On Sunday, 14 April 2019 21:08:36 UTC+1, peter wieck wrote:

You don't. Solar panels pollute in their manufacture, and they pollute in their disposal.

one could always crush them & add bitumen. Or cut & toughen them to make roof slates. Hopefully better uses can be found though.

As a life-cycle equation, it has been only over the last couple of years that the energy out has surpassed the energy in. It is government subsidies that make solar power cost-effective, and the fact that the really large solar farm have not yet approached the end of their useful lives.

Nuclear power is a matter of political will - at the most practical level, disposal of the waste is quite simple via

a) Breeder-reactors reducing spent fuel pellets, and tripling the life of any given unit of fissile material.
b) Considering that there are well over 1,000 underground test sites in Nevada, any one of which could contain very nearly all the nuclear waste at every power plant in the US and elsewhere;
c) And those same underground domes will be radioactive for the next 30,000 years or so anyway.

The issue is transport to said location. That is, political will.

Fossil Fuel plants create carbon dioxide in large amounts.

Wind Farms require acreage, which is in limited supply, but otherwise are comparatively cheap, effective and very long-lasting. Life-cycle cost-per-watt is far and away the cheapest of the lot.

Pick your poison. In terms of generating large amounts of unusable waste that cannot be recycled using present technology, Solar is the winner by a massive margin. It just hasn't gotten there yet.

Peter Wieck
Melrose Park, PA


Wind farms displace zero generation as their output is too unreliable. They are a huge consumer of resources per gigawatt for nothing of significant value. The power they produce could equally be produced by the other generation that must accompany them. Financially they are losers.

Solar are only useful where connection to the grid is excessively expensive.. Give it 100 years and let's hope solar PV by then is supremely cheap & coats every roof. But there's no tech in the pipeline now that might do that.

Nuke, oil & gas are proven effective. Alts are't, hence they're still alts.
If green issues are seen as a problem, energy efficiency could go a long way. Cars are senselessly inefficient, and easy & cheap to make better on gas consumption.

Many houses likewise. Governments don't seem to understand how to get there on that one either.


NT