went to a cool community run workshop on solar panels the other day in a different part of cali when phoenix was up and i asked good questions so i got a cool portable solar charging thing. it was mostly stuff i already knew but getting clarification on some electrical stuff i forgot about from nuke school was nice. one of the guys there ended up making the point that "there's no such thing as alternative energy" and started talking about how the energy that goes into making panels and other stuff exceeds the energy you get out of them and talked about the other environmental effects from the extraction involved and it's so fucked up that i can like count on one hand the number of twitter communists whose egos allow them to comprehend that really basic fact because most of them are just authoritarian technocrats
@ZiaNitori well it doesn't exceed the energy you get out from the solar panels. generally it takes somewhere between 1-4 years for there to be a break even point strictly in terms of energy
@fauxlosopher how are they measuring that energy? cause i'm not even sure how you could measure that esp when you get to the reproduction of the labourers