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  1. - Top - End - #61
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    Default Re: Carbon emissions of solar panels?

    Quote Originally Posted by Theodoxus View Post
    Getting away from the nuke disaster porn...

    It would seem that residential solar would ultimately have the smallest footprint and general environmental impact. Look at Germany, which has an overabundance of electricity generation just through residential panels over the last decade. Germany - the cloudiest nation in Europe, on the same latitude as Michigan in the US - not exactly known for its sunny days!
    Germany still uses mostly coal power for electricity generation, and I think natural gas for home heating. Yes, renewables are climbing, but they have a long way to go.

    Quote Originally Posted by Theodoxus View Post
    If every large metropolitan center, say anything over 50,000 people got off the grid and built a single transformer hub to collect excess electricity generated by photo-voltaic collectors on roofs and other covered areas, we'd solve the general electric problem full stop. Smaller, more rural areas might still deal with cross county/country transmission lines, or draw upon their closest metro center hub for power - offset by their own personal solar panels, and mini wind turbines (the kind we've used forever, not the massive 5+ story behemoths that blot out the landscape and catch fire .

    I'm not sure how the rest of the 1st World's infrastructure is - having most of it blown to bits 75 years ago probably helps a bit compared to the US's 150+ year old infrastructure... but I'd be shocked if there couldn't be massive improvements nearly everywhere.... tackling both problems at once, rebuilding the infrastructure while building it in a meaningful way that limits CO, CO2, methane, butane, etc. production and sets up regional metro power hubs at the same time? Save the planet and make everything nicer all at once... win/win!
    Energy storage isn't free either. Using batteries, pumped hydro, or something else still means a large investment to build that storage. You need that storage because home energy use is highest when it is dark. I have seen some stuff about possibly storing solar energy by cracking water and combining that with air to make ammonia. Theoretically that can solve the transport and storage problem that hydrogen otherwise suffers from, so you can separate generation and consumption (in time and space) but that probably isn't close.

    When it comes to rebuilding everything, that costs money as well, and concrete and steel both produce large amounts of CO₂.
    Last edited by Excession; 2019-01-21 at 09:30 PM.

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    Default Re: Carbon emissions of solar panels?

    Storing electricity for more than a few minutes leaks a lot of it, no matter how you do it. Unless you're using expensive high-performance batteries, we're talking about at least a third of it gone, either leaked or used to manage the system.

    Rooftop solar in particular is generally less efficient in terms of environmental footprint than utility-scale solar. The main benefit is that the physical land footprint is recycled. A secondary benefit is saving a few percent on transmission losses if it's never pushed to the grid. The drawbacks include losing a lot of efficiency from being forced into a suboptimal angle relative to the sun, a larger infrastructure footprint from being more spread out, maintenance in particular being more difficult/dangerous, energy requirements for lifting things to the roof, and some extra difficulty with grid management.

    Most places aren't particularly short on buildable spots that are close to the consumers and not far off the ground.
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    Default Re: Carbon emissions of solar panels?

    Quote Originally Posted by Excession View Post
    I have seen some stuff about possibly storing solar energy by cracking water and combining that with air to make ammonia. Theoretically that can solve the transport and storage problem that hydrogen otherwise suffers from, so you can separate generation and consumption (in time and space) but that probably isn't close.
    I'm looking forward to the first major liquid ammonia pipeline spill near a major city after switching to an ammonia-hydrogen energy economy. That sounds like lots of fun.

    That being said, I don't think it's a bad idea or that we shouldn't pursue it. I'm just pointing out that it seems like it'd need to be approached with lots of caution. Probably even more caution than compressed or liquid hydrogen storage and transport. Ammonia is nasty stuff.

    Still, it's worth looking into, doing detailed cost benefit analyses, and revisiting after developing new future materials handling methods that might help with it.
    Quote Originally Posted by Harnel View Post
    where is the atropal? and does it have a listed LA?

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    Default Re: Carbon emissions of solar panels?

    Quote Originally Posted by Bucky View Post
    Storing electricity for more than a few minutes leaks a lot of it, no matter how you do it. Unless you're using expensive high-performance batteries, we're talking about at least a third of it gone, either leaked or used to manage the system.

