Trying to lower your carbon footprint by installing solar panels? How about taking it a step further and choosing yours solar panels based on their carbon footprint!?Believe it or not, the facility that your solar panels are manufactured in can play a significant role in determining the overall ecological impact of your system.

In a letter written by local graduate students at the Bard Center for Environmental Policy we now see that there are inherent environmental advantages in choosing a solar panel that is manufactured in a facility whose own energy comes largely from low emissions and/or renewable sources.

After doing some research on the solar panels that were installed on their professor’s home, the Bard students found that the SolarWorld panels were manufactured in Oregon, where the grid is largely fed by hydro power. Since many solar manufacturers are based in areas of the world where coal and other non-renewable energy sources are used to manufacture panels, it was found that the SolarWorld product actually has an environmental advantage over other types of solar panels.

In a letter to SolarWorld stating their findings, the students said:

“Noting that your manufacturing process is located in Oregon we were interested to know how much lower the emissions are for your panels, given the low emissions intensity of the grid in Oregon. We are aware that you probably know these numbers already – we note that the white paper by Daily and Yenamandra (2008) on your web site mentions the benefits of manufacturing on a low carbon intensity grid system as exists in Oregon relative to other part of the US or China. However, that paper does not make the explicit mention of the relative emissions over the life cycle of the panel. We therefore thought you might be interested in seeing our results.

We estimate g CO 2 eq/ kWh emissions over the life cycle of mono-S panels made in your Oregon facility to be 3.9 times lower than equivalent panels manufactured in China. We feel this is information that you should not only be proud of, but also can use in your marketing of the panels in a more prominent way than you currently do”

Thanks to the Bard graduate students in the Climate Science and Policy Masters Program for their research, and thanks to their professor Jen Phillips for sharing their findings with us.