Many homeowners and businesses are proud of their solar panel system's benefits. Should you invest your money and disconnect yourself from your local energy source? Let's look at the existing benefits of today's solar panel technologies
Energy Sharing and Decarbonization
Solar panels enable homes and businesses to reduce their carbon footprint and create a healthier environment. With solar energy powering homes, it reduces strain on fossil fuel power plants and helps reduce global warming's effects.
An Independent Energy Provider
You become independent of any local power company's bills if you have solar panels powering the lights and appliances. With high-quality energy storage systems continuously improving, many homeowners with panels are bound to become independent energy providers. Sturdy solar panel constructions ensure homeowners their panels stay intact and generate power even during extreme weather conditions.
Improved Efficiency and Savings
Natural gas and oil prices continue to rise as sources dwindle globally. The power of the sun, which can generate solar energy for centuries to come, won't be reduced anytime soon. With these forecasts, having an independent solar energy system will save money and power your home.
Of course, solar power is not without its issues. The technology faces many challenges in resources, adoption, and disposal. Dezeen has an extensive write-up on the challenges facing solar technology and energy. Read more about it below.
Intermittency
The major appeal of fossil fuels is that they can be burned to produce energy on demand. For solar, energy can obviously only be generated when the sun is shining – but people need power at any time.
That gives rise to issues with storage and connectivity that are discussed below.
However, as postdoctoral researcher in solar physics at the University of Liverpool Theo Hobson points out, it is possible to mitigate the issue with proper planning.
Solar panels need a good supply of sunshine to generate energy efficiently
"While solar is intermittent, it's at least still pretty predictable," he told Dezeen. "The day-night cycle and seasonal changes make the biggest difference to power output, with unpredictable variations being relatively small by comparison."
"This means that while intermittency is still a challenge, it is possible to plan power management and infrastructure around the predictable aspects of solar power."
Storage
Because of the intermittency of solar power, very large amounts of energy storage are needed to make full use of it – so that electricity can be produced when conditions are sunny and then used when it's dark or cloudy.
Usually, that means batteries. But these come with their own issues as they tend to require vast quantities of lithium, an element that is in high demand with the rise of electric vehicles (EVs) and which is associated with a polluting and dangerous mining industry.
"The design industry needs to imagine a world where we use less energy, full stop"
To help deal with this issue, Hobson suggests it should be possible to use the battery in the EV parked outside your house to store electricity generated by solar panels on your rooftop for later use.
Other energy storage options are on the horizon, particularly electrolysed hydrogen where large amounts of research is taking place, but these are not yet practical.
Connectivity
While fossil fuels can be burned anywhere, solar power is best generated where it is sunniest.
Ideally, large solar farms spread across sparsely populated, very sunny areas like the deserts of the southwestern United States would be combined with vast cabling infrastructure to transport the energy generated to, for instance, big cities in the much colder northeast of the country.
But building that infrastructure would be a huge undertaking, particularly as it would need to pass across privately owned land, explains solar designer and technologist Alex Nathanson.
Vast amounts of infrastructure could be needed to transport solar power to where it is needed
"In the US our biggest issue is distribution," he told Dezeen. "It's very hard to do new electricity distribution orders because it's hard to get that land allocated, there are tons and tons of challenges with that."
"I suspect that at some point in 20 years that'll get solved but it is a harder, farther-out horizon," Nathanson added. "There may be solutions like increasing the complexity of our electrical grids so it's not necessarily the case that it would need to go from one side of the country to the other, but this is more complex than saying technically we have the solar energy to power everything."
Part of the workaround to the intermittency of solar energy and the associated storage and connectivity challenges will inevitably involve supplementary power from other sources such as wind.
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