    Rooftop solar in particular is generally less efficient in terms of environmental footprint than utility-scale solar. The main benefit is that the physical land footprint is recycled. A secondary benefit is saving a few percent on transmission losses if it's never pushed to the grid. The drawbacks include losing a lot of efficiency from being forced into a suboptimal angle relative to the sun, a larger infrastructure footprint from being more spread out, maintenance in particular being more difficult/dangerous, energy requirements for lifting things to the roof, and some extra difficulty with grid management.

    Most places aren't particularly short on buildable spots that are close to the consumers and not far off the ground.
    You can do better things with rooftops, if you just want to help the environment in general. Rooftop green spaces, for one, are fantastic for biodiversity.
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    Default Re: Carbon emissions of solar panels?

    Quote Originally Posted by Eldan View Post
    You can do better things with rooftops, if you just want to help the environment in general. Rooftop green spaces, for one, are fantastic for biodiversity.
    That wouldn't be very practical on steep sloped roofs that already exist. Whereas if such a roof already slopes more or less towards the equator, it can be a decent platform for solar cells.
    Quote Originally Posted by Harnel View Post
    where is the atropal? and does it have a listed LA?

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    Default Re: Carbon emissions of solar panels?

    Oh, sure. I'm just saying. It's not all that easy to convert a pre-existing roof into a green space either, necessarily. Soil is heavy, so you might need reinforcements. And drainage.

    That said, on a lot of angled roofs, solar water heating might be more interesting than solar panels, too.
    Last edited by Eldan; 2019-01-22 at 04:59 AM.
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    Default Re: Carbon emissions of solar panels?

    Quote Originally Posted by Eldan View Post
    That said, on a lot of angled roofs, solar water heating might be more interesting than solar panels, too.
    I mentioned that one earlier. Without adequate storage and grid infrastructure, reducing energy consumption has more pressing needs than producing energy and feeding it into the grid.

    The German government that originally started the "Green Energy Revolution" more or less had a good plan: Reduce consumption by enforcing higher insulation standards on buildings, as well as enforcing solar water heating as being mandatory, enforce e-mobility as a means to create a distributed storage network in form of cars and their batteries.

    Well, they lasted 5 years and the follow-up government didn't have a clue how to proceed with the already started plan....

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    Default Re: Carbon emissions of solar panels?

    Another promising technology is chemical "heat storage" using solutions of sodium hydroxide or other ionic chemicals. It was mostly reported as being for "storing summer heat for use in winter" but on a smaller scale, it would be good for "home heat load-leveling" using a solar water heater type collector to evaporate the solution with excess heat during the day and releasing heat into the HVAC system at night.
    Quote Originally Posted by Harnel View Post
    where is the atropal? and does it have a listed LA?

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    Default Re: Carbon emissions of solar panels?

    Quote Originally Posted by Eldan View Post
    The main cost of solar panels is that the materials have to be melted at extremely high temperatures. That was also the reason why for a long time, they weren't seen as very efficient over their lifetime. Of course, nuclear produces CO2 in production too, from mining uranium and building the plants (huge amounts of concrete, which is horrific all on its own). But then, all kinds of plants need to be built, whether they are coal plants or factories to produce wind turbines or solar panels.
    Quote Originally Posted by Florian View Post
    I think that the claims are based on the widely different production and environmental protection standards, as well as the infrastructure already in place. For example, renewable energy is already very wide-spread in Germany, environmental protection standards are fairly high, so locally produced nuclear power plants or wind power plants have an extremely small carbon footprint when compared to solar panels produced in and shipped from China.

    The cleaner your infrastructure already is, the cleaner the products created using that infrastructure will be as a result.
    This, exactly. It's not like the steel that goes into making power plants of any description doesn't also need to be melted at rather high temperatures, and the only reason why energy inputs translate into CO2 emissions is because most of our existing power generation capacity is based on fossil fuels. If all our energy came from renewables, the CO2 emissions associated with manufacturing more renewable capacity (or manufacturing in general) would be close to zero.

