Comments on: Global Solar Photovoltaic Industry Is Likely Now A Net Energy Producer

By: Otis11

Otis11 — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 16:19:00 +0000

Well, honestly I thought it was an interesting article. What I got from it – Solar panels as a whole have already paid for themselves. While individual panels may still be in the paying back stage, as a whole it’s all all free electricity now. (well, free from an energy perspective, there’s still some R&D costs to recoup, but that shouldn’t take long)

By: Zachary Shahan

Zachary Shahan — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 06:52:00 +0000

Completely agree. Unfort., this was one story I didn’t see until after it was published. I probably would have declined if I had. Or would have added a big preface. At least the message was a “net positive,” and that’s probably all that most readers will take out of it.

By: Zachary Shahan

Zachary Shahan — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 20:01:00 +0000

good call. this was definitely not my favorite story/study of the month.

By: Otis11

Otis11 — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 17:36:00 +0000

Yeah, what this actually tells me is that we’re not ramping up production fast enough. We should just be re-investing all of the generation in making more generation capacity until we have enough… or at least until we get close so that we can scale down in a controllable manner…

By: Bob_Wallace

Bob_Wallace — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 17:03:00 +0000

” last year was the first year that solar panels generated more power than was consumed (in annual panel manufacturing)”

I agree, this is a meaningless statistic.

We could have reached that point in the second year of panel manufacturing by simply not manufacturing any panels in year two.

By: Otis11

Otis11 — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 02:50:00 +0000

A few things everyone is overlooking:

Yes, last year was the first year that solar panels generated more power than was consumed in their construction, but the biggest factor in that is because we are in a period of exponential growth for solar cells. If it takes 4 years for a solar panel to pay back the electricity it took to make it, but we made 30% of the global supply of panels last year, of course we’re going to be in an energy deficit! That’s basic mathematics and is in no way a reflection of the technology! (This actually happens in drilling for oil too… but it’s all proprietary so we don’t generally hear about the numbers)

Secondly, the vast majority of our solar panels are less than 5 years old! Given it takes ~4 years for energy pay back, we wouldn’t expect it to be a net energy gain until right around now… And actually even a little later given that the growth is not linear and the average of these panels is less than 2.5 years old.

Third, what this says is we have created more electricity with our PV cells than we consumed in making them… and they still have 20+ years left to make more power!

The video did get these right, but as they only mentioned it in a single sentence about 3/4 the way through and they weren’t mentioned in the article, thought I’d bring it up.

By: beernotwar

beernotwar — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 18:46:00 +0000

Is this a fair analysis? If we weren’t using fossil fuels to create solar energy generation capacity, wouldn’t a similar amount of fossil fuel be burned to create some other kind of generation capacity? How many coal, nuclear or natural gas plants haven’t been constructed because of new solar capacity? The amount of fossil fuels that would have been burned to construct those plants needs to be subtracted from the energy used to create the solar capacity.

By: Speller

Speller — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 13:30:00 +0000

Interesting article. But please spell check your headline. You are missing an ‘n’.

By: Jouni Valkonen

Jouni Valkonen — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 10:44:00 +0000

The energy cost of solar does not matter at all, if solar power is used for manufacturing new solar panels. Silicon refinery should be able to adjust its output according sun and wind.