It’s Not Easy Being Green

Kermit the Frog told us decades ago that it wasn’t easy being green.  We’re only now starting to understand.  Coal is thought to have first been used for heat in Northern China 4,000 years ago.  This special rock could burn like a log, providing warmth in a cold part of the globe and likely the first time humans used fossil fuel.  Fast forward through various industrial revolutions, and we find ourselves trying to reduce the consumption of fossil fuels because of their environmental impact.

These dirty forms of energy are being replaced by various green substitutes.  Seems easy enough, right?  Well, it isn’t that simple.  As it turns out, going green has some dirty secrets of its own.  In their finished form, solar panels don’t emit carbon dioxide while generating electricity like burning fossil fuels does.  But it sure takes a lot of energy to make them in the first place.  Silicon is the primary material in solar panels.  Despite being the second-most common element on earth (you can find it at the beach), before panels can be molded, it must be mined, transported, melted and purified.  At 2577 °F, silicon’s melting point is just 255°F cooler than that of iron.  Heat this hot takes lots of energy to produce, and fossil fuels are often the source of that energy.

All the power used to create solar panels is hardly a reason to turn our back on the process, however.  This technology starts with a deficit in carbon emissions because of the energy required to manufacture the cells.  But according to this article from the New Scientist, the time it takes to pay back the emissions is about 18 months.  Of course, there will be considerable time and energy required to more fully build out this infrastructure.

Green may not be a very exciting color.  Kermit will tell you here.  It is, though, a color requiring an industrial process to create.  Being neither blue nor red, it will probably also require some compromise from our nation’s leaders to update the energy distribution grid.  And along the way, many greenbacks are likely to be made and/or saved.  If American can do well, other countries might turn a shade of it with envy.