    Quote Originally Posted by Erloas View Post
    Yes, retrofitting something is always more expensive and more work than building it like that in the beginning. We could make much safer and efficient nuclear reactors if the fear of nuclear didn't make it so that no one has even tried in the USA in decades. I did a project on it in school.... about 20 years ago, and they had designs then that couldn't melt down even if all of the safety measures were turned off (like what happened in Chernobyl). I think they were trying to get a pilot plant up in Africa as a proof of concept, but I don't know if it ever actually happened. And of course since Fukashima virtually no one in the world wants to even entertain the possibility of nuclear.
    Quote Originally Posted by Chronos View Post
    And I know that Fukushima scared a lot of people off of nuclear power, but I have no idea why. The disaster in Fukushima was an entirely natural tsunami. Everything in that region of Japan failed, not just the nuclear plant. And most of the failures, including multiple fossil-fuel facilities of various sorts, had worse consequences than the nuclear plant. I think that people heard about a nuclear failure, and saw the devastation, and connected them, even though almost all of the devastation had nothing at all to do with the nuclear plant. Oh, and there's also some meaningless made-up scale for nuclear disasters that it got a 5 on, because that represents "really bad disaster", and of course it was really bad, because it got a 5 on that scale.
    Yeah, most of the actual casualties seem to have been caused by the panic to evacuate rather than any particular evidence for significant radiation exposure... following a natural disaster which already killed 15,000 people. Design flaws or no, the level of attendant hysteria was ridiculous.


    Anyway, on the subject of energy storage, this might be worth looking at-

    https://qz.com/1355672/stacking-conc...-store-energy/
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    Default Re: Carbon emissions of solar panels?

    One other big problem with renewables (except hydro, which has its own problems) is consistency. In many places, you can not get consistent sunlight or wind, which plays absolute hell on the infrastructure.
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    Default Re: Carbon emissions of solar panels?

    Quote Originally Posted by Lacuna Caster View Post
    Anyway, on the subject of energy storage, this might be worth looking at-

    https://qz.com/1355672/stacking-conc...-store-energy/
    That's really interesting. I wonder how it fares in earthquake-prone areas, though.

    I read about molten metal batteries in Mechanical Engineering. The advantage with those is that you don't need to worry about anode/cathode degeneration. The disadvantage is that you need to keep the metal molten, so the batteries consume energy to maintain temperature. http://news.mit.edu/2016/battery-molten-metals-0112. It's been a few years now, and I haven't heard of any further developments, though.
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    Default Re: Carbon emissions of solar panels?

    Quote Originally Posted by Lacuna Caster View Post
    Anyway, on the subject of energy storage, this might be worth looking at-

    https://qz.com/1355672/stacking-conc...-store-energy/
    I don't think it's fast enough.

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    TV pickup is a term used in the United Kingdom to refer to a phenomenon that affects electricity generation and transmission networks. It often occurs when a large number of people watch the same TV programmes while taking advantage of breaks in programming to use toilets and operate electrical appliances, thus causing large synchronised surges in national electricity consumption.

    ...

    The shortest lead-in times are on pumped storage reservoirs, such as the Dinorwig Power Station that has the fastest response time of any pumped storage station in the world at just 12 seconds to produce 1320 MW.[9] Once the longer term fossil fuel stations, which have response times around half an hour, and nuclear power stations, which can take even longer, come online then pumped storage stations can be turned off and the water returned to the reservoir.[9]
    That concrete business might be good for longer term smoothing, but I think some pumped storage will be needed for shorter term use.
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    Default Re: Carbon emissions of solar panels?

    I saw this a few months ago, I wonder what you think about it. http://carbonengineering.com/ce-videos/

    It feels like short term it might be part of the solution for more rural places where things like setting up the infrastructure for electric cars or things like that would be problematic as well as for things like airplane fuel or long-haul trucking where electric is probably never going to be viable (or even power generation in the arctic or something), and the carbon capture applications are pretty obvious for a carbon market or government funded carbon sequestration projects.

    I'm just not sure it checks out and how well it would scale up.
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    Default Re: Carbon emissions of solar panels?

