In fairness, a typical PV cell is somewhere around 20% efficient at converting solar energy into electricity with the rest lost to heat. The article mentions that renewables are not perfectly efficient either but that their losses do not contribute pollution, making the losses less egregious. I guess the conclusion to draw from this is that if you must burn coal, you should look seriously at cogeneration schemes where you use that heat directly for other purposes such as industrial processes or even municipal heating to get the most out of the energy.
That’s ok; that sunlight would have hit the earth anyways. Solar installations are optimized for minimizing price per kwh, not for optimizing use of solar energy.
In fairness, a typical PV cell is somewhere around 20% efficient at converting solar energy into electricity with the rest lost to heat. The article mentions that renewables are not perfectly efficient either but that their losses do not contribute pollution, making the losses less egregious. I guess the conclusion to draw from this is that if you must burn coal, you should look seriously at cogeneration schemes where you use that heat directly for other purposes such as industrial processes or even municipal heating to get the most out of the energy.
That’s ok; that sunlight would have hit the earth anyways. Solar installations are optimized for minimizing price per kwh, not for optimizing use of solar energy.