Coal Vs Solar Panel Energy Production

The 550 mw desert sunlight solar farm for example is one of the largest solar power plants in the world with 8 8 million solar panels covering six square miles.

Coal vs solar panel energy production.

Wind is the lowest cost large scale renewable energy source while rooftop solar panels are competitive with retail electricity prices. Even with the increased costs of solar energy it is very difficult to use solar energy to power large regions due to space constraints and weather conditions. The massive turbines that use the steam by boiling water by burning coal and turn that into electricity take energy to make. The study finds that electricity from fossil fuels hydro and bioenergy has significantly higher embodied energy compared to nuclear wind and solar power.

Coal has an efficiency of 33 40 but unlike solar energy it is a nightmare for the environment. For example the study finds that 11 of the energy generated by a coal fired power station is offset by energy needed to build the plant and supply the fuel as the chart below shows. Solar panels are much more efficient today than they were in the past. Although coal is dirtier and more scarce than solar energy it is also much more efficient.

Solar power costs nearly three times as much to produce as coal power. The silicon used to make the vast majority of today s photovoltaic cells is abundant but a silicon based solar cell requires a lot of energy input in its manufacturing process said. In 2018 coal accounted for just 16 of total domestic energy production less than half its share a decade earlier. Over the past decade solar power has experienced the largest percentage growth of any u s.

Utility scale solar uses much more land than a coal power plant since each solar panel needs to face the sun and can t be shaded by other panels. By 2030 the lcoe ranges of both conventional coal and gas technologies as well as wind and large scale solar converge to a common range of a 50 to a 100 per megawatt hour. The amount mined in the first nine months of 2019 540 million tons was about a third lower than in the same period in 2009. Even what s needed to burn coal takes energy.

Like all manufactured objects solar panels are manufactured. The environmental impact it has is incomparable to the harm that coal production causes as well as the detrimental impact it has on our overall health through the fumes that are created when the coal is burned. Production of solar as previously mentioned being a renewable energy source solar power is cleaner and more reliable than coal.