alt Hacker NewsNo, that's wishful thinking. You can have your own opinion, but not your own facts. Engineers actually calculate all this stuff. EROEI for instance means Energy Returned on Energy Invested. For renewables, its 4. That means under ideal conditions (albino of 1, 20 year lifetime), over the lifetime of the panel you get back 4x the energy that it took to extract the materials, make the panels and install them. So if you site the panel somewhere with an albino of .25 (Spain) you get about as much power out of them as they took to make and install. And that obviously doesn't actually help with AGW.
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bryanlarsen • yesterday at 9:30 PM
A quick Google shows EREOI of solar panels at 10-30 depending on study.
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An of EROI of 4 would probably already include the poor sunlight conditions of Ireland or would be some old numbers based off old solar technology. Plus there's contention around EROI because it does ignore the fact that renewables can be recycled and many are used past their lifetimes, and of course it ignores the negative externalities of spewing the one time use fossil fuels into the atmosphere. There are plenty of studies and papers arguing over EROI and its veracity.