Edit: I'm not advocating fossil fuels. I think solar makes a ton of sense, but it also seems crazy to think we could build enough solar + storage capacity for the world. Nuclear energy is the real future.
The environmental impact of mining/refining is certainly significant and worthy of some concern. But it is worth noting that fossil fuels also require significant mining and refining. In general it is thought that solar panels would offset their environmental cost within 1-3 years, with an average lifetime of 15-30 years. So roughly, you could expect them to “recoup” about an order of magnitude more than it took to manufacture.
It’s actually a very good and smart question to ask. But I think sometimes it’s perhaps a question over-asked by some groups in bad faith to sow doubt. Similarly you’ll hear the same argument applied to plastic vs cloth shopping bags.
Either way, the plastic bags will be here as microplastic fragments long after the cloth bag has disintegrated and been recycled by microorganisms. The science isn’t quite consensus-level, but it isn’t looking good for microplastics, negative externality-wise.
This fixation on picking up plastic bag pennies on the ground while refusing to pick up the $100 bills like funding an electric train transit network and enforce the law on current transit systems so people feel safe to be on them makes it feel like there are no real adults in the room when it comes to these things. Nobody is building nuclear power plants in the desert running mass CO2 scrubbers either.
Also, land usage can be minimal. Vertical panels can allow farming, and are also more efficient (allow heat to escape), cover the early mornings and evenings better.
40m acres (just in US!) are used for ethanol production to produce a small fraction of fuel. I'd imagine the material costs of these 40m acres over 25 - 50 years (fertilizer, harvesting, shipping, refining ....) would be a lot more than solar panels.
Also, 40% of shipping is fossil fuels, we are mining, refining and shipping billions of tons every year.
Also remember the fossil fuel plants and infrastructure are not material free. There is a one time cost of materials there just as much as solar panels. But for fuel, solar panels have zero input costs, zero processing costs, zero waste production.
Solar is roughly on par with coal, depending on the exact type of solar technology used. Of course you can put solar on existing structures, in which case the land use is negligible and on par with nuclear.
Regarding energy input, solar panels break even after about two years, I think (no source on hand currently). It would be quite easy to have solar panel production run entirely on renewable energy input.
Regarding the other resources, you can't really compare energy sources to one another, as all are using vastly different inputs and have different challenges regarding disposal of waste and recycling. You'd have to make a judgement based on impact. I.e. coal is really bad, because it produces CO2 which has potentially society-ending consequences. Nuclear has challenges, because the waste remains radioactive for so long. My personal impression is that solar has some challenges, but those are manageable and likely can be mitigated by regulating disposal and recycling of old panels.
Solar is already cheaper than nuclear in terms of cost per MWH, and while adding extensive storage tends to even the cost out, nuclear still has some disadvantages including: uncertain uranium fuel sources and costs, black swan catastrophe concerns, cooling water demands, and long-term waste disposal costs - all issues solar mostly avoids. Some niche nuclear uses are more promising, e.g. China's current attempt to make pebble-bed helium-cooled models work for industrial process use (500C steam).
Look at France, they've got a big expensive mess on their hands after betting on nuclear: https://www.reuters.com/world/france-braces-uncertain-winter...
At present in the US there's no reactor that anyone will build. No one will build any more big AP1000s after the unmitigated financial disasters that were its 2 initial projects. Everyone has put their faith in small reactors (SMRs) but the only one with an approved design (NuScale) had its initial project fail after a Utah utility coalition fell apart.
The NuScale project that failed was supposed to come online around 2030. Their other project was some sort of Bitcoin mining fiction, its not clear they will have a future. There are a bunch of SMR startups that are at various stages of development, however, none has an approved design. So, we're looking at after 2030 if we're lucky with speculative designs that may or may not work out.
Not a very certain bet.
The medium term future of energy in the US at least is california, ie ridiculously expensive and unreliable. Hopefully costs will eventually come down as we get enough batteries and grid infrastructure in place so everyone can have their indian solar power energy--but a sane policy that would have been to have excess nuclear capacity in place and slowly transition to solar panels as the reliability improves.
So China, surely the best case scenario for nuclear power expansion anywhere in the world, will go from 5% nuclear power generation today to 7.7% by 2035. That is about all that you need to know about the potential contribution of current and near future nuclear power technology to solving the climate crisis.
