squeaker wrote:Thanks, and for your earlier elucidations. They prodded me to look at Gridwatch again, which led me to their CO2 pageand its interesting table of lifecycle CO2 emissions for different generation methods. The surprisingly high (to me) value for SolarPV then took me to their source (published in 2011) which inherently only used earlier papers, many of which were also secondary sources - you get the picture
So, back to Ecosia search engine, which threw up this 2020 report, an interesting read in itself. Its lifecycle data seems to come from the International Energy Agency, which seems fairly kosher, although seemingly open to criticism about it's environmental forecasting? The IEA's home page threw up this interesting report about the environmental impact of battery storage with SolarPV, summary slides here. So I still don't know how much the manufacturing efficiency improvements over the last decade have reduced the lifecycle emissions of SolarPV, but I've broadened my mind
There's a channel on YouTube called "Just Have a Think" - well worth a watch imo.
To my mind at least it's a no nonsense look at various topics without any whitewashing.
I'm pretty sure he covered solar pretty recently (including some of the newer technologies coming up).
It's definitely an issue with a lot of tech (EV, solar, wind) that information just a few years old is seriously out of date.