Solarpunk technology

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Truly sustainable solar panels (solar.lowtechmagazine.com)

submitted 11 months ago by ecoelectrify to c/technology

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Solar panels have always bothered me because they require such intense manufacturing and usage of scarce resources. TLDR of article: "Many people will argue that if low-tech solar panels are less efficient, we would need more solar panels to produce the same power output. Consequently, the resources saved by low-tech production methods would be compensated by the extra resources to build more solar panels. However, efficiency is only crucial when we take energy demand for granted, sacrificing some efficiency may gain us a lot in sustainability."

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[–] MrMakabar 5 points 11 months ago (1 children)

The problem is that solar has to replace fossil fuels, instead of being additional to fossil fuels. That is not going to work on a global scale, if we continue to use more and more energy to have a fast growing economy. At least the wealthy countries have to stop growing energy consumption and even lower it, to make it possible in a reasonable timeframe to go to net zero.

Long term we have enough of it, since solar panels last a long time and sunlight is basicly limitless. However that is long term. Short to mid term it is limited by the number of panels we have.

[–] iraq_lobster 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

also passive carbon sequestration is needed, aka forestation: actively trying to sequestrate carbon is stupid. depopulation is also needed, and GDP's is to be lowered too