Great research, Michael. The 'renewable energy market" dynamics have offered a great opportunity for unscrupulous salesmen to over-promise and under-deliver. That is the problem with an emotionally-appealing narrative that lacks a fact basis. The problem that only 5% of EV batteries being recycled is ominous as the electrolyte in lithium-ion batteries is toxic and flammable.
Manufacture, array land footprints and waste disposal life-cycle environmental impacts have been wholly ignored in the rush to "renewable" energy installations.
Your reasoned, well-researched and cited, and always reasonable dissent from contemporary eco-orthodoxy reminds me of something I read last year in a Catholic newsletter I subscribe to: "When being seen choosing sides is easy, we should be wary." (Stephen P. White, The Catholic Thing, April 16, 2020). Too many people are more interested in choosing the "right" side than in doing any actual discernment. Trying to reduce a discipline like climatology to a bumper sticker is not only a fool's errand, but is a slight to climatology. So thank you for your thoughtful research on these issues.
You are reasoning from false premisses. How about, if you think of it like "if zealous believers in Malthus were inventing things to solve problems that didn't exist, what would all those solutions really be accomplishing?". The answer, is depopulating the earth. Making trash pickers in Africa sick, is actually a feature, not a bug.
We are carbon based life forms. We need CO2 in the atmosphere to continue to survive. Going to "zero carbon" is a suicide pact. For us, not them. Of course.
Good luck Michael in your fight against the solar lobby. You are up against the biggest and most powerful corporations in the world. I used to have a dairy farm in Decatur county Georgia which lies just north of Tallahassee, FL. where I now live. Solar entrepreneurs are offering over $700
per acre yearly rents to landowners to lease their for solar panels. This is over 3 times as much
as local farmers can afford to pay. Decatur county ranks second in Georgia for annual crop production mostly peanuts, cotton, corn, tomatoes and pecans Thousands of acres of some
of the most productive irrigated farmland in the world are taken over by solar panels. Pastures and forests are being destroyed as well. The local economy which depends on agriculture will be severely impacted as local farmers lose their leases. The jobs created supplying these farms,
transporting the harvest and working the farm it self will be gone. All the income from the solar
leases will go to a handful of multimillionaire landowners as well as huge tax and zero carbon incentives. All this destruction just to produce a few hundred megawatts of electricity.
This area gets very little sunshine in the summer months of peak demand. Since June 1st
we have had less than 10 days with consistent sunshine. Cloud cover has been
80 per cent or more nearly everyday and we get showers and thunderstorms nearly everyday.
I would be shocked if a 100 megawatt installation could produce 10 megawatts a day in the summer.
So in the not distant future I will see mile after mile of solar ugliness on my drive through
Decatur county rather than mile after mile of pine forests, peanut and tomato fields. It seems
like to go Green we need to eliminate the green landscape we now enjoy. And you could cover the entire county with solar panels and the effect on the Earth's climate would be zero.
Near where we live in Tennessee there is a large coal fired generating station, producing up to 2.47 GW of power into the grid. The plant is dated, plans for its future are under discussion. One path has the plant being replaced with a combined cycle gas turbine, the other path some are advocating is solar. So I was curious as to how much solar it would take to replace the plants output on a cold December morning. I used the NREL PV Watts calculator, to keep the numbers simple I looked at a 1kW scenario, operating 24 hours / day (24 kWh output). To produce this capacity in December would require 10.4kW of PV, this factors in the shorter days and average cloud coverage. I’m not so sure about cloud coverage & storage, however the DNI for our zip code is ~4.7 kWh / m2, and PV Watts assumed 2.89 kWh / m2, which might suggest 40% cloud coverage, which doesn’t seem unusual. So in December, 12 days will see reduced panel output, relying more on stored energy. If we assume on those days panel output is reduced 50%, this might suggest 12 kWh comes from batteries, requiring 144kWh of storage assuming the cloudy days were sequential. These are averages, we don’t want a brown out should there be prolonged periods of cloudy weather, so maybe add a safety factor of 2X, or 288 kWh of storage.
This is for a 1 kW source (like a small generator), scaling this up to the 2.47GW plant, 25.7 gW of PV solar would be required with 711 gWh of storage. I haven’t thought about real estate required, cost, or managing the storm water runoff from such a facility, but this illustrates the challenges of providing reliable base load on a 24/7 basis from a source that has diurnal, seasonal and weather based variability. And we are expecting it to get wetter in our area due to climate change.
