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kscherer
Which way is up?
 
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Boyzeee
 
2021-07-21, 11:53

Honestly, I don't care about the "carbon footprint" stuff. These things all have to be manufactured, most of which happens in China and we Westerners don't have to look at the horrible, ugly eye-sores that come with making it all. Using it does very little, big picture, as far as pollution goes. It looks nice on paper, but the end result is a lot of ugly somewhere.

BUT!

Solar is the future, if we can just figure out how to store the energy without having to dig up large swaths of earth in titanic pit mines that cause more trouble, long-term, than they solve. This stuff is really hard, and it's one of the very few areas where I believe not enough gubmint is happening.

Why isn't PV required on new housing? Why isn't it required on the rooftops of massive warehouses? We require that automobiles reach unachievable standards in unrealistic time-frames, but solar panels on roof-tops? And it's weird that conservatives aren't pushing for this, because they—more than the left—bark about going "off-grid". I mean, you want to talk about getting pushed in the right direction for the sake of your agenda!

Maybe there isn't enough production capacity for all that?

I watched a Wendover Productions video demonstrating that the entire planet could be powered by solar with just an area the size of New Mexico covered in solar panels (it would cost 60 Trillion in paper U.S. dollars, but hey, money is "free", right?). That's a lot of panels! Here in Idaho we have some pretty big solar farms, but they still put the populace at the mercy of for-profit electricity, rather than the generate-your-own-power idea of roof-top solar. You own it, you maintain it, you reap the benefits. Less dams, less reactors, less coal plants, less gas plants, etc., etc., but we still have to figure out how to store enough power to get us through the night, or those other things are still a necessity, if only for half the day — and the easy half, at that.

Africa is beginning to invest heavily in this stuff (with help from Germany and China), but even Morocco—with a multi-billion dollar solar plant—is only covering 1/3 of its paltry energy needs with solar. They have a very long ways to go, and they have nothing but sunlight!

Here in the U.S., we can spend trillions on bombs, trillions on hand-outs, and trillions on other useless fluff, but we can't spend billions on solar-powered houses?

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Last edited by kscherer : 2021-07-21 at 17:00.
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