Expert Article (Final)

 

What If We Could Make the Sun Do Our Bidding?

Pollution? Gross, Get Rid of It

I woke up to the slightest tint of red light peeking through my curtains when I woke up for class at 9:30AM on a Wednesday. “Wait a minute,” I thought to myself, “Shouldn’t the light be brighter at this time?” I got up and decided to let the light in fully, hoping the red light didn’t signal a fire in my own yard. The extended news about the California wildfires was all the danger I needed in my life. Thankfully, there was no fire. But as I drowsily looked out the window, I questioned everything. Why was the light level the same as the brightness of the pre-dawn sky? Had time broken? The sky was completely overcast with a strong red tint. By the time my first class was over at 12PM, the sky was even darker. I learned that the wind had carried smoke and ash from fires from Northern California and Oregon, scattering the sun’s rays above the layer of clouds that typically defines San Franciscan weather.

While I was lucky I didn’t have to breathe in smoke and ash, I couldn’t help but think about how burning coal can have similar effects on the environment and have severely detrimental effects on human health. If a few days of wildfires could almost completely remove the sun from my life for at least a day, what does that mean for long-term burning of coal? Air pollution from coal-fired power plants is linked with asthma, cancer, heart and lung ailments, neurological problems, acid rain, and global warming. (UCS, 2017) This air pollution consists of mercury, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and carbon monoxide, just to name a few. Most of these emissions can be reduced by pollution controls, but many plants don’t have adequate controls installed.

Coal has many environmental impacts, but the most harmful and irreversible one is global warming. Why does global warming matter anyway? Global warming leads to rising sea levels, increased risk of drought, heat waves, intensified storms, and species loss. If this climate change goes on unchecked into the future, it would disrupt humans directly because of drowning coastlines and inhospitable climates. While carbon capture and storage technologies are being developed, they are extremely expensive and at their current scale cannot be proven to significantly impact climate change. Rather than address the symptoms of a disease, it is always better to address the disease itself. This is where solar energy shines. We wouldn’t need to burn coal in the first place and release all those pollutants and chemicals when we could use the sun’s energy to power everything. Compared to carbon capture technologies, solar power investment is significantly cheaper and more viable.

So Where Are All The Solar Panels?

You’d think that with all the benefits that solar energy can provide, we would be seeing solar panels on every home, office, and public building. Clearly, that isn’t the case. The main issue with solar energy is grid infrastructure, which was built to carry fairly consistent levels of energy generation and will struggle to deal with the variability of solar and wind energy. (Mathiesen, 2016) National grids are slowly adapting but the required infrastructure investments are huge and the work is slow. “In Europe, a plan to build a massive solar farm in the Sahara Desert that would provide 15% of Europe’s power by 2050, collapsed because the costs involved in transmission of solar power have not fallen as fast as the costs to build panels.” (Mathiesen, 2016) Along with costs, solar energy production is of course heavily reliant on the availability of the sun. At higher latitudes, solar energy becomes unviable. If we were somehow able to connect every country in the world, surely the sun would be shining somewhere and the problem would be over. However, we are quite far from that kind of ideal situation.

A major aspect that investors look at is the competitiveness of the product they will potentially be investing in. Solar energy is held back by how often it is producing electricity. While a coal power station runs at 70-80% capacity, in northern Europe, solar panel capacity factor is just 15%. (Mathiesen, 2016) This means that solar energy has significantly reduced competitiveness. Another challenge for solar energy is the low prices of fossil fuels. The solar industry would require government subsidies for at least 15 years in order to compete against established fossil fuels technologies. (Mathiesen, 2016)

Our Bright Future

Since solar panels seem so expensive, is it even worth it to invest into solar energy? The long-term answer is yes. On an individual level, installing a solar panel on your home might seem very costly. However, when you go solar, you essentially have a mini power plant that replaces the one where your utility gets its electricity from. (Aggarwal, 2020) If you are a homeowner with high electricity rates from their utility, you would be the one getting the most savings. Cheap solar panels might seem like the best choice for affordability, but investing in higher-quality equipment will mean much higher savings over 20 years. Another sweet incentive is that the federal government offers a 26 percent solar tax credit. This means that 26 percent of what you spent on the solar equipment is removed from your federal taxes. Okay, well what if you don’t live somewhere sunny? Does that mean solar energy won’t be worth it? It turns out that states with less sunlight often have higher electricity costs and better local incentives than other states. (Aggarwal, 2020)

To get a sense of how much solar energy has affected greenhouse emissions, “1.6 billion trees store as much carbon as the emissions reduced by the US solar industry.” (SEIA) While the production of solar panels contributes slightly to greenhouse gas emissions, as with the production of almost all products, the energy produced by them does not contribute one bit. Solar energy is an important part in reducing emissions and achieving climate goals. As well as mitigating our impact on the climate, solar energy contributes to the reliability of the electric grid. An example of the transportation sector slowly beginning its shift to electricity and solar energy instead of gas is the rise in popularity of Tesla and the rise in public buses switching to electricity. So why not hop on the trend? Here’s to a cleaner and more sustainable future.

Works Cited

“Coal and Air Pollution.” Union of Concerned Scientists, www.ucsusa.org/resources/coal-and-air-pollution.

“What Is Holding Back the Growth of Solar Power?” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 31 Jan. 2016, www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2016/jan/31/solar-power-what-is-holding-back-growth-clean-energy.

“Are Solar Panels Really Worth It In 2020?: EnergySage.” Solar News, 18 June 2020, news.energysage.com/are-solar-panels-worth-it/.

“Climate Change.” SEIA, www.seia.org/initiatives/climate-change.