"But solar panels cannot be a primary energy source like nuclear, natural gas, or coal, for inherently physical reasons relating to the unreliable and dilute nature of their “fuel,” sunlight. Low power densities must induce higher material intensity and spatial requirements, and thus higher physical costs. "
Your article might be about solar, but the arguments made me accept this too, and the world makes more sense as a result!
Must be aggravating to write an article like this and have it ripped to pieces by people who know what they are talking about. What, did you get four people who agreed with your premise and 40 who proved you wrong? Perhaps you should fire your research staff.
"in contrast to nuclear waste, which is safely stored and never hurts anyone": "Radioactive waste is a huge concern. Waste from nuclear power plants can remain active for hundreds of thousands of years. Currently, much of the radioactive waste from nuclear power plants has been stored at the power plant. Due to space constraints, eventually the radioactive waste will need to be relocated. Plans have been proposed to bury the radioactive waste contained in casks in the Yucca Mountains in Nevada.
There are several issues with burying the radioactive waste. Waste would be transported in large trucks. In the event of an accident, the radioactive waste could possibly leak. Another issue is uncertainty about whether the casks will leak after the waste is buried. The current amount of radioactive waste requiring long-term storage would fill the Yucca Mountains and new sites would need to be found to bury future radioactive waste. There is no current solution to deal with the issue of radioactive waste. Some scientists feel that the idea of building more nuclear power plants and worrying about dealing with the waste later has the potential of a dangerous outcome."
The decline in solar cost blows all of this away. If a person upgrades their solar because it has so improved in cost and quality, this article pretends people don't know how to add to their system, or sell their used panels to someone else. Solar panels in the US are currently lasting 33 years on average and have had an 85% cost decrease in a decade. Now a new US program intends to cut the cost in half in the next decade and increase that life expectancy to 50 years.
The great wave of retirements will be in the coming decades, recycling resources are, and will be, coming along to deal with this as volume goes up. I'll give five examples from around the world.
-
USA
1) Game-changing solar company recycles old panels into new ones
The first wave of solar panels is reaching the end of their useful lives. Now they can become new solar panels instead of trash.
"...At a recycling plant in Ohio, next to the company’s manufacturing facility, First Solar uses custom technology to disassemble and recycle old panels, recovering 90% of the materials inside. It runs similar recycling systems in Germany and Malaysia.
"...The E.U. requires solar producers to recycle products, and similar laws are in the works in some other parts of the world, including Japan and India.
"...By recycling materials, the total environmental impact of each panel drops. The original solar panel, ...might last 30 or even 40 years. If 95% of the semiconductor material can be recovered and put back in a new panel, and the cycle continues to repeat, the original material could stay in use as long as 1,200 years.”
2) First Solar began investing in recycling and established the first voluntary global panel recycling program in 2005. They now have recycling facilities in the US, Malaysia and Germany and offer customers a service to recover and process panels globally. Their technology involves a continuous flow process and claims to result in the recovery and recycling of over 90% of the semiconductor material and approximately 90% of the glass used in its panels. This material is then re-used in new First Solar modules and for new glass or rubber products8.”
4) Italy: Mechanical technique for PV module recycling
“An Italian consortium has developed a panel recycling process that can recover up to 99% of raw materials. The developers claim their technique takes only 40 seconds to fully recycle a standard panel, depending on size and recycling site conditions.”
5) Australia: One of Australia’s first solar PV recycling facilities is up and running in Melbourne’s north, The plant will recycle 100% of end-of-life solar PV modules and all associated materials recovered – inverters, cables, optimisers, mounting structures – using no chemicals.
The final components are:
- High grade aluminium
- High grade silica dust
- The silica cells which will be reused by some manufacturers.
- Copper
- PVC
- Silver
100% of the materials separated from this process will be reused and given a second life. All inverters, rail components, cable can be processed in this facility.”
Great research, Michael. The 'renewable energy market" dynamics have offered a great opportunity for unscrupulous salesmen to over-promise and under-deliver. That is the problem with an emotionally-appealing narrative that lacks a fact basis. The problem that only 5% of EV batteries being recycled is ominous as the electrolyte in lithium-ion batteries is toxic and flammable.
Manufacture, array land footprints and waste disposal life-cycle environmental impacts have been wholly ignored in the rush to "renewable" energy installations.
