Dr Dan Davies at Solarcentury comments.
Journalist Ben Webster’s story “Solar panels less green than you think say experts” (The Times, December 7th 2016) implied that panels will never repay the energy used to create them. This is not the case. Webster was reporting from a study by researchers at the University of Utrecht, published in Nature, which clearly didn’t state this.
So here are the facts.
Energy is needed to manufacture solar panels. Once the panels are installed on your home, school or local solar farm, they start producing electricity. After a year, they’ve paid back the energy used to manufacture them. From then on, each panel is producing electricity which is totally free of greenhouse gas emissions as well as helping us all to live in a less polluted world.
The study reported in Nature backs this up, stating that because solar is growing in popularity and more is being installed every year, the amount of energy used to create solar panels has been increasing. We are making more and more solar, but each panel will still take only a year to pay back the energy used to make it. The article in the Times misses this point.
We live in a world dependent on fossil fuels and it is universally accepted that we need to transition to cleaner sources of energy. To make that transition, the solar industry and other renewable technologies are using some old-school energy to make the new; but this is only for a reasonably short period of time.
Shell predicts in one energy scenario that by 2100, 37.7% of the world’s energy will come from electricity generated by solar panels. As solar proliferates, it’s only a matter of time before the electricity used to create new solar panels comes from solar itself.
Contrast this with the energy required to build a fossil fuel power station only to generate energy that emits carbon emissions – in perpetuity!
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