There’s no such thing as “free energy”: both wind and solar generators start their productive life with substantial energy deficits. Of course, their owners and operators are only interested in the subsidies they generate. But others are keen to take full account of the amount of energy employed before wind turbines or solar panels get to (occasionally) generate their first watt of electricity.
In the parlance it’s a thing known as the ‘Energy Return On Investment’ EROI. As to which see our post here.
Solar panels are the product of strip-mined quartz which gets converted to silica using coal-fired furnaces. But that’s just the ‘dirty’ fossil-fuel energy used to create the PV cells themselves.
Then, as Vic Furman details below, there’s the tremendous amount of energy used to create the aluminium frames used to house and support the panels.
Solar Framing Is A Problem No Matter How One…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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