You can properly dispose or recycle anything non-radioactive with enough energy, heat and oxygen. Soon this process will be powered by excess renewable energy.
That's a bit hand-wavy and optimistic. Li-Ion batteries are notoriously hard to recycle, not because the chemistry is hard, but because the logistics are hard in the face of such a wide variety of batteries in use. Maybe solar panels are more uniform, but the challenges of recycling some non-radioactive items are an existence proof of recycling difficulties.
> You can properly dispose or recycle anything non-radioactive with enough energy, heat and oxygen.
With "enough energy" you could recycle anything. In theory you could for instance vaporize any waste mixture (including radioactive compounds), send it through a giant mass spectrometer, and get output beams sorted by atomic number. But in practice, how much energy is "enough energy" is quite important to whether that process is realistic.
In this case, the relevant metric is how much energy is spent producing and recycling solar panels compared to the energy the solar panels are expected to produce over their lifetime. As long as that ratio can be made sufficiently low, we should be good.
I don't know what they are writing about. PV wafer reclaim has been around for at least a decade, at least in China.
Reclaiming a cell is as easy as polishing off its surface layer, which contains most of defects, and resurfacing it.
A much more crude method just heats up the cell to the temperature where most defects from solar radiation disappear, but not hot enough for dopants to start diffusing more than they should, and then reselling it as a lower spec cell.
> A: Solar panel wastes include heavy metals such as silver, copper, lead, arsenic, cadmium, selenium that at certain levels may be classified as hazardous wastes.
> Q: What does data show? What are the constituents that make the panels hazardous?
> A: In general, data shows that older silicon panels may be hazardous due to lead solder. Some older silicon panels are hazardous for hexavalent chromium coatings. Cadmium tellurium (CdTe) panels are typically hazardous due to the cadmium. Gallium arsenide (GaAs) panels may be hazardous due to the arsenic. Thin film panels, such as copper indium gallium selenide (CIS/CIGS) panels, may be hazardous due to the copper and/or selenium.
> Q: What about electronic components associated with the solar panels? What are they hazardous for?
> A: The electronic components associated with the solar panels (e.g. drivers, inverters, circuit boards) contain all of the common electronic device hazardous constituents such as lead, arsenic, cadmium, selenium, and chromium.
> A: Solar panel wastes include heavy metals such as silver, copper, lead, arsenic, cadmium, selenium that at certain levels may be classified as hazardous wastes.
Note that this is grouping together ALL kinds of cells, particularly cadmium telluride. These cells -especially gallium-based cells- are a small or tiny minority of solar panels.
The vast majority of solar panels do not contain any of these except copper and lead. Lead is actively in the process of removal, but the plan is to do so over the next decade or so. Regardless roughly 2000x more lead is used to make car batteries:
Are there even any substances known to the state of California to not cause cancer? Air, salt, and all sugars fats and alcohols from things which consume air, are a bit radioactive.
Your comment made me wonder something: how delicate are solar panels? Like, if a hailstorm hits a town with solar panels, will they be completely destroyed?
The cells themselves are very delicate, much of the job of the panel is to protect the cells. Construction can vary, but generally they are designed to withstand normal weather events, just like a roof is. That said, weather can occasionally exceed those design limitations.
Large hail can break through a polycarbonate skylight or the tempered glass of a car, it’ll do the same to a solar panel covered in the same.
I thought that as well, but then I thought "well car windshields can be busted by hail, so maybe there is just insurance, like we have for cars". By the replies I've gotten, looks like that's not the case!
seems they're likely damaged by hail roughly the size of a golf ball, but in the link above they point to an example where 2.75in diameter hail did little damage to panels at NREL.
It's "size of golfball" hail that makes me wonder if shielding the solar panel with 40mm wire mesh (often called chicken wire) is worth the solar efficiency loss.
One thing about Climate Change is: more energy in the system means worse extreme events, and the less extreme events more often. But when is the cut over point?
Silicon cells are quite brittle, think like very thin dry pasta with a metallic cling. You can find pieces sold in lots on ebay, mostly due to operator error when soldering them.
The obvious use to recycle silicon cells is to replace metallurgical silicon (which is far less pure) in the feed to the production of trichlorosilane. Failing that, just melt it with aluminum in the production of silicon-aluminum alloys.
" Voluntary, industry-led recycling efforts are limited in scope."
Did anyone else chuckle when they saw this?
Also, what will happen to the poor people who cannot detach from the grid? As the amount of people using solar increases, I am sure the costs for those who can't afford solar will increase, right? Also, as solar increases, if it does, the already horrible grid infrastructure will suffer even more so as the utility providers face even less financial incentive to provide upkeep.
I am taking a hunch here, but I imagine that it is cheaper for you to provide energy to the grid (once the grid is already established) than for the power companies to provide energy to the grid. IIRC, your unused power you generate goes back into the grid correct?
The argument they are making is one that you will see a lot in these types of discussions. As renewable energy becomes cheaper and easier to add to individual houses, the supply of cheap energy combined with the decrease in energy demand from wealthy households will drive down energy prices and cut into the operating margins of power companies.
If too many people start producing power and not buying it themselves, power companies would not be able to afford maintaining the power grid as effectively or would have to increase prices for people who can't supply their own power.
Basically the argument is that a movement for those who can afford to be self-sufficient to do so ends up being a tax on those who can't afford to.
There is some level of merit to this argument and if we transition to a heavily renewables based energy system, we will likely see this occur to some extent during the transitional period.
There are a handful of solutions to this problem but the easiest is to move maintenance of power infrastructure from the public utility to the government and implement a local tax to pay for the power grid. Power Utilities would still exist however instead of also maintaining the grid, they would just be responsible for producing power and supplying sufficient redundancy to minimise/eliminate brown- and black-outs.