As we need to be basically net 0 CO2 emissions by 2050 at the latest, there is simply no scenario in which nuclear can play more than a minor part in solving this. Meanwhile renewables are cost effective investments today, you simply need to improve the regulatory and infrastructure context (transmission lines). Yes, solving storage is required as well, but that seems vastly more feasible than somehow beating 80 years of real world experience telling you that putting it all on nuclear is not a politically or financially viable path forward.
Yet no one has picked up this project. Why? Because the construction risk is too great, not because of environmental regulations.
They might also abandon theirs on account of being able to make solar incredibly cheap domestically, but they also might not, we have to wait and see.
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/chinas-coal-country-f...
Or, maybe they'll build out all-of-the-above electricity-generating options, depending on how their political leaders feel.
1) just based on real world observation. The country with the most ambitious nuclear power buildout program is China. It has the perfect combination of incentives: nuclear power is needed to maintain status as a nuclear weapons power, it needs to expand its energy production dramatically while at the same time limiting CO2 emissions, nuclear fuel is a domestic resource and they have a domestic nuclear industry and a generally quite innovative tech sector. But even China only plans to produce 7.7% of its electricity output from nuclear in 2035, barely more than now, while renewables are slated to expand dramatically: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China
EDIT: China also doesn't need to worry about domestic political backlash to new nuclear construction.
2) cost and political risk. There is not a single privately owned or listed company in the world that is willing to take on the risk and cost of building a substantial nuclear reactor. And governments are not keen on spending billions of dollars on potential boondoggles either. In comparison, renewable power generation is already cost-effective and can be built out rapidly with available technologies. If you want more, you can simply spend more. Energy storage is somewhat unsolved, true, but you can probably get 90% of where you need to go in terms of climate change mitigation with existing energy storage technology, while nuclear has no viable financial or political path to your goal at all.
Contrary to what other might be saying, that's not a question we can avoid asking, as there is a physical realities behind the ideal of switching to a fully decarbonated and decentralised grid... Even though that's basically the only thing we can do to keep existing as a specie.
> Does anyone have a breakdown of the materials required to create 2.2 million solar panels?
In academia, these are called "lifecycle analyses" (or sometimes cradle-to-grave/cradle-to-cradle analyses). Here's one by the International Energy Agency, a NGO: https://iea-pvps.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/IEA-PVPS-LCI...
PDF page 21 has a detailed bill of materials for PV modules (solar panels), and pg 60 for li-ion batteries. There are also breakdowns for various parts of subcomponents.
In general, as you noted, we're pretty good at analyzing the carbon impacts of PV manufacturing (TLDR: it's a net positive), but the land use question is much harder because it's not a mathematical equation that you can apply. How do you weigh X solar panels vs Y endangered tortoises or whatever? It's often just a case-by-case determination, and in the US that usually means an specialized environmental review under NEPA (National Environmental Policy Act) or similar state laws.
It always boil down to a judgment call (and also local community sentiment, to some degree), the quality of the review, and maybe just plain dumb luck (whether the site surveys happen to notice any listed species at that particular time).
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Re: Land & mining...
Climate change isn't great for many species either (it does help some plants and such), so even from a land use conservation point of view, the opportunity cost of not building more solar/nuclear often means increased desertification or flooding, etc., just because climate change will slowly affect big swaths of land and water. In a way, these renewables projects can be thought of a way to sacrifice small plots of land to try to protect the rest. With some exceptions (like old growth forests), I think in general we are better able to manage around localized disruptions in land area than global climate change, if only because most land is controlled (and thus permitted/reviewed) only by a few entities and maybe 1-3 governments (federal/state/tribal), vs anything climatic involving the whole damned world and all its politicians and protestors.
The mining of materials, though, also causes a lot of human suffering that a lot of these academic analyses don't fully account for, or illustrate very well on a visceral level. Read: child labor in highly dangerous mines under terrible conditions, just so Joe American can feel a bit better about driving his Tesla with a few panels on his roof. But, to be fair, that system of exploitation is going to exist no matter our energy source. It's not always foreign kids, but coal mining is no easy life either.
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Re: Nuclear
I'm pro-nuclear myself, but many people still aren't (for reasons not worth getting into here, which I'm sure you already know).
I think PV has reached such a low price point (thanks, China) that nuclear just isn't really speed- or cost-competitive anymore.
Realistically, though, we really need both (like a solar bridge to nuclear), much more than we have now, and much faster, and we're not going to get enough of either one in time =/
I don't think it's really a "PV vs nuclear" but a "all of the above, and then some!"