Here’s a disturbing bit of news. Discarded solar panels are becoming an environmental hazard in China. From Daily Caller:
Solar panels use hazardous materials, like sulfuric acid and phosphine gas, in the manufacturing process that makes them hard to recycle. Solar panels also have relatively short operational lifespans and can’t be stored in a landfill without protections against contamination.
Solar panels create 300 times more toxic waste per unit of electricity generated than nuclear power plants, according to research by the green group Environmental Progress. Solar panels use heavy metals, including lead, chromium and cadmium, which can harm the environment. The hazards of nuclear waste are well known and can be planned for, but very little has been done to mitigate solar waste issues.
Not only is the manufacturing process for solar panels problematic:
The net impact of solar panels actually temporarily increased carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, due to how much energy is used in their construction, a study published in December 2016 concluded. The solar industry has been “a temporary net emitter of greenhouse gas emissions,†and more modern solar panels have a smaller adverse environmental impact than older models. Scientists estimated that by 2018 at the latest, the solar industry as a whole could have a net positive environmental impact.
but the sheer accumulation of discarded panels is becoming an issue as well:
China has more solar power plants than any other country, operating roughly twice as many solar panels as the U.S. with no plans on how to dispose of the old panels that break down.
“It will explode with full force in two or three decades and wreck the environment, if the estimate is correct,†Tian Min, general manager of a Chinese recycling company, told The South China Morning Post. “This is a huge amount of waste and they are not easy to recycle.â€
There could be 20 million metric tons of solar panel waste, or 2,000 times the weight of the Eiffel Tower, by 2050 according to Lu Fang, the secretary general of solar power at the China Renewable Energy Society.
I’m not quite sure how to react to all of this. It seems to me that there are actually multiple issues to consider: degradation rate, failure rate, and obsolescence. The prevailing wisdom is that solar panels produce about 1% less energy per year of use, usually expressed as at the end of 20 years a panel will produce 80% of the energy it did originally.
But there’s also a failure rate. Cells fail. Physical damage can cause panels to become inoperative. They can just become inoperative for other reasons. I don’t really have a handle on that failure rate but as the number in use rises it clearly becomes an issue.
Finally, there’s obsolescence. How many of you are using the cellphone or PC that you used 20 years ago? Electromechanical devices like the old dial phones had very long lifespans. Do electropholtaic devices more closely resemble electromechanical devices or electronic devices? At some point does continued use become uneconomical compared to replacement?
IMO we shouldn’t be buying solar panels from China for a whole host of reasons among them that China does not have the civil infrastructure to deal with its own environmental problems. It’s also clear that as the tonnage of solar panels in use rises we should be thinking about whole lifecycle issues in solar panel use.
The corn fuel apologist in me often wonders what a study would look like if researchers used the same rigor (a.k.a. putting thumb on the scale) in dealing with clean energy as they do with ethanol. It all entails industrial processes to one degree or another. The last ethanol study I saw attributed approximately half of the negative environmental impacts from the nature of the fuel source used in distillation (natural gas vs. coal). I understand the point, but it seems to be more about the nature of the local power supply than ethanol itself, or to put it simply, the environmental issue is with coal-based ethanol production. Doesn’t the same analysis apply to wind turbines and solar panels?
That’s what I call “directed research” or “advocacy research”—research that’s intended to prove an outcome rather than reveal the empirical facts. It should be kept in mind that not all research is directed research. For example, the study commissioned by the city of Seattle on their $15 minimum wage and which found that it had likely hurt the people it was intended to help was not advocacy research but the counter-study that found the opposite was.
A lot of the research on hot-button issues is advocacy research. Sadly, IMO.
Somewhat related to your points on technological lifespan, I attended a seminar a couple of years ago that included speakers on legal issues pertaining to wind farms. Illinois wind generators are typically required to post financial assurance to guarantee that the turbines, roads, transformers and power lines will be properly removed at the end of life. I don’t recall the accepted time period, but perhaps 50 years?
And the way wind turbines are sited is entirely the judgment of the generator. So while farmers would love to see income generated from a poor patch of clayish sand, the generator purchases an option to explore and locate the very best place on the farm or groups of farms to place the structures. When they build they permanent displace agricultural production within their footprint, and depending on the extent of any foundation or compaction, damage to soil productivity may essentially be permanent.
Obviously the farmer is not being forced to make this decision, but again would love to see the same rigor given to environmental assessments of wind energy.
I’d really love to see a 3D-unprinting technology developed. Some sort of nanotechnology that breaks up circuit boards or trash or other disorganized piles of stuff and transports individual atoms or molecules to heaps of organized material — a thimble’s worth of gold here, a quart of bakelite there, pencil-thick lengths of aluminum over there …. It’d dispose of trash, sure. And clean up land fills and environmental disasters. And maybe be a low-residue method of mining.
Of course, nanotechnology is an old fashioned notion that hasn’t gone beyond the talk-shop phase in thirty years, so there’s no great likelihood of doing this in the US. Maybe the Chinese can figure out how to make a few bucks or yuan from it some day.