With this solution, everybody shares the burden of maintaining the grid rather than just those who can't afford to be self-sufficient. Those who are able to be self-sufficient can feed back into the grid to help recuperate their expenses on their energy equipment as well as some of the tax they paid in.
correct, any amount on on site generation reduces stress on the grid. my power company actually pays me for what I produce over the first 10 years of my panels life... this is in addition to my savings
> I imagine that it is cheaper for you to provide energy to the grid (once the grid is already established) than for the power companies to provide energy to the grid.
This is a bit inaccurate. Utility scale solar is cheaper to produce than rooftop solar generally.
But there are a lot of other things in play too, such as markets, subsidies etc.
Also: power companies don't just provide the electricity to the grid, they keep the grid running and in balance. If the consumption does not equal the production at all times you are going to get blackouts.
Which is good news, because thanks to the exponential growth of solar, panels manufactured in the bad old days may as well not exist.
The vast majority of solar panels were manufactured in the last ten years: they are largely free of toxic atoms, and built to a higher standard of power delivery and reliability.
Green is great, but probably the most moral kilowatt is that both green (as in accounts for the environmental load, so it minimizes eco-debt that future humans would have to "pay back") and maximizes current humans' needs, eg. powers homes, schools, hospitals where currently there millions live without stable electricity.
Much of the issue with the waste is that it still doesn't have proper disposal logistics. It's mostly just piling up next to reactors with no place to go.[1]
If we still can't solve the storage problem after decades of effort, why should we have any confidence in promises made by that particular industry? [2]
If one goes to search for information on the problem, you can see some very obvious SEO manipulation to bring up only industry-positive sites.
It's not really industry that failed here but rather the government that imposed a tax for a service that was never rendered and whose revenues were later squandered.
For the sake of clarity, and because it's your primary point, I do think it's worth to point out even in the article you cite nuclear is the cleanest, but safety depends on how you perform the estimate.
I found the comparisons in analysis they performed here: https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy#why-do-b... interesting. One estimate results in nuclear being more deadly per TwH produced than wind, hydro, and solar (about 2-3x), and the other results in it being less deadly by the same amount. It is important to note that a significant portion of deaths from nuclear seem to come from a few large events; with this in mind, one study includes Fukushima, and the other includes Chernobyl. [1]
A larger factor in the discrepancy is one study's very conservative estimate of "deaths from occupational effects", which I interpret as the net added risk versus background from radiation exposure for all workers involved in the maintenance and fueling of the plant. The true relationship between radiation exposure and death risk seems to be under dispute: the more conservative estimate now appears to be an overestimate because it assumes a linear relationship, while the article states consensus is shifting towards a threshold model where one assumes that very low exposure to radiation (the type of exposure most nuclear plant workers experience, I presume?) does not increase cancer risk.
[1] perhaps this is an instance of a more general difficulty in statistics: that of estimating the mean of heavy-tailed distributions (see e.g. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1906.04280.pdf). I'd guess that deaths from nuclear events follow a heavy-tailed distribution, which implies the mean could not be a good estimate of the true impact. But as I have not actually taken the time to investigate the analysis of nuclear deaths performed in the studies, I can't say how well existing analyses do this.
And keep in mind that Japanese people are usually religiously meticulous about work, procedures and safety.
And still remains the problem of radioactive toxic waste.
Edit: I don't want to underplay your comment, but it's important to understand that when dealing with nuclear power all it takes is one major fuck-up to completely screw a whole region.
My main point is that the problem of waste from modern reactors is about the same as managing waste from solar panels, probably is even easier since it is concentrated in few locations and there is not much of it.
Tell that to fossil fuel and renewable biomass, which cause 8 million deaths/yr from air pollution and also cause climate change. Compared to that, nuclear is astronomically cheaper in the externality dept.
Your own link seems to show hydro, solar and wind power as being safer. The conclusion after the chart though ignores those and compares only nuclear and fossil fuels. As far as pollution, the article seemed to again compare only fossil fuels vs nuclear.
Fossil makes wastelands via climate change. We get 80% of our energy from fossil. The nuclear wasteland thing is largely a myth propagated by those who say that even natural background levels of radiation are deadly. Nevermind that there are places in the world (e.g. in Iran, Brazil, and India) with ~50x higher natural background with lots of people living there who are just fine.
No that's water-energy, and funny...it's just not on the first graph from your link, something is really not right with those data s hydro-power have higher emissions than Solar and wind?
Personally I dream of the day that we are a galaxy spanning species consuming the energy equivalent of a lifetime of our sun every couple of days. I think net energy consumption is a decent measuring stick for how advanced a society is.
I'm also all for sustainability. We aren't going to reach the stars if our home planet collapses before we get there.
> Just remember that the greenest kilowatt hour is the kilowatt hour never produced.
Not only it is like saying the safest human is a dead human, it is also wrong. We can easily harvest energy for our human endevours and put a portion of that into “good” use including keeping and even making more things green.
What we are currently having is a game theoretic policy problem, not an inherent law of thermodynamics.
And I don’t think sloganeering will help us overcome that, because appeal to emotions won’t convince China or India to not increase their cheap, non-green energy flow while they are also experiencing their largest economic expansion. (Not saying they are solely responsible of course, but they drive the trend in increase)
Is there a way to mass-disassemble panels and replace the cells? Panel sizes could have been long standardized. I used to buy slightly damaged 6x6 cells on eBay from the factory, so could this be the size template for the automated tooling and robotic maneuvering required to switch out the active material?
I think that is the point they are making though. PV is still harmful to the environment in its current form but it isn't as bad as Coal is in its current form.
