7 Advantages of Solar Energy

There are dozens of solar energy advantages when compared to all other energy sources, even compared to other renewable energy sources on some topics. I will run through several of these advantages of solar energy in the article below. However, there are numerous others that benefit society, your local and national economy, and all types of living creatures on the planet.

Solar Makes You Feel Good

Starting with an advantage that doesn't get nearly enough love or attention, this one is perhaps the biggest solar advantage of all. People often like to crunch numbers when considering the advantages of solar power, but much of this is about rationalizing a feeling. Also, no simple numbers compare to the good feeling you get every day when you think about something cool and helpful that you bought.

For all of the reasons below, it just feels good to go solar. Having that feeling pop into your head and heart each time you think of your rooftop solar system is, as a certain credit card company would say, priceless.

Solar Can Save You Thousands

This advantage depends on individual circumstances. Some people can save tens of thousands of dollars by going solar, some people can't save anything. There's no uniform answer to the cost of going solar or to the savings from going solar. You simply have to get a solar price quote from a local solar installer who can examine the potential on your roof; local, utility, regional, state, and federal financial incentives; your electricity costs; and more in order to provide you with an estimate solar system cost and estimated solar system savings.

However, that said, many if not most homeowners can now save money by going solar, and a high portion of those people can save not just thousands but tens of thousands of dollars thanks to reduced electricity bills.

Solar may be expensive (up front), but it's generally not nearly as expensive as buying all of your electricity from a utility company.

Solar Improves Human Health

It might be old news, but it's as important as ever: Air pollution is causing asthma, cancer, heart disease, dementia, and premature death. That air pollution comes in large part from dirty power plants. Switching to solar power is a top way to cut that pollution, improves human health, and indeed improve your, your kids', your grandkids', and your friends' chances of not getting pollution-related diseases.

Solar Can Help Save Our Climate

Human health is one thing, humanity's survival — or, at least, society's survival — is another. There's a grave concern that we are heating up the planet far too much via "greenhouse gases" that trap heat here on Earth. Not only is it getting more and more dangerously hot — which also leads to more and more extreme and deadly weather of various sorts — but there's a great fear among climate scientists and others who follow climate science that we may be creating a "runaway" scenario whereby even cutting greenhouse gases won't stop the heating. In the most extreme scenarios, the whole planet could become uninhabitable. (Hence Space X Founder & CEO Elon Musk's goal to make humans a multiplanetary species. But isn't it just easier to stop polluting the world and keep this rather good planet that we have today?

The three main sources of greenhouse gas emissions are electricity generation, transportation-related emissions, and emissions connected to livestock production. So, switching from fossil fuel generation to clean, zero-emission, renewable energy generation is one of the top things we can do to stop global warming and catastrophic climate change. You can do your part, of course, by installing solar panels on your roof (or, more realistically, hiring someone to install them on your roof for you).

Solar Power Boosts the Local Economy

This is one of the advantages of solar power that probably doesn't get enough attention or respect. When you get electricity from a large dirty energy power plant located far away, much of the money you pay goes to companies and rich investors far away — the people who own, control, collect, and burn the fuel that creates that electricity. When you get electricity from rooftop solar panels, much of the cost is actually going to the labor installing the solar panels, which is inherently local even if your choose a national company. That means much more of your money "stays" in your local community, improving local services, infrastructure, and retail centers.

Grid Resilience

What? Grid who? Well, you know what a blackout is. What you might not know is that electricity supply and electricity demand must always meet — if they don't for a moment that can lead to a blackout. Grid resiliency is what protects you from blackouts. Basically, the grid must be able to respond quickly to sudden changes in either electricity supply (a power plant going offline, for example) or demand.

Traditional power plants that burn coal or nuclear fuel take quite a long time to start up, which is one problem for grid resiliency, but the bigger point as it compares to solar is that such power plants heavily centralize electricity generation and transmission. That means that a problem at one power plant or along one major transmission corridor can cause a dramatic shock on the grid that's hard to recover from. Since rooftop solar power plants are so small and so spread out, they essentially create a much more robust, resilient, stable grid network. One rooftop solar system going down or even a whole neighborhood of them going down doesn't have such a dramatic effect on the grid, possibly crashing the whole thing. Furthermore, they can help to soak up demand and even out generation in the event that a large, traditional power plant has a problem.

Grid Security

Grid security is a similar but slightly different matter. It is about intentional rather than accidental grid disturbances. As it stands, if some group so wished and put in the concerted effort to do so, it could attack a handful of large power plants and wreak total havoc on the grid. Since the grid is such a fundamental part of modern life and there is this open risk, national security experts place threats to the grid as a top national security concern.

As explained in the section above, widely distributed, small-scale solar power systems dissipate such risk. The more distributed the grid's power generation facilities are, the better for grid security.

Those are 7 advantages of solar energy, some of which may have been obvious, some not at all. In total, they put solar energy high on the totem of potential energy choices, perhaps even in the #1 position.

To know more: Cost of Solar