A little something for techies and wokiez

If you're a typical kid, seeing your first solar cell running something is pretty magical.  "Wow, no batteries!  Free energy!  This is SO cool!"

Once you've see it work it's not much of a stretch for people to buy into the idea that we could power the whole country without producing supposedly-deadly CO2, just by installiing a few hundred square miles of solar panels!  Easy-peasy.

Even better, the greenies who push renewables tell ya solar cells are made mainly from silicon, which is the main ingredient in sand.  And the planet has more than enough sand to last forever!  Yay!

I totally get all that, cuz I was the same way as a kid.  Then I got an engineering degree and started to do some research.  And very quickly you run up against some big problems.  First is the obvious: they only produce "rated output" in direct sun, so on cloudy days and at night, problem.

That's bad enough, and the second problem is just as bad: As noted, the main component of solar cells is silicon, which is, in fact, the major component of sand.  Problem is, to work, solar cells require the silicon to be extremely pure.  That requires melting it, doing some chemical magic and then cooling it very slowly.

Unfortunately sand is NOT pure silicon, but is a compound called silica, SiO2, which is quartz. Which has a melting point of 4,000 F.  So melting batches of it and cooling it very slowly takes a staggering amount of energy.  And it turns out that because solar cells don't produce much power per square foot the amount of CO2 produced to make the heat needed to melt the quartz is more than the CO2 *avoided* by the electricity made by the cell over its entire life.

And decades of research have shown that we're not likely to get much improvement in efficiency, so that fundamental barrier isn't likely to yield.

SO...unless we can find a way to make solar cells without having to melt and purify silicon, solar cells aren't gonna reduce CO2 at all.  All we'd be doing is producing more CO2 today to cut it by a smaller amount in the future.

"Wait...we keep seeing these ads showing thousands of acres of solar panels built by huge utility companies!  Those big companies have smart engineers and economists working for 'em, so if solar cells don't actually cut CO2, why would a giant utility pay to install 'em?"

Great question.  And you already know the answer:  their execs are "woke," so they want to look virtuous to the Left--cuz if the Left thinks you're not bending the knee to 'em, you end up with transformers shot out, coal trains derailed and protesters outside your headquarters.

Unfortunately, even though solar cells don't reduce CO2, wokie laws ORDERING a certain percentage of a utility's electricity to come from "renewables," along with billion-dollar incentives in the tax laws, will ensure that they'll keep being made.  And in 30 years when none of the Leftist/commie/warmie predictions have come true, they'll claim that the reason was that they forced utilities to install gazillions of acres of solar cells.

Count on it.