Both can be clean and zero-impact however in practice neither are.
PV is still "cleaner" than coal in its current form but neither are truly clean. It's the significant lesser of two evils until we make the effort to go net-zero.
How much cleaner is solar thermal than PV? I assume that depends on how dirty it is to produce the metal for the turbines (steam or air, in the case of solar towers).
Solar thermal is vulnerable to attacks from media articles about dead birds and the fact that some of them have to burn natural gas to start the plant in the morning. You can find both varieties of article courtesy of Fox News:
Solar thermal does have one huge advantage over PV: the plants contain their own short-term energy storage and keep running well after dark. Unfortunately due to market forces solar thermal is currently dead in America. All planned plants have been canceled.
Not clean enough to offset the higher cost per kWh currently. The PV price collapse kneecapped several alternative power sources. Plus solar thermal requires big centralized power plants, where PV can be distributed easily.
Coal necessarily produces waste. It's an inviolable law of thermodynamics. Burning coal cannot produce enough energy to capture the waste products of burning coal.
Solar, on the other hand, can account for its own waste stream, even in energy terms, because the source of its energy comes from outside the system boundary.
I'm no fan of coal, but to be fair "integrated gasification combined cycle" plants [1] are way cleaner than conventional coal plants without violating laws of thermodynamics. You can drastically reduce emissions of e.g. heavy metals, sulphur oxides, carbon monoxide, and particulate matter, while being amenable to pre-combustion carbon capture.
This is largely theoretical. The Kemper demo plant is a disaster in terms of massive cost overruns, many years of delays, and inconsequential net energy production. They ultimately abandoned the project.
No, it's very much feasible to cool the CO2 down to ambient temperature and separate it from the nitrogen, in preparation for sequestering it.
Now, without setting a net-0 carbon dioxide emissions goal, which isn't feasible without salable atmospheric carbon dioxide capturing, there won't be enough incentives to capture the exhaust co2 from a coal power plant.
Is it really true that it’s inert? I thought making solar panels was a pretty toxic endeavor, which is in part why so many are made in China. Is it just in the manufacturing or in the final product too?
The silicon purification uses loads of fluor based acid IIRC. But the cell in itself is mostly Si + some minute amount of other metals (layers and pads).
Purification of silicon is by conversion to trichlorosilane, followed by distillation. No fluorine is involved.
The side by products of this process are very quickly hydrolyzed to silica and hydrochloric acid, neither of which is something to worry about as a persistent pollutant.
The volumes are also small. Just a few hundred thousand tons of silicon are used every year for all electronics (PV and ICs combined).
I'm not sure how much that is, though. On the other hand, manufacture of aluminum from ore requires several kilograms of HF per ton of aluminum. So perhaps the HF usage in PV manufacture is dominated by the production of the aluminum frames for the modules.
I think the dominant consumer of HF, industrially, is in petroleum refineries, where HF is used in alkylation units.
Came here to say the same thing. I don't understand why (semi-)reputable outlets are hocking this anti-renewable propaganda. Reminds me of an article[1] earlier this year about the coming "wind turbine waste", which sounds big when you give a number with tons after it but in reality amounts to a small fraction of waste from disposable toothbrushes.
I've been seeing an uptick of anti-renewable sentiment, either coal or nuclear is probably doing a media buy at the moment.
So much of what we see in news outlets are driven by dedicated PR drives, and these dying industries are trying to hold on, or trying to unload stranded assets on the next biggest fool. (For example BHP announced their exit from coal: https://companysavingexpert.co.uk/2020/08/19/bhp-to-exit-the... )
Nuclear is low-carbon energy being killed in the US by cheap fracked natural gas. It's a low-carbon partner with wind and solar. Wouldn't make sense for the nuclear industry to attack renewables.
Unfortunately, that is not how the political or lobbying allegiances have played out. Nuclear support is often virulently anti-renewable and anti-efficiency. The divide comes from the 1970s:
Huh, that's one way to put it I guess. I always understood this story to be that Amory Lovins was virulently anti-nuclear and invented the Soft Energy Path as a nuclear-free utopia vision to underpin his anti-nuclear activities.
One of the biggest actual challenges with Soft Energy is its low EROI. As you have to start buying huge batteries and transmission lines at a certain point, it dips below feasible levels in some studies, like [1]. Because of it's astronomical energy density, nuclear is amazing on EROI (and also effectively carbon-free).
[1] Dynamic Energy Return on Energy Investment (EROI) and material requirements in scenarios of global transition to renewable energies (2019) https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esr.2019.100399
Energy density is a physical argument that is pretty sound. If you get more energy from less material and land, that can lead directly to a smaller land/material/waste/emissions footprint and therefore a smaller overall footprint. Nuclear being borderline magical here due to E=MC² is the key argument in support of splitting atoms for civilian power. The large land and material footprint of low-density renewables is only barely beginning to be noticed, though they still produce less than 5% of the world's energy. At scale it will be serious, mark my words.
EROI for renewables, especially as it decreases substantially with added storage at scale, is by some accounts (the paper linked) troublingly low. If you have to put in roughly the same amount of energy into a system as it produces in its full lifecycle, you run into issues. This is another good physical argument for nuclear.
One can state they're failed arguments, as anti-nuclear propagandists always do, but that alone is not, as David Deutsch would say, a "good argument".
Energy density is only important insofar as it affects cost. So, if we have cost data (which we do), pointing instead to energy density is pointless (and is likely a deliberate attempt to distract from cost numbers that the person making the argument does not like.)
> If you have to put in roughly the same amount of energy into a system as it produces in its full lifecycle, you run into issues.
