Quote:
Originally Posted by Win1894
The premise that solar is the savior of the planet is irritatingly ignorant. Do the physics. It's not green and it's not renewable. You've been sold a bill of goods. First, where do you think most PV cells come from - China. Second, what are you going to do for power when the sun don't shine or at night? Batteries you say - not possible. The battery capacity would have to be so massive it would shift the Earth's orbit.
So, after the 20 year lifespan of a solar panel, then what? There is no recycling capacity for solar panels, and what about all the heavy metals in the PV cells? When you need a new roof do you really want to pay for your inefficient solar array to be removed and then reinstalled over the new roof, and let's not even get into roof leaks or panels shorting out before their full lifespan. Oh, and did you know that solar panels lose between 1 to 2 percent of their efficiency every year?
So, on a sunny day you have all these panels producing electricity. What are you going to do with the excess capacity since it cannot be stored? then the sun goes down and BOOM now you have to stoke up the coal plant. Not an easy thing to do if you know anything about power generation.
There is only one solution even if you don't believe the dire predictions about global warming/climate change and that is to invest in 4th generation nuclear power run on Thorium (which we have at least a 1000 year supply in the US). It's clean, efficient, incredibly safe, virtually no waste , and non-proliferative. Additionally, its excess power can be used to purify water, and pull carbon dioxide out the the air and reduce it to hydrocarbon fuels - now that's renewable energy!
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Erm - you're wrong. There's really no other way to express that.
Not only can you store solar energy, but most houses in the north that have solar energy, also have the means to store it. They're called solar batteries. They're an actual thing and they exist expressly to store energy collected from solar panels.
Those who don't have batteries, have their solar system hooked up to the utility's company grid, which produces energy for all the customers on the grid. This results in the solar customer receiving a credit from the utility company for any UNused energy, and significantly reduced cost for any energy drawn from the pool.
As for the actual topic: there already is a "green" solar community near the Villages, right in Lady Lake. It's called Green Key Village. The homes aren't just solar-panels on the roofs, they're also amazingly energy-efficient, and advertise that most homes have a net-zero energy expense. In other words, their homes produce more energy to the grid than the average home uses in a year.
The benefit to adding solar to existing homes in the Villages is negligible, since it's very expensive unless you rent, and renting means risky resale value to the home (if the new homeowners don't like it, the solar company has to remove the panels from the roof).
On the other hand, a home that is built WITH solar panels and sold as new construction that way will have a much greater value. Since the average life of solar panels is 20 years (new tech has actually increased it to 25 years), it's very likely that someone will buy a home and move in to the Villages, and remain in that home for the entire lifespan of the panels.
Compare to a roof - which has to be replaced every 10-15 years. Do you not put a roof on your house because it'll need to be replaced and whatever shall we do with all that wasted destroyed useless old roof? No of course not. We buy homes with roofs, and replace the roofs every 10-15 years. And the old roofing is discarded into landfills.
That's another downside to solar panels though - if they outlive the roof they're connected to, you have to deal with removal and replacement of the panels. Most roofing companies don't offer that service.