

10 Myths surrounding solar energy - c4urself
http://solarplaza.com/article/10-myths-surrounding-solar-energy

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sixtofour
Consider that the name of the site is Solarplaza. That said:

"But the payback time for the energy used to produce a solar panel is only one
to two years. This means that in this time the panel generates the total
amount of energy that has been used in its entire production. ... Other
sources of energy have much longer payback times. Specifically, nuclear power
plants have extremely long payback times - so long in fact that it is
questionable whether all the power that generated during their lifetime is
enough to pay for the energy used to build and disassemble them."

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skew
The bit about nuclear power plants is such nonsense I doubt the creditability
of the rest of the article. The highest figure anywhere seems to be about 15
years, from Storm van Leeuwen
<http://www.stormsmith.nl/report20071013/partC.pdf>

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caesarion
"In the summer, almost 10% of the household electricity in the south of
Germany is generated by solar panels."

I don't know a great deal about solar energy, and I was led to believe that it
was a bit hokey or inefficient, but that is a really impressive number. Cool!

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reirob
Very enlightening. I did not know that solar panels can last from 25 to 40
years and that only in 1 to 2 years the produced energy pays off the carbon
footprint needed for producing the panels.

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nextparadigms
This is why I want the public and the Governments to focus on pouring money
into solar energy. The more attention it gets, the better the technology
becomes and the price keeps dropping.

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dennisgorelik
Thank you for the offer, but no.

Government should stay away from innovations. It's not where government is
efficient at.

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nextparadigms
Well, I wasn't exactly implying that Government should be the biggest investor
in these technologies, just that it should support it, and be its main
priority going forward, like writing legislation to help it accelerate, etc.

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dennisgorelik
Partial government involvement into innovation process would limit the damage,
but it still would be damaging. Main priority of the government going forward
should be limiting government expenses. That would be the best thing to
encourage innovation.

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plesn
What about the end of life of solar panels ? Did they manage to build
recyclable ones ?

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reirob
The answer is at the end of the article. The short answeris: that the solar
industrie has processes to recycle 100% all the panels. I agree that it would
be nice to know more about this, especially if the panels are really recycled
- after all having processes is not a gjarantee that they are really applied.

