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131 points mg | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.242s | source
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briga ◴[] No.26597549[source]
This is good to hear. I assume location must play a large part in this? Solar must be more cost-effective in, say, the Mojave desert, than it is in Alaska.

I sometimes wonder if the widespread adoption of solar is going to have an environmental impact that isn't immediately apparent. Every solar panel you put on the ground is going to take up solar energy that could otherwise be absorbed by a plant, which in turn means that plant can't absorb carbon from the atmosphere. So unless we just limit ourselves to rooftop solar panels there's sure to be some sort of environmental impact if we just switch all our energy to solar.

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1. Someone ◴[] No.26597844[source]
https://news.mit.edu/2011/energy-scale-part3-1026:

“A total of 173,000 terawatts (trillions of watts) of solar energy strikes the Earth continuously. That's more than 10,000 times the world's total energy use“

That article is from 2011, but I think it’s a very safe bet that factor is still more than 1,000 today.

Also, I would think about every solar panel you put on the ground reflects less energy into space than the ground did.