Solar panel waste may not be as bad as we thought • Hacker News Board

Re: Solar panel waste may not be as bad as we thought

#101

Post by thrown_22 » Sun, Nov 13, 2022, 10:11 PM UTC

hgomersall wrote: post #55

thrown_22 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>- electric cars are still burning fossil fuels cause powerplants burn fossil fuels (yeah, but electric cars go ~2 times further on 1 liter of fuel even if all our power came from fossil fuels which it doesn't) No they don't. When you add the efficiency of the grid, the charging station, charging the battery and discharging the battery burning a lump of coal to power your Tesla has _no_ advantage over burning a bottl…

Let's consider the numbers... A decent modern combined cycle gas turbine can achieve 60% efficiency, so let's take 50% to be conservative. Transmission losses are generally better than 15%, so that leaves a combined efficiency of 42.5%. A pessimistic charge/discharge efficiency for lithium ion would be 80% and I'd expect the charger to be 90% efficient, which gives us a total (pessimistic) efficiency of 31%. An inter…

You're missing the engine efficiency. Which is another ~90% efficiency process. That brings it down to be lower than an ice.

Re: Solar panel waste may not be as bad as we thought

#102

Post by kragen » Sun, Nov 13, 2022, 10:13 PM UTC

i explained this in a comment thread here 3 months ago

> your concern is like a kid worrying that if his parents buy him a lollipop they won't be able to afford this month's rent…not completely disconnected from reality but it's way out of proportion

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32201803

i touched on the points of longevity, total scale, recyclability, toxicity, and land use, and i calculated that the solar panels needed to power the entire world's total energy use would fit into a single reservoir in andhra pradesh

i've been talking about this for years

too bad fast company reporters don't read hn threads, dan gearino could have avoided embarrassing himself in his february article for inside climate news

commenting here is a fucking waste of time, and so is reading fast company or inside climate news

Re: Solar panel waste may not be as bad as we thought

#103

Post by __pache__ » Sun, Nov 13, 2022, 10:16 PM UTC

derriz wrote: post #100

__pache__ wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any. Solar/Wind, for example, are not reliable. Nuclear, for example, is reliable. Instead of having Solar/Wind with batteries and all this nonsense, along with Nuclear for its stability, just skip the nonsense and go straight to Nuclear. Solar/Wind are terrible...

You can no more rely on nuclear or coal generation for your electricity without back-up than you can on wind or solar. A nuclear plant in the US is off-line for 29 days a year on average according to the EIA. So you still need back-up for your "reliable" nuclear, unless you want people using candles for nearly a month a year. All generation technologies are intermittent - they're just intermittent in different ways.

What is your argument...? Are you admitting "being intermittent is bad," while ignoring Solar is intermittent like 70% of the time vs 10% of the time for Nuclear?

...great argument?

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=37252

doesn't seem like you interpreted this correctly, seems bad faith for sure.

> A scheduled shutdown of a nuclear power plant is generally timed to coincide with the plant’s refueling cycle. Nuclear power plants typically refuel every 18 to 24 months, often during the fall and spring when electricity demand is lower.

It's shut down every ~2 years, not "every year."

> _During the past six years, average refueling outages have become shorter, decreasing from an average of 46 days in 2012 to 34 days in 2018._

They're getting better and better.

So adjust the above 10% downtime number I gave, Nuclear is down ~3-5% of the time it sounds like. With improvements, this can probably get down to 1%. Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

EDIT: not to mention this is an implementation problem. You can have multiple small reactors that never need maintenance where you just hot swap an old reactor for a new one.

https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/what-are-small-modular-...

The anti-science crowd is nuts on this stuff.. it's not _that hard..._

Re: Solar panel waste may not be as bad as we thought

#104

Post by derriz » Sun, Nov 13, 2022, 10:21 PM UTC

ajuc wrote: post #14

monero-xmr wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On HN I find it precisely the opposite - if you point out flaws with solar, electric cars, wind, self driving cars, etc. you take a lot of downvotes

One of the reasons is that a lot of these downsides are overplayed, based on long-obsolete data or false altogether. For some examples: - electric cars are still burning fossil fuels cause powerplants burn fossil fuels (yeah, but electric cars go ~2 times further on 1 liter of fuel even if all our power came from fossil fuels which it doesn't) - rare earth minerals are limited which means we can't have everybody driv…

100% isn't the goal.. yet. Nor is it practical for many countries. But, getting to 70-80% renewables with current technology is feasible and economic for nearly all countries. The balance to be provided by modern (natural) gas turbine generation.

There's no need to slow down getting to 70-80% renewables because we're unsure how to cover the last 20%. The latter is a problem for future decades.

