Of all the ways to cut carbon, building solar is the fastest, cheapest, and cleanest. Here's how we think about it.
We chose solar because it's the fastest, cheapest way to cut the carbon in the air we breathe. Fossil fuels still make up about 80% of global energy use, and producing electricity and heat from them accounts for around 30% of global emissions — more than any other single sector.
Offsets and tree planting can help clean up emissions after the fact. But the simpler, cheaper move is to not create them in the first place. Every solar panel we fund replaces a share of coal and gas with free sunlight — for decades.
Solar panels are sheets of photovoltaic (PV) cells that turn sunlight directly into electricity. No combustion. No moving parts. No emissions while they run.
At any given moment, the sun bathes the Earth in about 173,000 terawatts of power — roughly 10,000 times more than humanity consumes. Which means a single hour of sunlight on the planet carries more energy than the entire world uses in a year. Capturing even a fraction of it as electricity is one of the highest-leverage bets we can make.
Zero Emissions
Solar generates electricity without burning anything — no greenhouse gases, no air pollution while it runs
Inexhaustible
Unlike coal or oil, there's no finite supply to deplete. The sun rises every day, everywhere on Earth — and is expected to keep doing so for another 5 billion years
Getting Cheaper
Panel costs have fallen more than 90% in a decade. Solar is now the cheapest source of electricity in human history
Utilities compare energy sources using the Levelized Cost of Electricity (LCOE) — the full cost of building and running a plant, divided by the total electricity it produces over its lifetime. It's the closest thing to an apples-to-apples number in energy. Today, building a new solar farm is cheaper than building a new gas or coal plant almost everywhere in the world.
$30–$60
per MWh — utility-scale solar PVLazard LCOE 2024
$45–$108
per MWh — natural gas combined cycleLazard LCOE 2024
$69–$168
per MWh — coal-fired powerLazard LCOE 2024
Solar's edge is still widening. Panel prices have fallen more than 90% over the past decade and battery storage is following the same curve. The IEA's 2024 outlook calls solar "the cheapest source of electricity in most countries" — and the gap keeps growing every year.
Over a 25-year lifetime, a typical residential solar system offsets around 150,000 pounds of CO₂ — about the same as burning 34 tons of coal, or taking 15 gasoline cars off the road for a year. Scale that across communities and the numbers get serious fast.
How much a project actually offsets depends on a handful of variables. These are the big ones:
Building a solar panel does cost some carbon upfront — from mining silicon, manufacturing cells, and shipping the finished product. But averaged across every kilowatt-hour a panel will generate over its 25+ year lifetime, the footprint works out to roughly 25–45 grams of CO₂ per kWh. Coal, by comparison, emits 820–1,050 grams per kWh — around 20 to 40 times more.
That one-time manufacturing carbon is repaid — in clean generation — within 1 to 3 years. After that, the panel keeps producing zero-emission electricity for another two decades or more. Net: deeply positive for the atmosphere.
Trees are incredible. They sequester carbon, cool cities, clean air, release oxygen. We're big fans.
But trees don't address the root problem: emissions from burning fossil fuels. They also take decades to mature, and a single wildfire can erase years of absorption overnight. Replacing coal and gas with solar cuts the problem at its source — preventing emissions instead of chasing them after the fact.
That's why our dollars go to building renewables first.
Solar power has one honest limitation: it's intermittent. Panels generate a lot of electricity at noon, less in the morning and afternoon, and nothing at all at night or during heavy cloud cover. Demand, meanwhile, doesn't follow that shape — it tends to peak in the early evening, right as solar output falls off. Utility engineers call the resulting mismatch the duck curve, named after the shape of net demand once you subtract the solar that's already on the grid.
The fix is already well underway. Grid-scale batteries store the midday surplus and release it a few hours later when people come home. Flexible backup plants — increasingly gas peakers today, hydrogen and long-duration storage tomorrow — fill any remaining gap. Battery costs are on the same downward curve solar rode for a decade: the more we deploy, the cheaper they get, and the smaller the intermittency problem becomes.
When a community builds solar, the benefits keep going after the panels are installed. Bills drop for the schools and hospitals connected to the project. Skilled, well-paid jobs are created — close to home. And countries get a little more control over their own energy future, instead of depending on fuel shipped in from somewhere else.
We use the profit from every Dyme booking to fund solar projects for schools and hospitals. Travel well. Do good.
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