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Environmental Impact

Ever wonder whether one family's choice to use solar energy really makes a difference to the world? Here's a simple way to estimate just how impactful your decision to go solar could be. Just enter the number of years you want to estimate on. Environmental calculations provided by AstroPower. See note below.

Enter Number of Years to Calculate --->  
BARRELS OF OIL OFFSET BY YOUR SYSTEM
The number of barrels of oil required to generate the same amount of electricity that your system will produce in this period.
CAR MILES NOT DRIVEN, LIFETIME
Using electricity generated from fossil fuels and driving cars are the two personal activities that have the most significant environmental impact. You can compare the amount of pollution generated by driving a car to that prevented by using solar electricity as another measure of the environmental benefits of solar.
ACID RAIN EMISSIONS REDUCTION, lbs
Generating electricity from fossil fuels also releases Sulfur Oxides and Nitrogen Oxides, primary causes of acid rain, into the air. Acid rain damages lakes, streams, trees and forest soils.
SMOG EMISSIONS REDUCTION, lbs
Nitrogen Oxides are a key contributor to the formation of ground level ozone, a major component of smog. Ozone irritates the eyes, and aggravates respiratory problems. It is our most widespread and intractable urban air pollution problem.
GREENHOUSE GAS REDUCTION, lbs
Carbon dioxide, along with other 'greenhouse gases', causes global warming. This results in increased rainfall and violent storms, decreased snow and ice cover, and rising sea levels.
EQUIVALENT NUMBER OF MATURE TREES PLANTED
Trees remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and many environmentalists advocate tree planting as a way to offset carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere.
Automatic recalculation 

Note: System Performance – The cost savings values presented were developed using the best available “real world” factors that influence system performance. However any particular installation performance cannot be guaranteed to match performance measures stated and may vary. Data sources: Emmisions data: US Environmental Protection Agency E-GRID 2000; Electricity mix and energy content: US DOE Energy Information Adminsistration; Car miles and tree data: US EPA, Green Mountain Power.



  • Climate Change and the Need to Eliminate Fossil Fuels

    Currently, CO2 and other greenhouse gas concentrations are rising not because of orbital changes but from the use of fossil fuels. The preindustrial level of CO2 in Earth's atmosphere was 280 parts per million (ppm); now it's about 380 ppm. Consider that 100 ppm of CO2 is what separated the Ice Age from the warm, stable climate of the past several thousand years, and that the corresponding temperature transition took about a thousand years. By comparison, half of all the energy used since the beginning of the industrial revolution has been consumed during the past 20 years, and global average temperatures are rising about 100 times faster than during transitions out of ice ages.

    Increased greenhouse gas concentrations are only partly responsible for the changes in temperature between an ice age and today. Much of the rise in temperature as an ice age ends is due to the loss of ice sheets that help cool the planet by reflecting sunlight. However, the current rate of Highly industrialized agriculture requires about 10 times more energy to grow, harvest, process, and distribute the food than is contained in the food itself.

    Relocalization change in the chemistry of Earth's atmosphere and oceans is comparable to only a few previous mass-extinction episodes over the past several hundred million years that appear to be related to radical, rapid climate change.

    Excerpted from the Solar Living Sourcebook 30th Anniversary Edition