| ▲ | eigenspace 3 hours ago | |
This is such a misleading comparison. The energy used that comes from a solar panel is already in an extremely low-entropy, highly usable form. The energy used from a fossil fuel is highly inefficient and hard to harness. For instance, if you just go by the number of joules in an electric car's battery versus the number of joules in a gasoline car's tank with the same range, you'll see that a 'normal' electric car gets around 15 kWh/100km whereas even a rather efficient gas car needs something more like 50kWh/100km. That's because gas combusion loses gigantic amounts of energy to heat and sound. If you want to talk about 'total energy consumption' and compare solar/wind against fossil fuels, you should count the amount of energy in the sunlight that hits the surface of the solar panel, or the amount of wind energy hitting the turbine blade, rather than the amount of energy they deliver to the grid. | ||