Los Angeles Ecopolitics Columnist
Your reasoned, well-researched and cited, and always reasonable dissent from contemporary eco-orthodoxy reminds me of something I read last year in a Catholic newsletter I subscribe to: "When being seen choosing sides is easy, we should be wary." (Stephen P. White, The Catholic Thing, April 16, 2020). Too many people are more interested in choosing the "right" side than in doing any actual discernment. Trying to reduce a discipline like climatology to a bumper sticker is not only a fool's errand, but is a slight to climatology. So thank you for your thoughtful research on these issues.
You are reasoning from false premisses. How about, if you think of it like "if zealous believers in Malthus were inventing things to solve problems that didn't exist, what would all those solutions really be accomplishing?". The answer, is depopulating the earth. Making trash pickers in Africa sick, is actually a feature, not a bug.
We are carbon based life forms. We need CO2 in the atmosphere to continue to survive. Going to "zero carbon" is a suicide pact. For us, not them. Of course.
Good luck Michael in your fight against the solar lobby. You are up against the biggest and most powerful corporations in the world. I used to have a dairy farm in Decatur county Georgia which lies just north of Tallahassee, FL. where I now live. Solar entrepreneurs are offering over $700
per acre yearly rents to landowners to lease their for solar panels. This is over 3 times as much
as local farmers can afford to pay. Decatur county ranks second in Georgia for annual crop production mostly peanuts, cotton, corn, tomatoes and pecans Thousands of acres of some
of the most productive irrigated farmland in the world are taken over by solar panels. Pastures and forests are being destroyed as well. The local economy which depends on agriculture will be severely impacted as local farmers lose their leases. The jobs created supplying these farms,
transporting the harvest and working the farm it self will be gone. All the income from the solar
leases will go to a handful of multimillionaire landowners as well as huge tax and zero carbon incentives. All this destruction just to produce a few hundred megawatts of electricity.
This area gets very little sunshine in the summer months of peak demand. Since June 1st
we have had less than 10 days with consistent sunshine. Cloud cover has been
80 per cent or more nearly everyday and we get showers and thunderstorms nearly everyday.
I would be shocked if a 100 megawatt installation could produce 10 megawatts a day in the summer.
So in the not distant future I will see mile after mile of solar ugliness on my drive through
Decatur county rather than mile after mile of pine forests, peanut and tomato fields. It seems
like to go Green we need to eliminate the green landscape we now enjoy. And you could cover the entire county with solar panels and the effect on the Earth's climate would be zero.
Near where we live in Tennessee there is a large coal fired generating station, producing up to 2.47 GW of power into the grid. The plant is dated, plans for its future are under discussion. One path has the plant being replaced with a combined cycle gas turbine, the other path some are advocating is solar. So I was curious as to how much solar it would take to replace the plants output on a cold December morning. I used the NREL PV Watts calculator, to keep the numbers simple I looked at a 1kW scenario, operating 24 hours / day (24 kWh output). To produce this capacity in December would require 10.4kW of PV, this factors in the shorter days and average cloud coverage. I’m not so sure about cloud coverage & storage, however the DNI for our zip code is ~4.7 kWh / m2, and PV Watts assumed 2.89 kWh / m2, which might suggest 40% cloud coverage, which doesn’t seem unusual. So in December, 12 days will see reduced panel output, relying more on stored energy. If we assume on those days panel output is reduced 50%, this might suggest 12 kWh comes from batteries, requiring 144kWh of storage assuming the cloudy days were sequential. These are averages, we don’t want a brown out should there be prolonged periods of cloudy weather, so maybe add a safety factor of 2X, or 288 kWh of storage.
This is for a 1 kW source (like a small generator), scaling this up to the 2.47GW plant, 25.7 gW of PV solar would be required with 711 gWh of storage. I haven’t thought about real estate required, cost, or managing the storm water runoff from such a facility, but this illustrates the challenges of providing reliable base load on a 24/7 basis from a source that has diurnal, seasonal and weather based variability. And we are expecting it to get wetter in our area due to climate change.
solar panels don't convert photons into electrons, they just make already existing electrons move.
"But solar panels cannot be a primary energy source like nuclear, natural gas, or coal, for inherently physical reasons relating to the unreliable and dilute nature of their “fuel,” sunlight. Low power densities must induce higher material intensity and spatial requirements, and thus higher physical costs. "
Your article might be about solar, but the arguments made me accept this too, and the world makes more sense as a result!
Total bullshit.
1) panels I bought in 1992 are still working.