Renewables are nowhere close to that. Claims otherwise are lying. For example, they pretend that massive storage is needed and then poorly optimize the storage system so building it requires lots of energy.
No the natural alliance right now is between gas and "renewables" because they're synergistic in that gas is the only technology that can paper wind/solar intermittency/variability today.
While it works I am not sure what the point of (wind/solar) renewables is when the grid is already low-carbon. My understanding is that it increases the cost of nuclear plants by reducing their load factor (since they have to reduce their output power to give way to renewables), but I don't see what we gain for it.
Maybe some additional usable capacity when coupled with reversible hydro?
France, like most other countries, has not been able to successfully build new nuclear, so there is no other option as their current fleet ages out. Renewables will be far cheaper than trying to have a second construction miracle.
The leading nuclear attack dog, whose name I will not mention here, spends much time attacking renewables, especially wind and solar, as "the enemy" and "destroying the planet". He gets lots of dark funding, and it constantly picked up by the gullible press for amplification.
There was recently a campaign against soy milk, because cows can eat grass and grass is better than soy on certain metrics. That much, alone, is true.
But if you're drinking equal volumes of soy milk and dairy milk, dairy is worse on every metric but price - Animal cruelty, health, clean water polluted, space needed, energy needed, carbon and other air pollutants released, etc.
I can't speak for the UK where the campaign was, but in the US the cheap dairy milk is probably not coming from grass-fed cows. The cheap milk is coming from factory-farmed cows that are probably eating lots of soy, and then the government also subsidizes it to drive down the cost in a misguided attempt to give poor people cheaper food without giving them any agency in their decision-making like an actual welfare program would. (I'm upset about this)
To further muddy the waters, some of the Amazon rainforest fires were started to clear land to grow soybeans - To feed to cattle.
jeffbee's unsourced numbers are probably not for UK.
Worldwide coal provides a lot more power than wind [1], although of course it still produces more waste and pollution and everything per TWh than renewables.
Note also the switch from fossil coal to fossil natural gas. Coal dying because of gas is not even remotely a climate win. It's like going from astoundingly awful to terrible.
"We've ended the war on beautiful, clean coal. and it's just been announced that a second, brand new coal mine where they're going to take out clean coal — meaning they're taking out coal, they're going to clean it — is opening in the state of Pennsylvania," Trump said.
Yes, there is still quite a bit of coal generation, but for the most part, electric utilities in the US have moved off coal to a much higher reliance on natural gas for base generation. This seems an inappropriate comparison?
Have you ever wondered why you can't eat fish caught in wilderness lakes over much of the American west?
Because of mercury levels, courtesy of coal-burning power plants. It goes up the smokestack and lands in the food chain.
This is also why people are advised to limit consumption of ocean-caught salmon, tuna, etc. - they have high mercury content, almost entirely thanks to coal plant smokestack emissions.
Cananyone explain the mechanism through which a solar panel dies or even loses efficiency ? I understand physical damage to the panel but how does a solar panel degrade ? Are stored solar panels losing efficiency or is it a result of an interaction with the solar/ultraviolet or some other radiation ? Is anyone working on solar panels that degrade less and last longer. One issue with solar panels right now I'd imagine is that even 25 years and the ROI are quite long periods of time for many Americans who don't plan on staying in their houses for that long and solar isn't mainstream enough that people appreciate the value it adds.
It's not impossible that as solar tech gets better and cheaper older panels may be replaced for financial reasons even though they are still functional.
Solar cells themselves do loose efficiency very slowly (less than 1% per year for most modern monocrystaline silicon cells) due to defects collecting in the semiconductor material. It is the same reason that LEDs slowly loose power over time. Due to the extreme conditions in the semiconductor material (high electric fields, often moderate to high temperatures) the dopants can diffuse into places they do not belong, or cluster together both of which hurt the performance.
That said, most panels die before the cells themselves go bad due to mechanical failure of the cells (cracking, etc) or failures in the electrical wiring in the panel due to corrosion.
It is the same problem as with LED lighting. I have not seen a single LED bulb which lasted long enough for the actual semiconductor devices to age noticeably, but I have seen dozens of bulbs where thermal cycling caused the electrical contacts to the chip fail or the power supply capacitors have gone bad.
Also, due to the rapidly increasing efficiency and decreasing costs of solar cells, it can often be economically viable to replace your array with fresh cells just for the added power output you get. If you took cells form 20 years ago and replace them with current cells you can quadruple your output power for the same area!
Not really, but it's a neat alternative for turning solar energy into mechanical power. Achievable (at grossly inefficient power outputs) by the hobbyist without expensive tools or nasty chemicals. Much easier to recycle at the end of a system's useful life.
Ultimately there may be no getting around the fact that we simply need to reduce demand. And reducing demand, if we want to preserve our quality of life, likely means population control.
I disagree with the movie's conclusion, which seems identical to yours. We can use tech to keep quality of life high by using responsible and sustainable energy systems like nuclear/wind/solar/hydro.
PoTH hardly even mentioned nuclear, which tears their whole "we must depopulate" narrative apart easily.
> A wind turbine’s blades can be longer than a Boeing 747 wing, so at the end of their lifespan they can’t just be hauled away.
This is wrong, the trucks that bring those blades could well re-take them to recycling plant. It would be a special transport, but a well pre-planned one.
So non-toxic waste is somehow a catastrophe compared to all of the other nonrecycalbe garbage already being produced? That is a blatantly stricter standard than literally anything else is held to.
I was under the impression that - baring physical damage - solar panels won't just stop working one day as the article implies, but they merely decrease in efficiency over time. Most solar panels today come with a manufacturer's guarantee that after 25 years, they will still be 80-something percent efficient.
At this point they would have paid for themselves over many times, and would now be generating free electricity, so for most installations there is little point in replacing them.
