For the smaller government crowd, there’s another advantage to solar power: less regulation. After all, the sun delivers its energy in a form which, at this distance, we can easily withstand with little damage, and collecting it, in the current forms of solar collection, has little impact on the environment. Oil, the medium of energy in our legacy power system, is a messy, dangerous substance to collect, transport, and refine.
Naturally, there are questions concerning the equipment used to collect solar power, as National Geographic pursued last year:
… researchers say it’s difficult to get quality data across solar panel markets. The numbers available on the environmental impact of solar panel manufacturing in China are “quite different from those in the U.S. or in Europe,” said Fengqi You, assistant professor of engineering at Northwestern University and a co-author of the May study. “It is a very complicated problem.”
The SVTC [Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition] hopes that pushing for more transparency now will lead to better practices later. “It’s a new industry,” said Davis. If companies adopt sustainable practices early on, she said, “then maybe over the next 10 or 15 years-as these panels begin to come down, the first wave of them, and we’re beginning to recycle them-the new panels that are on the market are zero waste.”
But there need not be any regulation of solar collection itself; local collection and use suggests little impact on the grid, so no regulation there as well. We may find that articles such as this one from Treehugger.com become an endangered species – as demand drops, fewer dangerous wells will require drilling, and so the relative cost of regulation on our energy supply will drop some more.
The libertarians should be loving it.