2) The glass is high quality and can be reused as is in new panels.
3) the aluminum frames can be reused or recycled.
Must be aggravating to write an article like this and have it ripped to pieces by people who know what they are talking about. What, did you get four people who agreed with your premise and 40 who proved you wrong? Perhaps you should fire your research staff.
LOVE the Photo of SCAM GUY, sums up Solar PV SCAM
"in contrast to nuclear waste, which is safely stored and never hurts anyone": "Radioactive waste is a huge concern. Waste from nuclear power plants can remain active for hundreds of thousands of years. Currently, much of the radioactive waste from nuclear power plants has been stored at the power plant. Due to space constraints, eventually the radioactive waste will need to be relocated. Plans have been proposed to bury the radioactive waste contained in casks in the Yucca Mountains in Nevada.
There are several issues with burying the radioactive waste. Waste would be transported in large trucks. In the event of an accident, the radioactive waste could possibly leak. Another issue is uncertainty about whether the casks will leak after the waste is buried. The current amount of radioactive waste requiring long-term storage would fill the Yucca Mountains and new sites would need to be found to bury future radioactive waste. There is no current solution to deal with the issue of radioactive waste. Some scientists feel that the idea of building more nuclear power plants and worrying about dealing with the waste later has the potential of a dangerous outcome."
https://sciencing.com/nuclear-energy-affect-environment-4566966.html
The decline in solar cost blows all of this away. If a person upgrades their solar because it has so improved in cost and quality, this article pretends people don't know how to add to their system, or sell their used panels to someone else. Solar panels in the US are currently lasting 33 years on average and have had an 85% cost decrease in a decade. Now a new US program intends to cut the cost in half in the next decade and increase that life expectancy to 50 years.
The great wave of retirements will be in the coming decades, recycling resources are, and will be, coming along to deal with this as volume goes up. I'll give five examples from around the world.
-
USA
1) Game-changing solar company recycles old panels into new ones
The first wave of solar panels is reaching the end of their useful lives. Now they can become new solar panels instead of trash.
"...At a recycling plant in Ohio, next to the company’s manufacturing facility, First Solar uses custom technology to disassemble and recycle old panels, recovering 90% of the materials inside. It runs similar recycling systems in Germany and Malaysia.
"...The E.U. requires solar producers to recycle products, and similar laws are in the works in some other parts of the world, including Japan and India.
"...By recycling materials, the total environmental impact of each panel drops. The original solar panel, ...might last 30 or even 40 years. If 95% of the semiconductor material can be recovered and put back in a new panel, and the cycle continues to repeat, the original material could stay in use as long as 1,200 years.”
https://www.fastcompany.com/90562056/this-game-changing-solar-company-recycles-old-panels-into-new-ones?
2) First Solar began investing in recycling and established the first voluntary global panel recycling program in 2005. They now have recycling facilities in the US, Malaysia and Germany and offer customers a service to recover and process panels globally. Their technology involves a continuous flow process and claims to result in the recovery and recycling of over 90% of the semiconductor material and approximately 90% of the glass used in its panels. This material is then re-used in new First Solar modules and for new glass or rubber products8.”
https://www.newenergysolar.com.au/renewable-insights/renewable-energy/solar-panel-recycling?
3) Canada: Solar X revolutionizes the solar industry in Canada with the launch of its new solar panel reuse + recycle program
https://pvbuzz.com/solar-x-launch-solar-panel-reuse-recycle-program/?
4) Italy: Mechanical technique for PV module recycling
“An Italian consortium has developed a panel recycling process that can recover up to 99% of raw materials. The developers claim their technique takes only 40 seconds to fully recycle a standard panel, depending on size and recycling site conditions.”
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2020/04/01/a-mechanical-technique-for-pv-module-recycling/
5) Australia: One of Australia’s first solar PV recycling facilities is up and running in Melbourne’s north, The plant will recycle 100% of end-of-life solar PV modules and all associated materials recovered – inverters, cables, optimisers, mounting structures – using no chemicals.
The final components are:
- High grade aluminium
- High grade silica dust
- The silica cells which will be reused by some manufacturers.
- Copper
- PVC
- Silver
100% of the materials separated from this process will be reused and given a second life. All inverters, rail components, cable can be processed in this facility.”
https://reneweconomy.com.au/australias-first-solar-panel-recycling-plant-swings-into-action/
Etc.
Recycling solar panels must be a REQUIREMENT and it should be paid for by the manufacturers.