Solar power and greenhouse emissions

It is no longer just environmentalists who are clamoring for renewable energy. Scientists and policymakers worldwide are beginning to understand the dangers mankind faces from pollution and climate change. Fossil fuel burning is only going to be around another fifty years. What do we do then? Wind and solar power are subsidized by nearly every major country in the world, either directly or indirectly through tax breaks, mandates, and regulations. The main reason for these subsidies is that wind and solar produce benefits to society that is not captured in their market price. Specifically, wind and solar power cut down on pollution, which reduces sickness, missed work days, and premature deaths. Every wind farm or solar field displaces some other form of power generation (usually coal or natural gas) that would have polluted the planet more.

Subsidies for solar

Subsidies for renewables are meant to remedy this market failure, to make the value of renewables more accurately reflect their total social value. This raises an obvious question: Are renewable energy subsidies doing the job intended? That turns out to be a difficult question to answer. Quantifying renewable energy’s health and environmental benefits is rather complicated. Researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley Lab have just produced the most significant attempt to date. Nearly every country in the world subsidizes fossil fuels. Globally, fossil fuels receive far more subsidies than renewables, despite the lack of any scientific rationale whatsoever for such subsidies. The researchers studied the health and environmental benefits of wind and solar in the US between 2007 and 2015. Specifically, they examined how much wind and solar reduced emissions of four main pollutants — sulfur dioxide (SO2), nitrogen oxides (NOx), fine particulate matter (PM2.5), and carbon dioxide (CO2) — over that span of several years. The goal was to understand not only the size of the environmental benefits but their geographical distribution and how they have changed over time.

Here are some basic conclusions:

From 2007 to 2015, wind and solar in the US reduced SO2, NOx, and PM2.5 by 1.0, 0.6, and 0.05 million tons respectively; reduction of local air pollutants helped avoid nearly 7,000 premature deaths (the central estimate in a range from 3,000 to 12,700); those avoided deaths, along with other public health impacts, are worth a cumulative $56 billion (the central estimate in a range from $30 to $113 billion); wind and solar also reduced CO2 emissions, almost $32 billion in avoided climate costs (the central estimate in a range from $5 to $107 billion).
Cumulatively, wind and solar saved Americans around $88 billion in health and environmental costs over eight years. We can do so much better. Fortunately, technological advances make it more appealing and cost-effective to install solar. Wind and solar benefits vary over time and from place to place

You can make a difference by installing a solar energy system today!

Solar power is here to stay, and the sooner you explore how much you can save, the sooner you can enjoy the benefits of residential solar power. Go to HahaSmart.com and try our price checker tool. It tells you how much solar power you need, and how much you can save.

Please visit our solar blog to find out more about the benefits of going solar.