The last time I had an estimate for solar, the break-even was 18 years, so it made no sense whatsoever, financially speaking.
When you mention after 25 years they would have paid for themselves many times over, based on what criteria? I'd love to revisit this topic -- power costs in Florida are very high.
Edit: Just curious on why the downvotes? Not enough context? Negative sentiment? (not intended, genuinely curious about revisiting solar)
What is "very high"? Much of the reason it takes so long to payback is labor, permitting costs, etc. If you reduce or remove those costs payback is in the order of 5 years at 10 cents/kwh.
People will point out that it's silly to factor out labor and permitting but those costs drop radically on grid scale 10MW+ systems where as they make up nearly 50% of the cost on a household scale system.
Very high: for the hottest months of the year, power is $1100+/mo. Average for the last 24 months is just under $900/mo.
It's a larger 1-story home: we've tried to address insulation, low-e glass, and AC SEER ratings. Working and teaching from home = consistent cooling demands throughout the day, every day.
Context: 5000 sf, 12' ceilings. 4 HVAC units. Large family, lots of animals, always at home, 9-10 workstations + 1 rack server running. Thermostats are set around 75-76F.
The first thing I'd be considering there is air leak detection, followed by a ground source heat pump. Having a bill that high implies on the order of 9000 kWh used per month, which is crazy.
The cost of solar has come down _a lot_ in the last few years. At this point the cost of a solar installation is dominated by the cost of the humans who have to deal wit the city to get permits and physically install the components on the roof. For a 6kw system (typical for a single family house in California) the cost of the panels is about $3000, the inverter is about $2000, the auxiliary components (racks, wiring, disconnect, etc) is about $1000. If you are doing it on new construction the install is basically free, but as a retrofit hiring a contractor that will work with the city to get the permits and install the panels is about another $1,000-$10,000 depending on who you talk to and how complicated the installation is (some people need a new electrical service for their house, which runs almost $5k in itself, etc)
That system should produce about 10,000 kw*hr of energy over the year, so the payback excluding installation would be under 5 years.
Thanks for this food for thought. I've commented a bit on costs in sibling threads.
Our home is relatively large (square footage and high ceiling heights compound that) and since we both work and teach at home, the cooling systems are in constant demand.
Appreciate the ballpark figures; time to revisit the idea.
> I'd love to revisit this topic -- power costs in Florida are very high.
Power /bills/ may be very high (due to hot/humid climate necessitating extensive air conditioning). But a quick google shows me power /rates/ in FL are around $0.11 per kWh - which is very low on a global scale (and on the low end of average for the US[1]). Solar costs are coming down on a per-kW basis, so the per-kWh electricity cost is the one you need to compare to find when it breaks even.
This is my problem; my power is ~7.5¢/kWh; my walls are 12” thick (6x2 studs + drywall + facade), so my electric bill only runs about 120$/month, averaged. I have a 68$/month fixed flat hookup fee. That means I’ve got to get solar to “pay out” at ~52$/month.
From what I understand all panels come with a 25 year warranty because that's the federally mandated minimum warranty, and that there are panels twice as old still operating today.
Unless they do something foolish like coat the panels in a plastic that degrades under direct sunlight, I don't really see why panels shouldn't last for quite a long time. Does the silicon itself take UV damage or something?
I bring this up every time solar panels are talked about as some god's gift to energy production. Nobody wants to talk about the insane amounts of e-waste it brings. Not to mention they're constantly improving so people throw out perfectly panels for new ones.
I'm pro solar but it does have a few downsides that we shouldn't ignore.
While this issue is worth exploring and talking about from a policy and science perspective it’s disappointing that the article doesn’t mention that solar e-waste is still considerably less harmful, and much smaller in scale than fossil fuel waste.
A more interesting comparison, moving forward, in my mind, is with nuclear waste. Solar and nuclear both make low carbon electricity and prevent air pollution heath impacts of combustion. Yet most people oppose nuclear because of the waste products.
Here we have to compare solar making large amounts of moderately toxic waste from solar that remains toxic forever vs. nuclear making very small amounts of extremely toxic waste that becomes less toxic over time. Clearly more people dislike nuclear waste, but the E=MC² thing makes it so small that it can be completely internalized.
At the very least, it is valuable to talk about the negative externalities of decarbonizing at scale with solar as we debate the details of the clean energy transition.
> A solar panel is essentially an electronic sandwich. The filling is a thin layer of crystalline silicon cells, which are insulated and protected from the elements on both sides by sheets of polymers and glass. It’s all held together in an aluminum frame. On the back of the panel, a junction box contains copper wiring that channels electricity away as it’s being generated.
None of this sounds like much of a problem in a landfill. I guess some panels might use lead-based solder, but I would be shocked if it’s more than a handful.
If it’s not economical to recycle them, why shouldn’t they go in a landfill?
One reason is that you end up using a lot of raw materials if you aren't recycling when you build out solar electricity at a scale that matters for deeply decarbonizing the world.
The problem is the toxic chemicals in between the glass. Are we going to bury the panes as deep as we dug them up? Or will they be near the surface, creating a layer of toxicity for future generations?
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[ 0.25 ms ] story [ 214 ms ] threadStill less toxic than coal.
With "enough energy" you could recycle anything. In theory you could for instance vaporize any waste mixture (including radioactive compounds), send it through a giant mass spectrometer, and get output beams sorted by atomic number. But in practice, how much energy is "enough energy" is quite important to whether that process is realistic.
In this case, the relevant metric is how much energy is spent producing and recycling solar panels compared to the energy the solar panels are expected to produce over their lifetime. As long as that ratio can be made sufficiently low, we should be good.
