How much electricity is used to make a solar cell, and how much can one produce in it’s useful lifetime?
Back story:
I was in Japan, staying with a researcher who worked for the military. We got onto the subject of solar cells, and he said even at the theoretical peak efficiency of the technology, it would always take more electricity to produce one that it would generate in it’s lifetime.
He said the process of making them involved heating a mixture of silicon and other materials to an extremely high temperature and high pressure. To do this takes a massive amount of electricity, and even if the process were nearly 100% heat efficient it would still far outweigh the electricity produced by the cells.
In addition to this, though not exactly on topic, the waste byproducts produced by the cells include several highly toxic substances.
To reiterate, my question is:
How much electricity is used to make a solar cell, and how much can one produce in it’s useful lifetime?