    Quoth Excession:

    Energy storage isn't free either. Using batteries, pumped hydro, or something else still means a large investment to build that storage. You need that storage because home energy use is highest when it is dark.
    Home electrical usage might be highest when it's dark, but overall usage is highest during the day. So when your solar panels are being shined upon but nobody's home to use the power, you sell it back to the utility company, which in turn sells it to the offices, factories, and other customers who are using power at that time.

    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. The idea is that some loads don't actually need a consistent power, as long as it's enough averaged out over some reasonable time interval, so the electric company continually varies the price of electricity based on production (i.e., cheap when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing), and those loads are connected to smart meters, so they know when it's cheap, and only turn on at those times. Air conditioning, for instance, is such a load, and is a major part of total usage in some areas (and it has the added advantage that the need is correlated with when the sun is shining).
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    Default Re: Carbon emissions of solar panels?

    Quote Originally Posted by thorgrim29 View Post
    I saw this a few months ago, I wonder what you think about it. http://carbonengineering.com/ce-videos/

    It feels like short term it might be part of the solution for more rural places where things like setting up the infrastructure for electric cars or things like that would be problematic as well as for things like airplane fuel or long-haul trucking where electric is probably never going to be viable (or even power generation in the arctic or something), and the carbon capture applications are pretty obvious for a carbon market or government funded carbon sequestration projects.

    I'm just not sure it checks out and how well it would scale up.
    Something that video didn't mention is using that captured carbon to make plastics. Burying it is all well and good for the feeling of doing something good, but what is needed is a carbon-negative process that produces profit.

    Sure, some of the carbon in plastic makes it back into the atmosphere. But, say for argument that plastic sequesters 60% of the carbon that goes into it and perfect burying sequesters 100%. Well, 60% of 100 million tons driven by capitalism is a lot more than 100% of 5 million tons driven by ethics and feels.

    You can also use polymer fibers to reinforce concrete. For long term high-volume projects like dams and properly built highways this is almost as good as burying carbon. By "properly built" I mean a road bed thicker than the depth of the frost line. That increases durability by quite a bit, and increases the volume used.

    Also, current concrete production is notoriously carbon-intensive. Thus, converting concrete manufacture to use renewable energy inputs would go a long way, too.
    Quote Originally Posted by Harnel View Post
    where is the atropal? and does it have a listed LA?

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    Default Re: Carbon emissions of solar panels?

    Quote Originally Posted by Chronos View Post
    Home electrical usage might be highest when it's dark, but overall usage is highest during the day. So when your solar panels are being shined upon but nobody's home to use the power, you sell it back to the utility company, which in turn sells it to the offices, factories, and other customers who are using power at that time.
    You're right, I think what I was looking at was a graph of household energy use, not overall. There is still the duck curve problem, where solar delivers plenty during the day, but can't meet that household peak that at 7pm or so. The more pronounced that curve gets the better the business case for energy storage, but until you have enough storage you still need the traditional generation capacity to cover the peak.
    Last edited by Excession; 2019-01-24 at 04:38 PM.

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    Default Re: Carbon emissions of solar panels?

    Quote Originally Posted by gomipile View Post
    Something that video didn't mention is using that captured carbon to make plastics. Burying it is all well and good for the feeling of doing something good, but what is needed is a carbon-negative process that produces profit.
    I didn't watch the videos, but from their website, it seems their initial plans are to convert the captured CO2 into a combustible fuel, so the process would basically be carbon-neutral at best (actually worse once you consider the entire life-cycle including construction, unless they are planning to sequester some of it to make up the balance). I agree that using it to make polymers or some other stable product would be a better solution, though the question is whether that is technically and/or economically feasible.

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    Default Re: Carbon emissions of solar panels?

    Quote Originally Posted by monomer View Post
    I didn't watch the videos, but from their website, it seems their initial plans are to convert the captured CO2 into a combustible fuel, so the process would basically be carbon-neutral at best (actually worse once you consider the entire life-cycle including construction, unless they are planning to sequester some of it to make up the balance). I agree that using it to make polymers or some other stable product would be a better solution, though the question is whether that is technically and/or economically feasible.
    In the video burying the captured carbon is mentioned as an option. They also say that the pilot plant runs entirely on renewables, so yes, the construction cost should be the main carbon emissions from the project. That would be amortized over the life of a plant, though.

