Right and so to follow this logic through, how do you think we get energy out of fossil fuels? Or nuclear reactors? Or a hypothetical fusion power plant?
> they are designed to turn the only external source of energy our planet receives (sun light) into heat and other forms of energy that will eventually become heat
How does a steam turbine work? By heat: we burn things to get heat, and use steam to turn it into work which..turns it into heat.
Your own statement is arguing against using energy in the first place, yet trying to frame it as a "renewable energy" problem as though the 60% of energy in gasoline isn't being thrown off into the environment, and 30-50% of energy in coal isn't the same, or as if literally every last bit of that - all of it because of the laws of thermodynamics - isn't eventually turned into heat.
Total estimate energy consumption per year [1] is about 14420 TWh as of 2021. The total solar energy we would've received in that same year [2] is 1,515,480,000 TWh. Or 0.00095%.
The amount of thermal emission from human activity on Earth is negligible. The idea that the amount of solar panels to power human civilization would have any non-local effect on the temperature of the planet is absurd.
I wasn't arguing against the use of solar panels, just pointing out that they don't reflect light as much as the natural environment that would have been in their place. This whole discussion is purely academic because the proportion of earth covered by solar panels is negligible.
