you simply can't say this. despite the lobby against it, solar and wind energy have lifespans of around 20 years and afterwards, it's a freaking mess to deal with recycling and often times, garbage we don't know what to do. not even counting the amount of NASTY chemicals going into the production of solar panels. these are sometimes permanent and will have a great long term impact on ecology if we just start destroying plants to substitute with "green" alternatives mindlessly
one can also make a point that despite wind generators metals and batteries being almost to 100% recyclable, it's heck expensive to do and we don't have infrastructure. a comparison cosidering everything involved may show that hydroelectrics, nuclear, geo-thermal and heck even gas may have a similar or better impact depending on location
And having to do all that continuously, every day, for the life of the plant.
In every single solution you can point out problems. Complaining that "X isn't perfect" is the easiest and laziest thing in the world to do. Assessing the ACTUAL costs and damages IN PROPORTION is more difficult, but actually yields good results.
Similar effects can also be created in currently wild areas that does NOT disrupt the ecosystem, but augments it. For starters, in very dry areas which are ideal for solar deployment, the typical constraint on the ecosystem is lack of shade and moisture preservation, which is mitigated by solar deployment
There are also VAST areas of already populated or in-use areas that are ripe for deployment of solar panels, rooftops, parking areas, canals, reservoirs, and more, and ALL of them are a net improvement with solar panels
So, nobody is stripping anything from the earth, and there is no continuous transportation of materials to set them on fire. The fact that it is already CHEAPER to produce electricity by tearing down a coal plant and installing the same solar capacity shows how crazy it is.
Just because something was the best way we had to do something three technology generations ago does not mean it is still best, or even viable or recommended. Stunning to see such unscientific backwards attitudes on a site focused on science and technology.
https://apnews.com/article/sheep-solar-texas-climate-333e721...
https://www.nrel.gov/news/detail/features/2025/solar-panels-...
Certainly more so than, say, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hambach_surface_mine.
no one here typed that photovoltaics shouldn't be on play. but the way it's being paraphrase, feels like a panacea. the OP telling other skeptical opinions against mass substitution to photovoltaics is 'a shame on a tech oriented forum' probably don't even know that regulations and deals of these ballparks have a bunch of regulamentations and considerations that even needs to look for the security/reliability of the grid agaisnt (cyber)terrorism and war...
they then bring a cute little article of people producing tomatoes under laboratory settings being shaded by solar panels. we are chatting about mass production and distribution of energy. if you think it's economically viable to dismantle coal stations and substitute them for solar only shows ignorancy from a multitude of fields... as if energy was easy as comparing output of CO2/$ per watt produced! they even were ironic agaisnt (underdeveloped yet more sane than photovoltaics in the long-term for a vast majority of cases) nuclear technology :D we may shall dismiss the discussion of hooking up batteries on wind/solar, as current prices don't make recycling (batteries) any sense in a large scale that will be decentralized due the geo-location of wind/solar requirements. or do you think transporting these batteries to be recycled in specific areas is just a matter of building cargo-drones powered by solar energy and AI vision? we may also dismiss ecology on the amount of area and damaged species by exchanging any power plant to wind/solar because it's cheap. even group of populations agaisnt visual pollution coming from wind turbines, for example. we also should dismiss the amount of thrash burried by thousands and thousands of multi kilo tons wind turbines after 25 years etc. /s
Every single claim above is at best massively outdated and/or outright wrong and disproved (and no, I won't go do your research for you and find cites for everything).
So, start from the bottom:
>> thrash burried .. multi kilo tons wind turbines
not sure if you mean buried or burned, but wind turbines are already being recycled and reused in bulk, and that is ramping up (and also offtopic from solar)
>> visual pollution coming from wind turbines
Again offtopic, and also purely a matter of taste; it doesn't affect anything
>> transporting these batteries to be recycled in specific areas is just a matter of building cargo-drones powered by solar energy and AI vision
Nice strawman argument from something I never said, and no, there are plenty of other perfectly good transport methods. And yes, recycling batteries is already becoming good business and a great feedstock for 'mining' the materials, and no it does not need to be a big deal, and siting the 'mining' facilities for recycling/recovery is vastly more flexible than siting mining for coal which is obviously necessary wherever the coal happened to form 100 million years ago.
>> they even were ironic agaisnt nuclear technology
Again, a strawman argument, as I never said I was against nuclear tech, and I am in fact for the new forms of nuclear tech, particularly the smaller even portable reactors ('tho the promise of Thorium reactors seems to have faded, but I'm not sure why).
>> if you think it's economically viable to dismantle coal stations and substitute them for solar
Again, only citing multiple studies showing that, and again, you entirely miss the point, which is not that you'd necessarily do it in every case, but that the point of coal being even the economical option has long passed, nevermind the environmental catastrophe it creates.
>> cute little article of people producing tomatoes under laboratory settings
tomatoes aren't the only thing being produced in conjunction with solar panels, and there are so many projects and studies showing its effectiveness in both improving results for farmers and improving their financial stability that it has a name: "agrivoltaics". Instead of spending your energy scoffing at things you obviously know nothing about, perhaps go read up on it and learn something.
>> security/reliability of the grid agaisnt (cyber)terrorism and war
If you want security and reliability, the best thing is widely dispersed power generation as close as possible to the use location. I have advocated for decades that a DOD project like the US Interstate Highway System should be done to ensure every household had a minimum amount of solar self-generation capacity, and stockpile transformers which have a manufacturing lead time of years. A nationwide grid outage without this is a potentially civilization-collapsing event, whereas if every household had some baseline capacity, they can still refrigerate food and communicate. Obviously just a cutout example, but the principle of diversity of power sources and locations makes a more robust system. Only bad grid planning makes solar or wind anything other than an improvement in grid reliability.
Moreover, battery tech is now sufficiently cheap that even the net cost of installing solar+batteries is lower than fossil plants, and that combination has better stability and millisecond-response rates that massively stabilize the grid (vs. ramp-up times measured in minutes-hours for gas plants and days for coal/nuclear).
>>a shame on a tech oriented forum
It is not the discussion of other options, but the disproportionate dismissal and spurious arguments that is a shame here. I'm sure there might be some exceptional situation where a new coal plant might actually be better all things considered, and if you have an actual example to discuss then bring some fats, but overall, that ship has sailed.
with agrivoataiagain, there are hundreds of article
I love that this is followed by “so go nuclear!”
then you can move on and judge what't the panorama of closed/paywalled science found out there (Nature) that evaluates impacts of solar panel not even considering numbers of last batches of thrash from ~ 2010 (which still have 10-15 years till they start filling the world with chemicals like lead)... then may dive into electricity security and distribution and recycling technology to bring up a single ignorant phrase comment downsizing nuclear generation, despite it being safer and ecological on the long-term compared to photovoltaics in LOTS of places, for example
