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Comment by CuriousCosmic | Hacker News Reader

I think that is the point they are making though. PV is still harmful to the environment in its current form but it isn't as bad as Coal is in its current form.

Both can be clean and zero-impact however in practice neither are.

PV is still "cleaner" than coal in its current form but neither are truly clean. It's the significant lesser of two evils until we make the effort to go net-zero.

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No energy source will ever be purely clean. PV is several orders of magnitude less polluting than Coal.

How much cleaner is solar thermal than PV? I assume that depends on how dirty it is to produce the metal for the turbines (steam or air, in the case of solar towers).

All of these are very clean compared to coal.

Solar thermal is vulnerable to attacks from media articles about dead birds and the fact that some of them have to burn natural gas to start the plant in the morning. You can find both varieties of article courtesy of Fox News:

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/taxpayer-backed-solar-plant...

https://www.foxnews.com/science/emerging-solar-plants-scorch...

Solar thermal does have one huge advantage over PV: the plants contain their own short-term energy storage and keep running well after dark. Unfortunately due to market forces solar thermal is currently dead in America. All planned plants have been canceled.

Solar thermal has a larger footprint, considering turbines and such, but would tend to be more easily recyclable out of the waste stream.

Not clean enough to offset the higher cost per kWh currently. The PV price collapse kneecapped several alternative power sources. Plus solar thermal requires big centralized power plants, where PV can be distributed easily.

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