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Comment by skybrian | Hacker News Reader

Yes, whatever is under the solar panels gets less sunlight. There are even some companies starting to lay solar panels directly on the ground, which means it gets none at all.

I don't think it's all that hard to take that into account, though; it's a land use concern. What was the land being used for before?

Also, the terawatts of power generated will get converted to heat in developed areas where it's used, but that's true of any electricity use.

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But if the sunlight that produced that power had hit something else instead, it also would have been turned into heat. There's no net heating of the planet from solar power. (Of course, the distribution of heating can change.)

Recall that PV panels are black. They get quite hot, almost certainly hotter than plain dirt would if uncovered. Plenty hot enough that you can't touch them for more than a moment.

For reference, that's somewhere just above 50°C

I am not sure that is correct. It is possible that solar panels absorb more total energy and keep it locally than would otherwise be reflected back into space via radiative cooling.

Possibly, although it would behoove solar panels to have a high albedo along the non-electrically producing wavelengths. Lower panel temperatures mean higher efficiency, but the effort might not be worth the marginal improvement.

Yes, and when electricity is used to do work, the vast, overwhelming majority of the energy used is turned into heat.

So solar panels are moving heat, not sending it into a black hole somewhere.

That was my point.

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