    And hey, using this technology you could power the construction machinery for every plant after the first with carbon neutral fuel. There are still probably many carbon-releasing manufacturing processes for needed off the shelf materials and components that would be outside the control of such a venture, though.
    Quote Originally Posted by Harnel View Post
    where is the atropal? and does it have a listed LA?

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    Default Re: Carbon emissions of solar panels?

    Quote Originally Posted by gomipile View Post
    Something that video didn't mention is using that captured carbon to make plastics. Burying it is all well and good for the feeling of doing something good, but what is needed is a carbon-negative process that produces profit.

    Sure, some of the carbon in plastic makes it back into the atmosphere. But, say for argument that plastic sequesters 60% of the carbon that goes into it and perfect burying sequesters 100%. Well, 60% of 100 million tons driven by capitalism is a lot more than 100% of 5 million tons driven by ethics and feels.

    You can also use polymer fibers to reinforce concrete. For long term high-volume projects like dams and properly built highways this is almost as good as burying carbon. By "properly built" I mean a road bed thicker than the depth of the frost line. That increases durability by quite a bit, and increases the volume used.

    Also, current concrete production is notoriously carbon-intensive. Thus, converting concrete manufacture to use renewable energy inputs would go a long way, too.
    If plastic is used for construction, when a plastic eating micro-organism comes along, buildings built using it will fall down. We need a plastic eating organism, there is too much waste plastic in the world, and more is coming by the second.
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    Default Re: Carbon emissions of solar panels?

    Quote Originally Posted by Chronos View Post
    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.
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    Default Re: Carbon emissions of solar panels?

    Quote Originally Posted by halfeye View Post
    If plastic is used for construction, when a plastic eating micro-organism comes along, buildings built using it will fall down. We need a plastic eating organism, there is too much waste plastic in the world, and more is coming by the second.
    That probably wouldn't be much of a problem for fiber reinforced concrete, since it's fairly alkaline. Likewise plastic building siding would probably still last longer than, say, wood siding does now. Which is to say a very long time.

    The existence of common microorganisms that digest a type of material typically only matters in composting-like conditions.

    PLA, the now-common corn-based biodegradable plastic, lasts quite a while outdoors in open air. If you compost it, however, it degrades about as fast as a very dense wood.

    (Edit: the post originally said PVA, but that was a typo.)
    Last edited by gomipile; 2019-01-26 at 02:26 AM.

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    Default Re: Carbon emissions of solar panels?

    IIRC, PVAs also dissolve in the wash. Hospitals use them for laundry bags so housekeeping staff don't come into contact with potentially contagious items.

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    Default Re: Carbon emissions of solar panels?

    Oops, you're right, PVA is soluble, and used as an indoor wood glue, etc. I meant PLA. Editing the post to reflect that.
    Quote Originally Posted by Harnel View Post
    where is the atropal? and does it have a listed LA?

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    Default Re: Carbon emissions of solar panels?

    Quoth Bucky:

    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.
    That depends on the area: "temperate" covers a wide range. Energy usage varies by season, but which way does it vary? Around here (Cleveland), people use much more energy in the winter, because our winters are cold, and our summers are moderate. In the southern US, however, winters are comfortable, but air conditioning is needed in the summer, so more energy is used in the summer. And the places where energy use is higher in the summer tend to be the places that are better suited to solar power to begin with.

    I think it's an all too common mistake to try to find The Solution. Solar isn't The Solution. Nor is wind, nor nuclear, nor any single technology you can think of, because there is no one single solution. The solution is actually a combination of all of the solutions. Build more solar, where it makes sense. Build wind turbines, where they make sense. Increase efficiency everywhere we can. Increase flexibility via smart metering, to mitigate the unpredictability of wind and solar. If you happen to be in one of the few areas where tide power or geothermal is practical, use that too. Continue using fossil fuels where you absolutely must, but mitigate them as much as possible with carbon sequestration elsewhere. And so on.

