Besides all of the economic benefits that residential solar panels bring, there are other, major benefits that producing your own solar energy brings to your community. That includes cleaner air, lower carbon emissions, and improved water conservation.
When a traditional power plant makes electricity, it’s using technology that wouldn’t look out of place in the 1800s. The power plant burns coal or natural gas to boil water which generates steam used to push a turbine to power a generator. Naturally, when we use 1800s technology we get 1800s problems, like bad local air pollution. Fossil-fuel-burning power plants emit sulfur dioxide, are the largest source of airborne mercury, produce problematic fine air particles, and are major sources of nitrogen oxides — which make smog and ground-level ozone and contribute to cardiovascular and severe respiratory problems.
Solar Panels Provide Clean Energy
When you install solar, your locality needs less conventional electricity, so fewer fossil fuels are burned and there is less air pollution from your nearest power plant, helping your whole community breathe better. The effects of installing solar panels can be even more far-reaching when considering the global problems caused by climate change and how solar energy can reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Burning fossil fuels produces greenhouse gasses like carbon dioxide which warm our climate and create more severe storms globally. While it seems like you can’t do much yourself to combat climate change, installing solar panels can actually have a big impact. Adding solar panels to your home will keep literal tons of greenhouse gasses out of the atmosphere every year. It’s the carbon-saving equivalent of planting 125 trees or not driving 20,000 miles in your gas-powered car — every year. A solar installation on a home also eliminates the need to mine and then transport over 8,000 lbs of coal each year. Solar panels can last for more than 40 years, so those yearly numbers get amazingly large over their lifetime.
Solar Panels and Water Conservation
Home solar panels also help conserve water. The massive amount of water used and polluted by power plants is often overlooked because it is easy to focus on the other environmental and health problems the plants cause. A conventional power plant uses massive amounts of water from our already strained Midwestern rivers, boiling it to power steam turbines and polluting our water.
The USGS, tasked with monitoring water in the U.S., estimates that power plants use 133 billion gallons of water each day. That makes power plants the largest consumer of water in any category — they account for a staggering 40% of all water use in the U.S. These power plants also contaminate water with toxic heavy metals and other contaminants, which can make their way into surrounding ecosystems. The EPA found that power plants dump more pollutants into our waters than the next nine industries combined.
When you add solar panels to your home, you are becoming more energy independent and are directly reducing your reliance on fossil-fuel-burning power plants, which means you are cutting down on local air pollutants, reducing greenhouse gasses, and saving our local water systems. Further expanding the positive effects of going solar is the fact that by installing solar panels on your home it will encourage others to follow suit, multiplying the positive benefits of solar.