Apply as much energy, heat and oxygen you want to mercury and it’s still mercury.
https://journals.aps.org/pr/abstract/10.1103/PhysRev.60.473 (1941)
So few people know that the alchemists ended up being correct. (they just didn’t have enough energy at their disposal!)
Reclaiming a cell is as easy as polishing off its surface layer, which contains most of defects, and resurfacing it.
A much more crude method just heats up the cell to the temperature where most defects from solar radiation disappear, but not hot enough for dopants to start diffusing more than they should, and then reselling it as a lower spec cell.
> A: Solar panel wastes include heavy metals such as silver, copper, lead, arsenic, cadmium, selenium that at certain levels may be classified as hazardous wastes.
> Q: What does data show? What are the constituents that make the panels hazardous?
> A: In general, data shows that older silicon panels may be hazardous due to lead solder. Some older silicon panels are hazardous for hexavalent chromium coatings. Cadmium tellurium (CdTe) panels are typically hazardous due to the cadmium. Gallium arsenide (GaAs) panels may be hazardous due to the arsenic. Thin film panels, such as copper indium gallium selenide (CIS/CIGS) panels, may be hazardous due to the copper and/or selenium.
> Q: What about electronic components associated with the solar panels? What are they hazardous for?
> A: The electronic components associated with the solar panels (e.g. drivers, inverters, circuit boards) contain all of the common electronic device hazardous constituents such as lead, arsenic, cadmium, selenium, and chromium.
Note that this is grouping together ALL kinds of cells, particularly cadmium telluride. These cells -especially gallium-based cells- are a small or tiny minority of solar panels.
The vast majority of solar panels do not contain any of these except copper and lead. Lead is actively in the process of removal, but the plan is to do so over the next decade or so. Regardless roughly 2000x more lead is used to make car batteries:
https://www.freeingenergy.com/are-solar-panels-really-full-o...
Large hail can break through a polycarbonate skylight or the tempered glass of a car, it’ll do the same to a solar panel covered in the same.
The solar cells themselves are usually quite delicate, but the surrounding material keeps them safe in the case of weatherproof ones.
seems they're likely damaged by hail roughly the size of a golf ball, but in the link above they point to an example where 2.75in diameter hail did little damage to panels at NREL.
One thing about Climate Change is: more energy in the system means worse extreme events, and the less extreme events more often. But when is the cut over point?
Did anyone else chuckle when they saw this?
Also, what will happen to the poor people who cannot detach from the grid? As the amount of people using solar increases, I am sure the costs for those who can't afford solar will increase, right? Also, as solar increases, if it does, the already horrible grid infrastructure will suffer even more so as the utility providers face even less financial incentive to provide upkeep.
If too many people start producing power and not buying it themselves, power companies would not be able to afford maintaining the power grid as effectively or would have to increase prices for people who can't supply their own power.
Basically the argument is that a movement for those who can afford to be self-sufficient to do so ends up being a tax on those who can't afford to.
There is some level of merit to this argument and if we transition to a heavily renewables based energy system, we will likely see this occur to some extent during the transitional period.
There are a handful of solutions to this problem but the easiest is to move maintenance of power infrastructure from the public utility to the government and implement a local tax to pay for the power grid. Power Utilities would still exist however instead of also maintaining the grid, they would just be responsible for producing power and supplying sufficient redundancy to minimise/eliminate brown- and black-outs.
With this solution, everybody shares the burden of maintaining the grid rather than just those who can't afford to be self-sufficient. Those who are able to be self-sufficient can feed back into the grid to help recuperate their expenses on their energy equipment as well as some of the tax they paid in.
Self sufficiency isn't the goal and makes no sense even with batteries getting cheaper.
This is a bit inaccurate. Utility scale solar is cheaper to produce than rooftop solar generally.
But there are a lot of other things in play too, such as markets, subsidies etc.
Also: power companies don't just provide the electricity to the grid, they keep the grid running and in balance. If the consumption does not equal the production at all times you are going to get blackouts.
The vast majority of solar panels were manufactured in the last ten years: they are largely free of toxic atoms, and built to a higher standard of power delivery and reliability.
In short, the article is clickbait.
https://www.rohsguide.com/rohs-categories.htm
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
1. https://www.npr.org/2019/04/30/716837443/as-nuclear-waste-pi...
2. https://slate.com/technology/2019/06/department-of-energy-nu...
I found the comparisons in analysis they performed here: https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy#why-do-b... interesting. One estimate results in nuclear being more deadly per TwH produced than wind, hydro, and solar (about 2-3x), and the other results in it being less deadly by the same amount. It is important to note that a significant portion of deaths from nuclear seem to come from a few large events; with this in mind, one study includes Fukushima, and the other includes Chernobyl. [1]
A larger factor in the discrepancy is one study's very conservative estimate of "deaths from occupational effects", which I interpret as the net added risk versus background from radiation exposure for all workers involved in the maintenance and fueling of the plant. The true relationship between radiation exposure and death risk seems to be under dispute: the more conservative estimate now appears to be an overestimate because it assumes a linear relationship, while the article states consensus is shifting towards a threshold model where one assumes that very low exposure to radiation (the type of exposure most nuclear plant workers experience, I presume?) does not increase cancer risk.
[1] perhaps this is an instance of a more general difficulty in statistics: that of estimating the mean of heavy-tailed distributions (see e.g. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1906.04280.pdf). I'd guess that deaths from nuclear events follow a heavy-tailed distribution, which implies the mean could not be a good estimate of the true impact. But as I have not actually taken the time to investigate the analysis of nuclear deaths performed in the studies, I can't say how well existing analyses do this.
And keep in mind that Japanese people are usually religiously meticulous about work, procedures and safety.