    Quoth halfeye:

    If plastic is used for construction, when a plastic eating micro-organism comes along, buildings built using it will fall down. We need a plastic eating organism, there is too much waste plastic in the world, and more is coming by the second.
    We'd actually be a lot better off if we were landfilling much more plastic. There's no shortage of landfill space, and won't be for a thousand years. It's purely a political problem, not a technical one. And plastic in a landfill is sequestered carbon. Much better for that plastic trash to be lying around where there's plenty of room for it, than for it to be eaten and turned into carbon dioxide, which we don't have room for.
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    Default Re: Carbon emissions of solar panels?

    Quote Originally Posted by Chronos View Post
    That depends on the area: "temperate" covers a wide range. Energy usage varies by season, but which way does it vary? Around here (Cleveland), people use much more energy in the winter, because our winters are cold, and our summers are moderate. In the southern US, however, winters are comfortable, but air conditioning is needed in the summer, so more energy is used in the summer. And the places where energy use is higher in the summer tend to be the places that are better suited to solar power to begin with.

    I think it's an all too common mistake to try to find The Solution. Solar isn't The Solution. Nor is wind, nor nuclear, nor any single technology you can think of, because there is no one single solution. The solution is actually a combination of all of the solutions. Build more solar, where it makes sense. Build wind turbines, where they make sense. Increase efficiency everywhere we can. Increase flexibility via smart metering, to mitigate the unpredictability of wind and solar. If you happen to be in one of the few areas where tide power or geothermal is practical, use that too. Continue using fossil fuels where you absolutely must, but mitigate them as much as possible with carbon sequestration elsewhere. And so on.
    Yeah, when winter gets cold, wind power is much better than solar, but less so in the summer (though that depends on the summer I suppose).

    We'd actually be a lot better off if we were landfilling much more plastic. There's no shortage of landfill space, and won't be for a thousand years. It's purely a political problem, not a technical one. And plastic in a landfill is sequestered carbon. Much better for that plastic trash to be lying around where there's plenty of room for it, than for it to be eaten and turned into carbon dioxide, which we don't have room for.
    Until it gets eaten and converted to oil, sugars or methane.

    However, the seas was what I was mainly talking about:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_gyre

    Pollution
    Main articles: Great Pacific garbage patch, Indian Ocean garbage patch, and North Atlantic garbage patch

    Ocean gyres are known to collect pollutants. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch in the central North Pacific Ocean is a gyre of marine debris particles and floating trash halfway between Hawaii and California, and extends over an indeterminate area of widely varying range depending on the degree of plastic concentration used to define it. An estimated 80,000 metric tons of plastic inhabit the patch, totaling 1.8 trillion pieces. 92% of the mass in the patch comes from objects larger than 0.5 centimeters.

    A similar patch of floating plastic debris is found in the Atlantic Ocean, called the North Atlantic garbage patch. The patch is estimated to be hundreds of kilometers across in size, with a density of over 200,000 pieces of debris per square kilometer.
    The end of what Son? The story? There is no end. There's just the point where the storytellers stop talking.

  26. - Top - End - #86
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    Default Re: Carbon emissions of solar panels?

    Quote Originally Posted by Chronos View Post
    We'd actually be a lot better off if we were landfilling much more plastic. There's no shortage of landfill space, and won't be for a thousand years. It's purely a political problem, not a technical one. And plastic in a landfill is sequestered carbon. Much better for that plastic trash to be lying around where there's plenty of room for it, than for it to be eaten and turned into carbon dioxide, which we don't have room for.
    The main issue with plastic isn't that it isn't supposed to go to landfills, it is that it doesn't stay there. I'm not sure if any country actively puts trash in the ocean, though there are plenty of areas that don't do much to stop it from happening. Plastic bags for instance move very easily with wind, so that even if you're no anywhere near an ocean they might end up in a waterway and make their way to the ocean eventually. Or simply wash into the water way as they break down and are washed away as particulate.

    The issue is that a paper straw that is thrown on the side of the road or dropped off a boat or breaks down in a landfill doesn't cause a problem like the plastic does. It is that people being people, aka not properly taking care of their trash, is less of an issue if something other than plastic is being used.

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