Solar panels are starting to die, leaving behind toxic trash

https://www.wired.com/story/solar-panels-are-starting-to-die-leaving-behind-toxic-trash/

by jocker12 • 6 years ago

141 156 6 years ago

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.

Still less toxic than coal.

aidenn0• 6 years ago

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.

jabirali2• 6 years ago

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.

refurb• 6 years ago

Anything organic.

Apply as much energy, heat and oxygen you want to mercury and it’s still mercury.

toast0• 6 years ago

You can bombard it with neutrons to produce (radioactive) gold, though.

https://journals.aps.org/pr/abstract/10.1103/PhysRev.60.473 (1941)

baybal25• 6 years ago

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.

casefields• 6 years ago

California Department of Toxic Substances Control: https://dtsc.ca.gov/solarpanels/

yorwba• 6 years ago

Q: How are solar panels hazardous?
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.

hamandcheese• 6 years ago

“This product is known to the state of California to cause cancer.”

kube-system3• 6 years ago

Can mechanically damaged cells be reclaimed, and/or is the scrap value of cells high enough to encourage them to be removed gently?

baybal25• 6 years ago

Mechanically damaged cell cannot be reclaimed. Cut, or non standard sized cells are likely to be going into smelter too.

pjc50• 6 years ago

You could just chuck them back in the furnace, I suppose: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czochralski_method .. but that's no better than using sand.

biophysboy2• 6 years ago

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?

noscrewstoyous2• 6 years ago

they will not (have panels, faced multiple hail storms)

kube-system3• 6 years ago

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.

dapids• 6 years ago

You know, that would be a very serious design flaw of they just broke like that. Hence the reason they are weatherproof...

The solar cells themselves are usually quite delicate, but the surrounding material keeps them safe in the case of weatherproof ones.

johnconnolly• 6 years ago

From a solar installer in Colorado: https://blog.namastesolar.com/hail-solar-panels-how-much-hai....

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.

agumonkey3• 6 years ago

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.

baybal25• 6 years ago

P.S the company that recycles mono-si cells: http://www.wurisolar.com/

pfdietz8• 6 years ago

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.

iamericfletcher• 6 years ago

" 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.

dimitrios1• 6 years ago

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?

CuriousCosmic2• 6 years ago

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.

lima• 6 years ago

That's how 99% of PV installations in Germany work. There's two meters and surplus energy during the day is sold to the power company.

Self sufficiency isn't the goal and makes no sense even with batteries getting cheaper.

noscrewstoyous2• 6 years ago

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

trenchgun• 6 years ago

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.

thetinguy• 6 years ago

Solar panels still use leaded solder?

seventytwo• 6 years ago

Not the ones manufactured today, but the ones on the article are 30 or 40 years old, so many of those might have had leaded solder.

samatman3• 6 years ago

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.

In short, the article is clickbait.

kube-system3• 6 years ago

Most leaded solder regulations apply to consumer electronics, don’t they? I industrial uses are usually exempt.

https://www.rohsguide.com/rohs-categories.htm

andys627• 6 years ago

Just remember that the greenest kilowatt hour is the kilowatt hour never produced.

pas• 6 years ago

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.

option4• 6 years ago

Of those produced, statistically, nuclear is both cleanest and safest [1]

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

avmich• 6 years ago

Until nuclear waste is taken into account (specifically, its radiotoxicity).

maxov• 6 years ago

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.

znpy• 6 years ago

Yeah, but go tell the people in Fukushima.

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.

sunstone2• 6 years ago

Unfunded externalities.

grawprog• 6 years ago

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.

Tade0• 6 years ago

True, but no other energy source has a mode of failure that makes swathes of land unusable for essentially forever.

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.

nix23• 6 years ago

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?

With nuclear....that's the dirty part of it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining

Taek• 6 years ago

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.

anticensor2• 6 years ago

Energy efficiency is also important. Otherwise, you will lose galaxies worth of energy without even an opportunity to use.

acituan• 6 years ago

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)

crispyporkbites• 6 years ago

Except in the case of solar, the energy has already been produced by the sun and we are failing to capture it and put it to good use

moneytide1• 6 years ago

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?

jeffbee4• 6 years ago

PV: By 2050, 6 million metric tons of pre-vitrified, almost perfectly inert and easily recycled "waste" material that had a 50-year service life.

