Basically I couldn't care less how many solar roofs are built in California. It would seem to me that every solar roof - they cost more than Hummers - that is put on a California roof is preferable to the other yuppie toys that might have been funded by lazy people with too much money, since unlike most yuppie toys that consume energy, solar roof yuppie toys produce energy, however marginally so.
One might ask, if one has a sense of scale and is not quantitatively lobotomized - this would exclude the membership of Greenpeace - how much carbon dioxide a 5000 kilo"watt" solar PV system will save - where the quotation around the word "watt" refers to the fact that the "solar will save us" crowd always reports peak power in their marketing, conveniently and consistently ignoring that the capacity utilization of solar cells is about 20% in most places, if the owner is lucky.
Let's calculate. Suppose one has a 5000
watt" solar toy on one's roof. There are 31,557,600 seconds, more or less, in a sideral year meaning that a continously operated power system that runs 100% at peak - even at night - produces about 160 billion joules of energy. Since the solar system operates so as to produce only 20% of this idealized capacity, the actual number produced by the putative solar cell is 31 billion joules. A gallon of gasoline - a convenient reference for most Americans - contains about gallon of gasoline, meaning that a 5000 "watt" solar system will produce as much energy as about 239 gallons of gasoline. Each gallon of gasoline that is burned, in turn, will produce as a rule of thumb, about 8 kg of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide. This translates into about 2 tons of carbon dioxide per year.
The link shows that for natural gas - which is the fuel actually displaced by solar toys - the actual carbon dioxide displaced - not counting the carbon dioxide invested in manufacturing, hauling and installing the solar toy - is about 1.7 tons per year.
By contrast, a single redwood tree can contains about 200 metric tons of carbon.
Thus a 5000 watt solar toy would need to operate a century to account for the carbon in a single tree. The number of solar cells that will operate that long is zero.
Now let's get to the good part.
Fundies in California, apparently, have outlawed shade.
In a case with statewide significance, the Santa Clara County District Attorney's office cited a Sunnyvale couple under a little-known California law because redwood trees in their backyard cast a shadow over their neighbor's solar panels.
Richard Treanor and Carolynn Bissett own a Toyota Prius hybrid vehicle and consider themselves environmentalists. But they refuse to cut down any of the trees behind their house on Benton Street, saying they've done nothing wrong.
"We're just living here in peace. We want to be left alone," said Bissett, who with her husband has spent $25,000 defending themselves against criminal charges. "We support solar power, but we thought common sense would prevail."
Their neighbor Mark Vargas considers himself an environmentalist too. His
10-kilowatt solar system that he installed in 2001 is so big he pays only about $60 a year in electrical bills, he said. He drives an electric car.
(This is a 10,000 watt solar system apparently - and would need to operate for 50 years to equal one tree.)
If I wasn't crying, I'd be, as they say, rolling on the floor laughing.
One may wonder, of course, what the fuck a bunch of McMansions occupied by competing "environmentalists" are doing in a redwood forest, but that's none of my damn business, I guess.
The link to my fundie anti-nuke source for this article is here.
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