Translation guide to green energy

This Fox News article about solar panels illustrates, inadvertently, something I've suspected for a long time; that when we're talking about green energy, one ought to double the estimated cost and halve the benefits, and then the numbers are a lot closer to reality.  How so?

Well,  the article states that in California, mass deployment of solar panels started in 2006, and that now, these solar panels are reaching the end of their 25 year lifecycle.  Now, of course, 2006 to the present is actually only 16 years, so we would infer that the actual useful lifespan of solar panels is not 25 years, but rather 16 years or less.  So if we divide the prospective benefits by two, we're a lot closer to reality.

In the same way, how do you dispose of a used solar panel?  Well, due to the toxic heavy metals like selenium and cadmium in solar panels, you need to handle them as hazardous waste.  Now yes, manufacturing solar panels is expensive, but so is creating a hazmat site with a clay underlayer to prevent leaching into the groundwater with containers that will prevent leaching.

In other words, double the costs, and you're just about there.  And how, precisely, it is better to make solar panels with coal fired power plants (no scrubbers to pull sulfur out of the exhaust there!) in China than to simply burn the coal here (with scrubbers and bag houses) to create electricity is not altogether clear to me.  And yet we are subsidizing one and penalizing the other.