Ignorance is a very, very bad thing. Last week, as North America suffering from extreme cold weather because of a phenomenon called “polar vortex“, Jim Hoft, founder of the American far-right news and opinion website The Gateway Pundit has tweeted that: “It’s a bit cold outside this morning in middle America… Aren’t you glad you aren’t heating your home with a solar panel like nitwit socialist @AOC is demanding?” (@AOC is the American politician and activist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez here.) What Jim Hoft says is flat-out wrong. Solar panels DO work in the cold. They work by absorbing LIGHT from the sun, not heat.
![Tweet of Jim Hoft about solar panels](https://cdn-0.ourplnt.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Jim-Hoft-solar-panel-tweet.jpg)
In fact, solar panels are more efficient at cooler temperatures. Furthermore, white snow can act like a mirror to reflect more light on them.
You’re likely to produce less energy in the winter months, but that’s not because of the cold – it’s because the days are a bit shorter, especially in the northern latitudes.
NASA has put a few rovers and landers on Mars in recent decades, and they were all solar-powered (with the exception of Curiosity rover – which uses an RTG – a Radioisotope Thermal Generator, which converts the heat from a decaying 5-kg slug of plutonium into electricity using Peltier devices). And Mars is an extremely cold place with an average temperature of -63 °C (210 K; -81 °F). Actual temperature measurements at the Viking landers‘ site range from -17.2 °C (256.0 K; 1.0 °F) to -107 °C (166 K; -161 °F).
What’s depressing is that this guy has a big reach on social media. So many people are getting misinformed by nonsense like this.
How do solar panels work?
![Solar Panels on top of the Roof](https://cdn-0.ourplnt.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/solar-panels-home.jpg)
Sources
- Solar Panel on Wikipedia
- Budget of NASA, Year by Year [1980-1989] - June 10, 2024
- Budget of NASA, Year by Year [1970-1979] - June 10, 2024
- Budget of NASA, Year by Year [1958-2024] - June 10, 2024