I understand that solar power is wonderful and great but i’m in debate and we’re arguing alternate energy. i need negative information on solar panels. help!
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{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
It takes a long time for its individual production energy to outwiegh its own energy and materials it takes to make it.
Solar panels are expensive and inefficient at the moment but are improving. Solar panels are good as an edition to alternative energy but no good for solely alternative supply.
- Huge initial investment.
- Sun doesn’t always shine.
- Panels can be unsightly and take up a large amount of room.
- Efficiency is still quite low. Newer techs should fix this.
- The raw materials are rare-ish and require polluting manufacturing processes.
All that being said, I’m just giving you Devil’s advocate answers. I fully support solar and think that it’s our best chance for a low-impact alternative fuel.
They’re unsightly, a lot of Property Owners Associations won’t allow them, feeling they detract from appearances.
At this point they’re still too expensive to ever pay for themselves over their lifetime without major tax incentives.
They’re susceptible to storm damage unless you use the peel and stick kind.
They’re prone to theft.
They don’t work at night when people are actually home, so unless you feed back into the grid or store excess energy in a lot of batteries, you’re still going to pay to run your house at night.
They can’t compare to geothermal or wind power in terms of efficiency.
I asked a local solar company to give me a quotation on some roof top solar panels. To make a long story short, their bid was $ 11,000 to install a setup which would make less than 6 kWh (kilowatt hours) of electricity on an average day. At the highest electric rate I know, that’s worth less than $ 1.80 per day. If you just treat the panels as an investment, it’s a very poor one.
I personally believe that “going green” should have some benefits which are also green – as in the color of money. That is, we should choose ways to “go green” which save energy and (thus) money. I concluded that there were more efficient uses of $ 11,000 – like buying double pane windows, replacing an inefficient refrigerator, adding insulation to a crawl space, etc.