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Comment by 543g43g43 | Hacker News Reader

The reason we can ignore the huge manufacturing energy inputs required to make solar panels, is because it's powered by cheap domestic coal in China.

>driving operating coal plants out of business

Any specific ones? The only coal plants I've seen get shut down are because of environmental reasons (or age). Some countries, like Germany and China, are re-opening or building new coal plants.

Talking of mental gymnastics - fundamentally, the energy economy boils down to EROI (energy returned on energy invested). It's just wishful thinking that we can replace energy sources that are basically free (coal, oil, gas), with those that have energy payback periods in the mid-double digits of their expected lifespan (solar).

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Try a new solar panel rather than one from the 90s. Your Shellenberger tripe about EROI went off when the EROI of solar surpassed that of nuclear and EPBT dropped below 18 months (or 6 months in sunny countries). Then it went even more ranc

If you're really worried about it, buy a panel from europe, the polysilicon (90% of the energy) comes from hydro, wind, and nuclear powered countries.

Even if all the money for a solar module went to coal generation at chinese or indian prices and nothing else it would pay back that power in under two years.

If the only activity involved in making PV was to spend the entire system cost on lignite and burn it directly at the mine front, it would *still* produce more energy in its lifetime than putting the coal in a coal plant.

It's absolutely laughable that you think you can keep spouting this ridiculous lie.

>the EROI of solar surpassed that of nuclear

Where do you get your numbers from?

>it would pay back that power in under two years.

That's exactly the problem. This is a significant portion of the lifetime output of the panels.

>it would still produce more energy in its lifetime than putting the coal in a coal plant.

I'm not arguing that solar panels are a net negative, as you seem to be implying. I'm arguing that the energy economics of a world fuelled entirely by solar (and other renewable technologies - solar is about the worst for EROI) would look very different to what we have now.

Crystalline Solar panels have a benchmark lifetime of 30 years and are consistently outperforming predicted degradation rates. None have worn out yet, but the best guess is a median 40 year lifetime. A new panasonic or jinko mono panel installed in india has epbt under 6 months and an eroi around 100.

You're the one making the insane claims. You back them up.

>A new panasonic or jinko mono panel installed in india has epbt under 6 months and an eroi around 100.

I certainly haven't made any claims as specific as this without any backup!

You claimed solar has too low EROI to be viable.

Prove new solar in a median location is lower EROI than the median for new gas using up to date info on the whole process and solar cells you would buy for a project started now such as 155 micron wafer mono PERC.

>You claimed solar has too low EROI to be viable.

Nope, I said that it's lower than other sources of power, and thus an energy economy based on solar will look very different than what we currently have.

Given that electricity represents a relatively small percentage of our power usage, in the majority of cases (materials manufacture, industry, heating, etc), the EROI of renewables will be worse than fossil fuels.

Prove that thermal energy from shale oil or tar sands is higher EROI than that same solar panel using a resistor or arc furnace then.

Then add heat pumps and PV+Heliostat or PV+CSP derived hydrogen compounds to your equation and realise that adding heat and chemical stocks shipped from distant places to the equation makes it favour renewables even more as you can turn 120MJ of electricity and 40MJ of direct sunlight at Chile's 35% capacity factor into 120MJ of hydrogen or 100MJ of Ammonia you don't have to refine. With the heat pump you'd get more low grade heat even if you burnt the fossil fuel for electricity.

Wind + PV is a pure upgrade from an EROI perspective, and electrolysers and CSP are following very close behind.

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