2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: Do you support fracking, or coal? [View all]Recursion
(56,582 posts)What makes you think this is about the cost of energy?
There's X tons of the metals needed to make solar panels already strip mined, and it's not enough to power everybody or even that many more people than are already powered by it. Hell, solar isn't even terribly "renewable" in that sense, because those metals get used up in the process of releasing the energy, and it takes more energy to re-extract them from the waste than the panel gave out to begin with (thermodynamics and all).
It's possible enough of those metals exist on the planet, and that we can strip mine them from wherever they are, but that first off ignores the environmental effects of that extraction, and secondly avoids the question of what to do in the decade it takes to get them dug up, processed into panels, and the grid modernized to accept them.