And still remains the problem of radioactive toxic waste.
Edit: I don't want to underplay your comment, but it's important to understand that when dealing with nuclear power all it takes is one major fuck-up to completely screw a whole region.
They aren't likely to stop, either. It's vexing, but there's not a lot that can be done about it.
But the main argument against nuclear is "organisational" so to speak.
For some reason nowadays the more liberal a country is, the less success it has in rolling out nuclear.
Perhaps it's the additional incentive of being able to reprocess waste for weapons that's so alluring.
https://thoughtscapism.com/2019/05/08/what-about-radioactive...
With nuclear....that's the dirty part of it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining
I'm also all for sustainability. We aren't going to reach the stars if our home planet collapses before we get there.
Not only it is like saying the safest human is a dead human, it is also wrong. We can easily harvest energy for our human endevours and put a portion of that into “good” use including keeping and even making more things green.
What we are currently having is a game theoretic policy problem, not an inherent law of thermodynamics. And I don’t think sloganeering will help us overcome that, because appeal to emotions won’t convince China or India to not increase their cheap, non-green energy flow while they are also experiencing their largest economic expansion. (Not saying they are solely responsible of course, but they drive the trend in increase)
Coal: 140 million metric tons of toxic glop, at least 100 parts per million of mercury and 10 ppm of uranium, every year, right now.
Even coal doesn't necessarily produce waste. It is our choice not to capture waste/harmful byproducts makes it so dangerous and "bad".
Both can be clean and zero-impact however in practice neither are.
PV is still "cleaner" than coal in its current form but neither are truly clean. It's the significant lesser of two evils until we make the effort to go net-zero.
Solar thermal is vulnerable to attacks from media articles about dead birds and the fact that some of them have to burn natural gas to start the plant in the morning. You can find both varieties of article courtesy of Fox News:
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/taxpayer-backed-solar-plant...
https://www.foxnews.com/science/emerging-solar-plants-scorch...
Solar thermal does have one huge advantage over PV: the plants contain their own short-term energy storage and keep running well after dark. Unfortunately due to market forces solar thermal is currently dead in America. All planned plants have been canceled.
Is there a working example of any of these perceived waste capture mechanisms? How much more expensive are they to operate?
Solar, on the other hand, can account for its own waste stream, even in energy terms, because the source of its energy comes from outside the system boundary.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_gasification_combin...
Now, without setting a net-0 carbon dioxide emissions goal, which isn't feasible without salable atmospheric carbon dioxide capturing, there won't be enough incentives to capture the exhaust co2 from a coal power plant.
Lastly there's the resin and framing.
The side by products of this process are very quickly hydrolyzed to silica and hydrochloric acid, neither of which is something to worry about as a persistent pollutant.
The volumes are also small. Just a few hundred thousand tons of silicon are used every year for all electronics (PV and ICs combined).
But...(at least in the US), wafer manufacturing is highly regulated and focused on safe waste handling...
I think the dominant consumer of HF, industrially, is in petroleum refineries, where HF is used in alkylation units.
No, China actively bought the tech and move the production into mainland china. Closing down boughtout businesses after all knowledge was absorbed.
Their strategy was to become market leader in solar - its a good future bet.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-02-05/wind-turb...
So much of what we see in news outlets are driven by dedicated PR drives, and these dying industries are trying to hold on, or trying to unload stranded assets on the next biggest fool. (For example BHP announced their exit from coal: https://companysavingexpert.co.uk/2020/08/19/bhp-to-exit-the... )
Attacking fracked gas would make more sense.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_energy_path
One of the biggest actual challenges with Soft Energy is its low EROI. As you have to start buying huge batteries and transmission lines at a certain point, it dips below feasible levels in some studies, like [1]. Because of it's astronomical energy density, nuclear is amazing on EROI (and also effectively carbon-free).
[1] Dynamic Energy Return on Energy Investment (EROI) and material requirements in scenarios of global transition to renewable energies (2019) https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esr.2019.100399
Oh, and EROI is another failed anti-renewable argument. EROI of renewables are just fine.
EROI for renewables, especially as it decreases substantially with added storage at scale, is by some accounts (the paper linked) troublingly low. If you have to put in roughly the same amount of energy into a system as it produces in its full lifecycle, you run into issues. This is another good physical argument for nuclear.
One can state they're failed arguments, as anti-nuclear propagandists always do, but that alone is not, as David Deutsch would say, a "good argument".
> If you have to put in roughly the same amount of energy into a system as it produces in its full lifecycle, you run into issues.
Renewables are nowhere close to that. Claims otherwise are lying. For example, they pretend that massive storage is needed and then poorly optimize the storage system so building it requires lots of energy.
Not a climate solution though. Gas's 490 gCO₂-eq/kWh is incompatible with stopping climate change.
- https://electricitymap.org
- https://www.rte-france.com/eco2mix/la-production-delectricit...
- Illustrated example with real data: https://twitter.com/tristankamin/status/1102620969808658432?...
Maybe some additional usable capacity when coupled with reversible hydro?
There was recently a campaign against soy milk, because cows can eat grass and grass is better than soy on certain metrics. That much, alone, is true.
But if you're drinking equal volumes of soy milk and dairy milk, dairy is worse on every metric but price - Animal cruelty, health, clean water polluted, space needed, energy needed, carbon and other air pollutants released, etc.
I can't speak for the UK where the campaign was, but in the US the cheap dairy milk is probably not coming from grass-fed cows. The cheap milk is coming from factory-farmed cows that are probably eating lots of soy, and then the government also subsidizes it to drive down the cost in a misguided attempt to give poor people cheaper food without giving them any agency in their decision-making like an actual welfare program would. (I'm upset about this)
To further muddy the waters, some of the Amazon rainforest fires were started to clear land to grow soybeans - To feed to cattle.
