Is the Future of Silicon Valley Solar?

Noryungi writes "In this provocative article, Brian McConnell argues that Silicon Valley, instead of staying in the saturated IT field, should apply its resources (including its chip-producing plants) into Solar Power/Renewable energy. Intel branded Solar Panels, anyone?"

Comments

Terrible idea from all sides

[Brett Buck]

First big problem - why is is that Silicon Valley should do this, vice everyone else that already knows how to build solar cells and has been doing so for years? A few years ago, my aerospace company decided to go into the railroad car business, to "bring them in to the 20th century". Well, predictably, companies that have been building railroad cars since the Civil War turned out to know *far* more about it than we did, and our "improvements" were nonsense. This seems like the same sort of arrogance/hubris.

Second, and far more fundamental, *it takes far more energy to make a solar cell than it can ever possibly collect*. So, to build these renewable, "environmentally-friendly" solar cells, results in fantastically *greater* use of fossil fuels (mostly coal) or nuclear plants. And it's not just start-up costs - it's still a net big loser even with the entire life-cycle. The cell degrades before it ever breaks even.

And if you have to build nuke plants to make solar cells, you might as well send the energy directly to the grid and cut out the intermediate process.

I want to help the environment at least as much as anyone, but doing things that are conceptually faulty won't get it done.

Brett