Your analogy is great. There is even more to consider however. How is the electricity being produced? Does it have emissions? Do they offset cutting down farmed trees for paper? There is a lot to consider for sure.
Those questions are irrelevent. None of us have control over how the power is produced or it's effects are mitigated, regardless of the system we are talking about.
Solar does pretty well where I am from. In fact, I recently saw reports that solar is just about on the edge with being competitive with coal. Thats a pretty huge development.
It's also a bold-faced lie. Solar tech would have to be less than free to compete with coal at the present time, because solar requires vast expanses of real estate to produce on any scale. I would wager that less than 0.01% of the population has the real estate to produce their own power consumption in this manner even if the tech were 100% efficient. Currently an efficiency rate of 20% is great.
The only problem is that I am going to be moving (just graduated). I'll be going to grad school at CMU and I am not sure how much sun I'll be seeing in Pittsburgh. For me, I am concerned more with unseen environmental costs that are not factored into the current price of energy. If I use solar panels, I would hope to combat that.
Don't forget to include the energy costs and environmental impact of the manufacturing of those panels before you decide that solar is a good environmental choice.
I very strongly disagree. However, I feel that this discussion is outside the scope of my original post so I will not continue to debate environment. If you want, we can create a thread elsewhere on the boards to address this or we can talk in private messages.