Solar energy is an excellent alternative to coal power. However, it’s a huge investment that requires a calculating mind to achieve stellar savings. Solar panel installation teams can give you a total power savings estimate after installation, but it’s still the actual figures that will give you a full picture.
These huge expenses and other extensive requirements of solar technologies are its major adoption hurdles nowadays.
Available Land
Massive solar panel deployment is excellent news. But, unfortunately, available land for solar energy farms is a major challenge because it’s scarce and expensive to own them.
Governments have alternatives to dedicated solar land farms. For example, they are considering buying spaces from numerous residences for solar power generation.
Compact Solar Panel Technologies
Currently, solar technologies can occupy enormous spaces on roofs. Therefore, property owners with small roofs have to think twice before owning a residential power-generating solar panel set.
Thankfully, compact solar technologies are catching up because it’ll only be a few more years to a decade until we see a breakthrough in compact solar technologies.
Relatively High Costs
High competition between manufacturers and low but recovering demand in the previous decades have lowered solar panel costs. However, solar panels remain too high and expensive for the average citizen.
In the future, much more affordable and compact solutions will highly likely lower manufacturing and purchasing costs.
Science Direct has a great post about solar panel’s positive and negative environmental impacts. Learn more about it below.
Solar photovoltaic (PV) system provides significant social and environmental benefits in comparison to the conventional energy sources, thus contributing to sustainable development. The worldwide PV market installations reached a very high growth in 2011 (27.4 GW). These are encouraging news since electricity generation from PV produces no greenhouse gas emissions and as such provides a clean alternative to fossil fuels, contributes to job creation and economic prosperity even in less developed areas.
However, manufacturing PV modules can have consequences for workers and on the environment throughout their life cycle (from raw material extraction and procurement, to manufacturing, disposal, and/or recycling). Large scale PV deployment also needs land that may not be available, or in competition with other land uses. These potential problems seem to be strong barriers for a further dissemination of PV technologies.
Conventional PV (silicon based) manufacturing processes have roots in the electronics industry, many of the chemicals found in e-waste are also found in solar PV, including lead, brominated flame retardants, cadmium, and chromium. The manufacturing of solar cells involves several toxic, flammable and explosive chemicals. Many of those components suppose a health hazard to workers involved in manufacturing of solar cells.
Solar panels are often in competition with agriculture and can cause soil erosion. The disposal of electronic products is becoming an escalating environmental and health problem in many countries. Recycling of PV panel is currently not economically viable because waste volumes generated are too small; significant volumes of end-of-life photovoltaic panels will begin to appear in 2025 or 2030.
Roper Roofing & Solar continues to provide the best solar panel and roofing installations for your Littleton, CO property. Contact us today to learn more about everything that we can do for you.
