thing left is reducing the cost. Those super special solar cells that you read about? They use hard to find elements, and we simply don't have enough of those elements on earth to create enough solar cells! Crushing ignorance indeed - you know nothing about me, or how much I know about the field of solar. I know nothing about you either, but you certainly don't sound like you know much about it except for the breathless prognostications from science rags.
Photovoltaic: It's dead. It's pointless, it takes more energy to make them than they produce for a huge time. Solar thermal? Now we are talking, but no one hardly builds them since you need HUGE areas (instead of small incremental installations). You also need an excellent power grid, (but that could be done).
F: No it's not working, it's just costing them money, and increasing CO2 emissions for the rest of the world. Nuclear is it - everything else is just little "feel good" incremental bits. Maybe solar thermal.