Carbon emissions of solar panels?

[Bucky]

Of course, the day-night cycle is predictable, and so it's easy to plan around that. More difficult is intermittent fluctuations due to clouds and such, and you still need some way of dealing with that. But even that might not need batteries or the equivalent: You can get a lot of flexibility out of smart metering and time-averaged loads...

In temperate areas, seasonal variation is an even bigger difficulty. If you try to solve the problem of insufficient winter power by adding more solar panels that are only necessary when the days are shortest, you're massively overpaying for that power. Trying to solve the problem with storage means you're paying for a massive amount of storage capacity that's only discharged once per year.

Also, very few kinds of time-averaged loads would let you switch them off for several months.