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Solar panel waste may not be as bad as we thought

fastcompany.com

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

#121

Post by hwillis »

Archelaos wrote: post #118
hwillis wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Solar modules contain lead for soldering Not all of them, and lead is also non-essential. Most solder in other contexts is already lead-free. It's also pretty minor compared to the other sources of lead in our lives already. > some contain cadmium telluride (CdTe) only "thin film" cells, which are virtually obsolete- they're the flexible kind that you get in "cell charging" backpacks and stuff. Price decreases in s…

The reports I quoted in reply to another comment here claimed a rather high market share for CdTe cells and predicted massively increasing volumns in the future. So even if they might become obsolete for "classic" flat panels, they seem to remain with us for "flexible" solutions, arn't they?

The current global solar market is 170+ billion, compared to your reports giving CdTe https://www.fortunebusinessinsights.com/industry-reports/sol...

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

#122

Post by jeffbee »

nautilius wrote: post #23
jeffbee wrote: post #2

"Experts once warned millions of tons of waste from solar panels was on the horizon" Eh, no expert ever warned that. It was always an overblown issue, taken up by bored members of the press with deadlines to meet and column-inches to fill with words, shadow-funded by oil interest astroturf campaigns.

Do you have some resources about recycling of panels? I understand the point of the article is it's no longer the pressing issue it was once considered (by some), but I am curious if it's now just a delayed problem, or if recycling is a solved problem? Thanks!

I don't, and I don't care. I do know that if you took every single solar panel in California (~40GW worth) and just stacked them up 10 meters high, they would only occupy 250 acres. It's a non-problem.

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

#123

Post by Schroedingersat »

thrown_22 wrote: post #53
Schroedingersat wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You forgot to include the other liter of fuel spent extracting, refining, and shipping the first one. Hence 2x. Also coal has double the emissions of oil per kWh so on an energy basis it's 1/4th

Keep moving the goalposts bud. OP made a blatantly false claim. She was wrong. That's it.

Pointing out you're equivocating lifecycle emissions with tailpipe in response to an assertion about energy is just pointing out you haven't reached the goalposts even after moving them.

A tesla 3 (top selling ev) uses about 170Wh/km. From a very low efficiency coal plant including transmission and charging losses (you don't get to double count discharge loss) this would be about 0.6kWh (thermal) or about 170g of CO2e. From a natgas plant it is 90g.

A CX-5 (top selling car) is a bit lighter and gets about 8L/100km. This is about 1 kWh or 2kWh including drilling/refining or roughly 250g of CO2e.

You could correctly argue that teslas are replacing smaller, lighter cars with bigger heavier ones, and that the smaller ones they displace have marginally lower CO2 emissions in spite of using double the energy because oil is lower CO2 than coal, but that's about as far as you can push it. If that was your argument then the solution is LEVs, transit, and bike lanes which is what the environmentalists you're straw manning want instead of most cars.

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

#124

Post by lolinder »

8note wrote: post #94
lolinder wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Burning fuel at a single power station that is reasonably distant from populated areas is far better from a health perspective than tens of thousands of small, poorly-regulated engines burning fuel within 10 yards of people's homes. I would take electric over ICE even if it were 1-to-1 on fuel consumption, just to feel like I can safely breath outside again.

As long as they're still cars, you should keep holding your breath. Tires and breaks still give off the polluting dust, not to mention the noise

Noise from electric cars is practically non-existent compared to cars (particularly trucks, SUVs, and motorcycles). I'm sure the pollution from tires and brakes isn't great, but that's like saying that if we cured cancer people would still die. Duh, but we should still cure cancer.

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

#125

Post by Schroedingersat »

delecti wrote: post #46
mschuster91 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> where people found it wasn’t that hard to extend the life of nuclear reactors a lot longer than originally planned. France is showing right at this moment just how bad an idea that is. Over half their reactors are still down, most because of issues with cracks in pipes.

