At least personally and anecdotally, because it doesn’t happen often, but it has happened more than once, that I have purchased electricity at negative prices due to overflow from renewables, which is a hell of lot cheaper than paying a tenth of a cent per kilowatt hour.
and with solar, most of the hardware can be recycled now into new units; with a 20 year lifespan, that’s going to pull thousands of kilowatts out of the sky, that’ll do just fine.
My main thing with solar is I wish they’d put panels over existing parking lots or large buildings. This is a thing that is already done in some places, this is a solved engineering problem, but in my area anywhere a solar farm has sprung up it’s been a field that previously either grew crops or was undeveloped woods. And I know the reason someone’s going to come back with: To install solar awnings over an existing Wal Mart parking lot, you need to tear up the asphalt to install power lines, build the actual structure, permitting is probably more expensive, and you have to have some or all of the parking lot down for awhile during construction restricting the use of the store. Meanwhile, clear cut 10 acres of forest and you get lumber to sell to a paper mill.
I guess renewables are still cheaper.
At least personally and anecdotally, because it doesn’t happen often, but it has happened more than once, that I have purchased electricity at negative prices due to overflow from renewables, which is a hell of lot cheaper than paying a tenth of a cent per kilowatt hour.
no radioactive waste to deal with either.
and with solar, most of the hardware can be recycled now into new units; with a 20 year lifespan, that’s going to pull thousands of kilowatts out of the sky, that’ll do just fine.
https://www.pv-tech.org/a-billion-dollar-industry-inside-the-growing-solar-panel-recycling-sector-in-the-us/
My main thing with solar is I wish they’d put panels over existing parking lots or large buildings. This is a thing that is already done in some places, this is a solved engineering problem, but in my area anywhere a solar farm has sprung up it’s been a field that previously either grew crops or was undeveloped woods. And I know the reason someone’s going to come back with: To install solar awnings over an existing Wal Mart parking lot, you need to tear up the asphalt to install power lines, build the actual structure, permitting is probably more expensive, and you have to have some or all of the parking lot down for awhile during construction restricting the use of the store. Meanwhile, clear cut 10 acres of forest and you get lumber to sell to a paper mill.