I contend:As far as the solar panels causing global warming I'll try to explain. If you put a black panel on the ground or on your house and don't connect it to anything, it will absorb solar energy (heat) during daylight and release it at night (radiation). The net heat gain is zero. If you hook up a solar panel in the same place but hook it up to batteries, charge the batteries during sunlight hours and using that energy to electrically heat the home at night. The panels will absorb solar energy during the day but will convert that to electrical energy in the batteries instead of radiating it back into space at night. The result is a net gain in earth's temperature.Right or wrong?
As far as it goes, you're right: putting up a big black object increases the total amount of energy absorbed from the sun. But that's only part of the story. If you didn't put up the solar panel, the same radiation would hit the earth. The earth already absorbs 2/3 or so of the energy that comes in (albedo .30), so adding even a perfectly black object increases it only by 50%. But it's not even that much, because most of the extra energy absorbed is converted into electricity. Solar panels are about 0-5% efficient, so half of the extra energy is turned into electricity rather than heat. Eventually it's put to use and turned into heat, but that heat was going to come from somewhere else anyway. (Even if it's just powering your DVD player, it turns into heat just the same as if you were using it to heat your house.) If you dig up a gallon of petroleum or fission a microgram of uranium, that's heat introduced into the earth's atmosphere. And these processes are inefficient: between generation and transmission you lose about 75% of the energy, meaning you've introduced 4 times as much energy into the atmosphere as you've actually used. So with a solar panel, you add extra heat to the earth by about 25% of incoming solar radiation, but you've offset external costs by about 45% of incoming solar radiation. The net effect is to cool the earth. And that assumes that the solar panel itself is perfectly black, which isn't the case. Real commercial solar panels have an albedo of about .35, which makes them more reflective than dirt and considerably more reflective than asphalt shingles, which have .03 albedo. In other words, even if you didn't actually use the solar panels for electricity, they'd be cooling the earth just by reflecting energy back into space more than your regular shingles.
Solar energy is very inefficient, and so most of the sunlight that is absorbed by the solar cells is re-radiated back as heat. But that leads to a bigger point. Global warming is the ability, or inability of the Earth to radiate heat/light out past the atmosphere into space. Once the light reaches the surface and is absorbed, it doesn't matter whether it was by a black panel or a solar panel. Energy is energy. A black panel does not radiate energy into space, it emits it into the atmosphere. The use of electrical energy also generates heat which is transferred to the atmosphere sooner or later. The advertised culprit of global warming is atmospheric greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, that reflect infrared wavelength energy from the surface back down to the surface. The heat generated by sunlight on a black panel, or from the use of electrical energy, is reflected back by the greenhouse gases instead of radiating out into space, no matter what the source. So no, solar panels do not contribute to global warning simply because of their transfer of light into electricity instead of infrared/heat. The source of the heat (black panel or electrical use) is not the (whole) problem. It is the greenhouse gases that trap the heat that is the problem, according to the global warming theory. I hope this helps.
If you put a black panel on the ground or on your house and don't connect it to anything, it will absorb solar energy (heat) during daylight and release it at night (radiation). Not exactly. Assuming the black panel establishes an equilibrium temperature, it's going to be losing exactly as much heat as it's receiving during the day. Some will radiate out into space, some will conduct or convect into the atmosphere. As a wild guess, maybe 50/50. If you hook up a solar panel in the same place but hook it up to batteries, charge the batteries during sunlight hours and using that energy to electrically heat the home at night. The panels will absorb solar energy during the day but will convert that to electrical energy in the batteries instead of radiating it back into space at night. The panels are only about 4% efficient, so it's the same situation as the pure black panel for 86% of the energy. The remaining 4% will get stored in the batteries and then converted to heat at night. That heat will eventually leak out of the house and warm up the Earth a tiny bit. I think it's much the same situation either way. With the black panel the energy gets radiated / conducted/convected right away. With the solar panel a small percentage is stored and not so much is radiated, mostly conducted and convected. You're partly right as a black panel is going to radiate more into space than a house. But you're taking about maybe some day about 4% of % of the differening radiation/convection/conduction fraction, of the Earth's surface area. Probably not significant.
Third Law of Thermodynamics (in normal speak): “Not only can you never get ahead, you can’t even break even.” This is a truism that applies to all activities involving energy exchange (and almost everything else as well). Energy in the form of solar radiation falls on the earth. That energy is absorbed by the planet (everything) and heat results. Some portion of that energy is lost in the absorption process and the net released as heat is less than that absorbed from the sun. This is true in all cases. Solar panels, both photovoltaic and heat collectors are subject to the Third Law and they all lose some of the radiant energy striking them in the process of converting that energy into either hot water (or whatever fluid) or electrical energy. Regardless of the process there is always a net loss of energy. The time delay you mention has no bearing on the total heat gain or loss for the planet. In fact the “solar panel effect” reduces the net energy put back into the ecosystem because it introduces another iteration of energy loss through conversion. The Holy Grail of energy conservation it the ability to use, store or recover the entire amount of energy produced regardless of the source of that energy, burning hydrocarbons, geothermal heat exchange, solar radiation, mice on treadmills …..all forms of energy suffer a net loss in any exchange! If we could avoid that loss we could dramatically reduce the heat lost into the atmosphere or ground water and our net energy gain would also be dramatic! Check out the super cooled circuits in use to reduce resistance in sophisticated electronic equipment for a good example of the energy savings. (Of course the savings do not account for energy lost in the cooling process. In any event NO….. solar panels do not contribute to global warming via their operation. (Their manufacture is another story altogether!)
One piece of technology: Hydro-energy storage. Pump water up to an artificial lake at the top of a mountain to store energy, and then let the water run down through turbines to retrieve the energy later, eliminating most or all of the need for batteries. Usually this stuff saying renewables suck is BS when you actually try. Yet another method, are solar power towers which last longer than solar panels and continue to generate energy at night. While a non-universal storage method, it's good for storing the sun's energy in the mechanism that generates the power. According to some studies, they are the best option next to wind turbines. I'll describe a particular model. A field of mirrors beams light to a part of the tower which contains salt, for it's incredible heat storage capacity when molten. In turn, the heat from that region heats water which spins some turbines, generating lots of energy. Currently, the best models continue to generate electricity at night and for a few consecutive cloudy days. I think whoever was saying that was probably trying to delay response. There are too many ways around that to be true, and saying that it contributes more to Global Warming than fossil fuels is a lie. This is why some government intervention is needed: The companies aren't responding to new ideas, and they happen to often be fossil fuel companies as well. If you don't create the environment where it lowers fossil fuel consumption, then they win because prices stay high.