That's less an inherent problem with extending the reactors' lifespans, and more a problem with all of the reactors being old. They built a bunch of reactors, and then stopped, so now they're all on the same maintenance schedule. If instead they had kept building over time, then they'd have a bunch of new ones, and advance warning to tackle problems those reactors might face eventually . https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki…

This is equivalent to asserting that they have a much shorter useful lifetime and low reliability. If you have to build as many reactors as you already have every 10 years in order to keep the old ones then you're going to run out of concrete or wires to hook them to fairly quickly.

It also has little to do with the shutdowns which skew towards newer plants.

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

#126

Post by Schroedingersat »

Archelaos wrote: post #112
Schroedingersat wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They've been completely abandoned for a while now. If you stack the small portion of CdTe ones neatly somewhere, someone will want the Te soon enough. Lead is already mostly phased out.

This does not seem to be the case. I googled "cdte cells market share" and immediately found a couple of Web-sites that say otherwise (although their numbers differ quite considerably): https://www.marketdataforecast.com/market-reports/cadmium-te... https://www.einnews.com/pr_news/587880725/cadmium-telluride-... https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/as-demand-rises-exp...

So the highest growth projections put them at a small fraction of today's monocrystalline market a few years after it's fairly likely that there'll be yet another technology dominating because it lowers resource requirements?

If you're that worried about a few grams of Cd per kW, please ban them or implement a version of WIEEE. You'll have to ban nuclear control rods and a few other things too.

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

#127

Post by Gare »

reilly3000 wrote: post #84
googlryas wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, at this point in our hyperpartisan world, I expect monsterous FUD about pretty much anything. There was just a small scale war in my city about a proposal to slightly modify the way our library is funded. If that gets people riled up, then one can only imagine what multi trillion dollar industries can stir up.

Public Relations won. Advertising won. Weaponized Infighting is winning. Say the first thing that comes to mind when you think “Coca Cola.” Say it out loud, don’t edit. If you said something about nostalgia or polar bears you would be like most humans around the globe for the past 50+ years. I submit that as my evidence that PR and Advertising are remarkably potent. If you really said something to the effect of “depr…

> Say the first thing that comes to mind when you think “Coca Cola.” Say it out loud, don’t edit.

Sometimes war?

Either I'm a very cynical person or a bigger Rammstein fan than I thought.

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

#128

Post by Schroedingersat »

__pache__ wrote: post #88
Mesopropithecus wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not following, which 1 reliable power system do you mean?

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...

There are roughly 40 million kgs of accessible, usable fissile material (U235 and Pu239) on Earth.

Each kg produces 30-80TJ with maybe another 20 if you spend even more money to scavenge the last little bit via reprocessing. Newer reactors hold about 6 years of fuel and cycle some of it every couple of years.

World energy consumption is approximately 550EJ.

How are you proposing to fuel your reactors more than once?

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

#129

Post by thrown_22 »

hwillis wrote: post #116
thrown_22 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cyanide is just carbon and nitrogen. How could it be possibly toxic?

Elements and chemicals are very different things. Silicon is the #2 most common element on earth and if you smash a bunch of solar panels, they turn into sand when they get wet. Or if you just wait. Even pure silicon metal is totally benign, even in large amounts. Certainly safer than iron, which can kill you in relatively small amounts if it's in a bioavailable form. Silicon is already literally everywhere, in every…

So the asbestos lobby was right and there's nothing dangerous about snorting it. It's after all just a funny shaped silicate that's totally benign.

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

#130

Post by Schroedingersat »

__pache__ wrote: post #74
colordrops wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They also last at least 25 years. There's no way that the waste from the panels is worse than 25 years of CO2 emissions.

wait, why are CO2 emissions "bad?" it might even literally take 20-25 years to "pay off the CO2" used to make, deliver, and install the solar panels... to me it seems like our CO2 emissions are not bad and the effects on climate are very minor. this is playing out in real time as we make dire predictions that never seem to come to fruition. the world is ending in 12 years, said someone popular in ~2016. Well, halfway…

EBPT for PERC panels is 3-12 months. Far lower than nuclear and slightly lower than wind.
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