[1] Tao, Major challenges and opportunities in silicon solar module recycling (July 2020) https://doi.org/10.1002/pip.3316
By the way, 100ppm of mercury or 10ppm of uranium aren't that high, you can find that in nature as well.
https://amp.ft.com/content/a05d1dd4-dddd-11e9-9743-db5a37048...
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/1355/measuring-sola...
Worldwide coal provides a lot more power than wind [1], although of course it still produces more waste and pollution and everything per TWh than renewables.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou...
https://www.acaa-usa.org/Portals/9/Files/PDFs/2018-Charts.pd...
The exceptions are practically rounding errors, even though Siberia is one of those regions that is worse than the UK and has 33 million people in it.
Because of mercury levels, courtesy of coal-burning power plants. It goes up the smokestack and lands in the food chain.
This is also why people are advised to limit consumption of ocean-caught salmon, tuna, etc. - they have high mercury content, almost entirely thanks to coal plant smokestack emissions.
That said, most panels die before the cells themselves go bad due to mechanical failure of the cells (cracking, etc) or failures in the electrical wiring in the panel due to corrosion.
It is the same problem as with LED lighting. I have not seen a single LED bulb which lasted long enough for the actual semiconductor devices to age noticeably, but I have seen dozens of bulbs where thermal cycling caused the electrical contacts to the chip fail or the power supply capacitors have gone bad.
Also, due to the rapidly increasing efficiency and decreasing costs of solar cells, it can often be economically viable to replace your array with fresh cells just for the added power output you get. If you took cells form 20 years ago and replace them with current cells you can quadruple your output power for the same area!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EahfGfDdgNY
Not really, but it's a neat alternative for turning solar energy into mechanical power. Achievable (at grossly inefficient power outputs) by the hobbyist without expensive tools or nasty chemicals. Much easier to recycle at the end of a system's useful life.
Similar concerns were raised around solar panels by Michael Moore in a recent documentary, which claimed that the total lifetime cost of a solar-powered society makes these alternative green technologies not really green. See https://medium.com/@tejasgole67/is-michael-moore-right-8603f... and https://medium.com/@tejasgole67/is-michael-moore-right-part-... for a discussion around that.
Ultimately there may be no getting around the fact that we simply need to reduce demand. And reducing demand, if we want to preserve our quality of life, likely means population control.
You can see the whole thing here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zk11vI-7czE
I disagree with the movie's conclusion, which seems identical to yours. We can use tech to keep quality of life high by using responsible and sustainable energy systems like nuclear/wind/solar/hydro.
PoTH hardly even mentioned nuclear, which tears their whole "we must depopulate" narrative apart easily.
Wind Turbine Blades Can’t Be Recycled, So They’re Piling Up in Landfills
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-02-05/wind-turb...
This is wrong, the trucks that bring those blades could well re-take them to recycling plant. It would be a special transport, but a well pre-planned one.
At this point they would have paid for themselves over many times, and would now be generating free electricity, so for most installations there is little point in replacing them.
When you mention after 25 years they would have paid for themselves many times over, based on what criteria? I'd love to revisit this topic -- power costs in Florida are very high.
Edit: Just curious on why the downvotes? Not enough context? Negative sentiment? (not intended, genuinely curious about revisiting solar)
People will point out that it's silly to factor out labor and permitting but those costs drop radically on grid scale 10MW+ systems where as they make up nearly 50% of the cost on a household scale system.
It's a larger 1-story home: we've tried to address insulation, low-e glass, and AC SEER ratings. Working and teaching from home = consistent cooling demands throughout the day, every day.
Either you have a poorly insulated 25k sqft mansion or your neighbors are siphoning off your power for an indoor weed farm.
That system should produce about 10,000 kw*hr of energy over the year, so the payback excluding installation would be under 5 years.
Our home is relatively large (square footage and high ceiling heights compound that) and since we both work and teach at home, the cooling systems are in constant demand.
Appreciate the ballpark figures; time to revisit the idea.
Power /bills/ may be very high (due to hot/humid climate necessitating extensive air conditioning). But a quick google shows me power /rates/ in FL are around $0.11 per kWh - which is very low on a global scale (and on the low end of average for the US[1]). Solar costs are coming down on a per-kW basis, so the per-kWh electricity cost is the one you need to compare to find when it breaks even.
[1] https://www.electricchoice.com/electricity-prices-by-state/
We work and teach from home (pre-Covid) so the cooling systems are in use throughout the day.
Unless they do something foolish like coat the panels in a plastic that degrades under direct sunlight, I don't really see why panels shouldn't last for quite a long time. Does the silicon itself take UV damage or something?
Yes, exactly that. Solar radiation causes crystal defects.
I'm pro solar but it does have a few downsides that we shouldn't ignore.
I sent this to a friend of mine who is an energy expert who reminded me about how terrible coal ash is: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Dan_River_coal_ash_spil...
Here we have to compare solar making large amounts of moderately toxic waste from solar that remains toxic forever vs. nuclear making very small amounts of extremely toxic waste that becomes less toxic over time. Clearly more people dislike nuclear waste, but the E=MC² thing makes it so small that it can be completely internalized.
At the very least, it is valuable to talk about the negative externalities of decarbonizing at scale with solar as we debate the details of the clean energy transition.
None of this sounds like much of a problem in a landfill. I guess some panels might use lead-based solder, but I would be shocked if it’s more than a handful.
If it’s not economical to recycle them, why shouldn’t they go in a landfill?
Glass and silicon are both rocks. Putting them back into the ground isn't going to hurt anything