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.

hamilyon2• 6 years ago

Comparing the problem at hand to other problems isn't going to make it tiny little bit less.

Even coal doesn't necessarily produce waste. It is our choice not to capture waste/harmful byproducts makes it so dangerous and "bad".

CuriousCosmic2• 6 years ago

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.

petersellers• 6 years ago

Not sure what you mean there. Everything I've read about "clean" coal seemed like greenwashing to me.

Is there a working example of any of these perceived waste capture mechanisms? How much more expensive are they to operate?

jeffbee4• 6 years ago

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.

azinman2• 6 years ago

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?

agumonkey3• 6 years ago

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).

Lastly there's the resin and framing.

me_me_me• 6 years ago

which is in part why so many are made in China

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.

femto113• 6 years ago

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.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-02-05/wind-turb...

epistasis3• 6 years ago

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... )

acidburnNSA12• 6 years ago

In this case, it's probably a response to the review paper that was recently published [1].

[1] Tao, Major challenges and opportunities in silicon solar module recycling (July 2020) https://doi.org/10.1002/pip.3316

gridlockd• 6 years ago

This ignores that coal actually contributes a meaningful amount of electricity around the clock.

By the way, 100ppm of mercury or 10ppm of uranium aren't that high, you can find that in nature as well.

ben_w4• 6 years ago

Fun fact: renewables produce more electricity than coal in the UK, even though the UK is worse for solar than anywhere in the contiguous USA.

https://amp.ft.com/content/a05d1dd4-dddd-11e9-9743-db5a37048...

https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/1355/measuring-sola...

WWLink2• 6 years ago

"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.

paul_f• 6 years ago

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?

drukenemo• 6 years ago

It depends on how it’s disposed, doesn’t it? Uranium and mercury are naturally occurring elements.

jhayward2• 6 years ago

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.

CamperBob2• 6 years ago

Not in the air and water, they're not.

downrightmike• 6 years ago

Wired probably took money to write this smear campaign. They haven't been a credible source for a very long time.

robotbikes• 6 years ago

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.

sunstone2• 6 years ago

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.

osamagirl692• 6 years ago

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!

_iyig• 6 years ago

The Stirling engine's time has finally come! :)

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.

colechristensen• 6 years ago

The word toxic has become a great indicator for bullshit.

throwawaysea• 6 years ago

Wind turbines also suffer from a similar problem. After some number of years, they just get landfilled. See https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-02-05/wind-turb... or https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2020-02-06/wind-turbi... for more on that.

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.

acidburnNSA12• 6 years ago

The Moore Documentary got lots of flack but does raise some pretty good points, particularly about combustion of biofuel.

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.

akerro• 6 years ago

That's not the only "clean" energy that's hard to keep for long with low costs:

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...

anticensor2• 6 years ago

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.

goda90• 6 years ago

An article on alternative blade materials: https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2019/06/wooden-wind-turbines...

Nasrudith• 6 years ago

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.

pfdietz8• 6 years ago

I"m pretty sure one could cut those expired turbine blades into short pieces if they were too large.

fyfy18• 6 years ago

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.

vz85• 6 years ago

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)

shiftpgdn2• 6 years ago

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.

osamagirl692• 6 years ago

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.

SECProto2• 6 years ago

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.

[1] https://www.electricchoice.com/electricity-prices-by-state/

liability• 6 years ago

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?

baybal25• 6 years ago

Does the silicon itself take UV damage or something?

Yes, exactly that. Solar radiation causes crystal defects.

2OEH8eoCRo0• 6 years ago

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.

sh1mmer• 6 years ago

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.

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...

acidburnNSA12• 6 years ago

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.

beervirus2• 6 years ago

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?

acidburnNSA12• 6 years ago

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.

beervirus2• 6 years ago

In that case, recycling them should be a money saver, and people should do it for economic reasons.

jokoon• 6 years ago

I wonder how many solar panels + storage you need versus your average nuclear plant

throwaway189262• 6 years ago

Uh aren't solar panels mostly glass and silicon? The article says silicon is "valuable" for recycling. It's not. It's sand, it's worthless.

Glass and silicon are both rocks. Putting them back into the ground isn't going to hurt anything

phendrenad22• 6 years ago

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?

pfdietz8• 6 years ago

Which chemicals are those?

Solar panels are starting to die, leaving behind toxic trash

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