Re: Solar panel waste may not be as bad as we thought

#105

Post by kragen » Sun, Nov 13, 2022, 10:22 PM UTC

ummonk wrote: post #90

howmayiannoyyou wrote: post #19

Recycling solar panels is tough because glass fines are created, often inseparable from items that adhere to them. Those fines don't currently have secondary demand and they're a health and possibly environmental hazard. The CAPEX for recycling panels is high because size reduction and separation requires expensive (and expensive to maintain) equipment. I expect companies like American Battery Recycling, et. al., to…

Price falling, sure, but I don’t see how efficiency rising would lead to more solar panel waste down the road.

jevons paradox

Re: Solar panel waste may not be as bad as we thought

#106

Post by jillesvangurp » Sun, Nov 13, 2022, 10:26 PM UTC

nostromo wrote: post #33

Aren’t they mostly silicon and recyclable metals? If so, who cares about the waste? It depends on what’s in the waste that matters, not its raw volume. The materials used in solar panels are both highly recyclable and environmentally benign, a great combination.

Indeed. Compared to other the garbage that people put in landfills right now, this is nothing.

Of course this article is a clever bit of FUD in disguise. By taking the problem seriously and then presenting a solution to the problem that never was real to begin with:

‘We’re gonna have (tens of millions) of metric tons of waste from PV. We’re all gonna die,’”

Actual quote from the article to convince us that there apparently are people that believe that. Classic FUD move. It's really, really, bad but the scientists are on it. So you can stop worrying now. But you had good reason to be worried and you should continue to be worried. That's the message.

Except of course, there never was a problem to worry about. The purpose of this article is perpetuating the myth that there was.

It's a nice business challenge how to recover some valuable metals from solar panels. And several companies are on that; as you would expect. But if they fail, we basically dump some inert material in a landfill. Not a big deal. People dump far worse things into landfills already.

Re: Solar panel waste may not be as bad as we thought

#107

Post by recycledmatt » Sun, Nov 13, 2022, 10:30 PM UTC

Scoundreller wrote: post #93

Schroedingersat wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Al, Si and trace amounts of silver have no health or environmental hazard, and the silver is the valuable bit. Please stop gas lighting based on obsolete technology that was only briefly popular in one country.

Inhaling solid $anything dust is a health and environment hazard. Si dust probably isn't asbestos bad, but wouldn't want to breathe it in either.

These will go into auto shredders (for the most part) which have dust management plants

Re: Solar panel waste may not be as bad as we thought

#108

Post by derriz » Sun, Nov 13, 2022, 10:30 PM UTC

__pache__ wrote: post #103

derriz wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can no more rely on nuclear or coal generation for your electricity without back-up than you can on wind or solar. A nuclear plant in the US is off-line for 29 days a year on average according to the EIA. So you still need back-up for your "reliable" nuclear, unless you want people using candles for nearly a month a year. All generation technologies are intermittent - they're just intermittent in different ways.

What is your argument...? Are you admitting "being intermittent is bad," while ignoring Solar is intermittent like 70% of the time vs 10% of the time for Nuclear? ...great argument? https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=37252 doesn't seem like you interpreted this correctly, seems bad faith for sure. > A scheduled shutdown of a nuclear power plant is generally timed to coincide with the plant’s refueling cy…

I though my argument was clear - that you need back-up for nuclear power also?

You accuse me of bad faith for quoting a number which includes both unscheduled and scheduled shutdowns by comparing with a number which only include the latter.

And I don't even understand where this is supposed to be going because even if plants never had unscheduled stoppages, you'd still need back-up.

But anyway, I find your tone overly aggressive. So it's unlikely that any discussion will be productive.

Re: Solar panel waste may not be as bad as we thought

#109

Post by recycledmatt » Sun, Nov 13, 2022, 10:30 PM UTC

howmayiannoyyou wrote: post #19

Recycling solar panels is tough because glass fines are created, often inseparable from items that adhere to them. Those fines don't currently have secondary demand and they're a health and possibly environmental hazard. The CAPEX for recycling panels is high because size reduction and separation requires expensive (and expensive to maintain) equipment. I expect companies like American Battery Recycling, et. al., to…

They can recover the aluminum fraction with an Eddy Current. The panel becomes Adc or land fill

Re: Solar panel waste may not be as bad as we thought

#110

Post by recycledmatt » Sun, Nov 13, 2022, 10:32 PM UTC

If you’re trying to recycle 100%, this is an expensive and hard to handle stream. If you’re cool pulling the aluminum and Alternative Daily Cover / landfill the rest, it’s not that bad and the infrastructure can handle it / exists.