Solar Energy: What We Like…What We Don’t.

What We Like…

Free, Abundant, Clean.

The Fuel Is Free, Abundant, and Perfectly Clean. Through nuclear fusion reactions that are taking place a nice, safe distance (93 million miles) from Earth, the sun provides our planet with 6000 times more power than we’re consuming. Though the low latitudes receive more direct sunlight than those closer to the poles, places as far north as Germany and Canada do quite well.

The People’s Power

Distributed Energy: Solar is “The People’s Power.” Solar energy is ideal for deployment at the consumer level, on the rooftops of homeowners, office buildings, etc. This eliminates loss of power in transmission from utilities, while reducing the overall importance of those utilities in our lives.

Diversity, Versatility

Solar Comes in Many Different Types, Each of Which Is Advancing Technologically. There are many different technologies by which the sun’s energy is directly converted to electricity via photovoltaics, some of which have the potential to be extremely easy to install, e.g., thin-film, which can be transparent, and sprayed onto windows.

Correspondence to Human Activity

Good Correspondence To Human Activity, Thus Demand/Load. In dealing with intermittence, solar compares favorably to wind energy. The demand for electricity and the presence of the sun in the sky have a good correlation to one another, minimizing the need for storage. Moreover, solar thermal (or concentrated solar power, often abbreviated “CSP”) lends itself to storage, by capturing the sun’s energy as heat, rather than converting it directly into electricity; heat energy can be stored far less expensively than electrical energy.

Improved Efficiency

Nanotechnology and Quantum Physics to the Rescue. Scientists have made recent breakthroughs in efficiency, in which one photon (particle of energy from the sun) can cause more than one electron to flow in an electrical circuit. This has the potential to double or triple the efficiency of solar panels.

And What We Don’t.

Intermittence

Intermittence. Solar energy is only available when the sun is shining. If we want to use solar to provide power at night, we need to store the energy. Although there is a variety of options for storage, the most obvious is batteries, which are quite expensive.

Low Efficiency

Low Efficiency Means Solar Requires Large Areas of Land. Some of the least expensive forms of solar energy are quite inefficient (in some cases under 10%). This means that large areas of land that could be used for other purposes can be needed to generate the required amount of power.

Scarcity of Materials

No Free Lunch. No form of energy generation is completely free of environmental impact. Solar, for instance, requires large amounts of ultrapure polysilicon, which is becoming scarce, the processing of which has its own ecological impact. Solar thermal uses large amounts of desert land, potentially endangering the desert tortoise and other creatures.