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

#151

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Nov 14, 2022, 1:36 AM UTC

Schroedingersat wrote: post #128

__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...

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?

[deleted]

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

#152

Post by solardev » Mon, Nov 14, 2022, 1:40 AM UTC

3D30497420 wrote: post #114

jillesvangurp wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 appa…

I think this is taking an overly critical view of the article. I did a very quick search and this HBR article, which makes it sound like solar panel waste is expected to be a significant problem, was the top result: https://hbr.org/2021/06/the-dark-side-of-solar-power So clearly some people, including presumably some prominent ones, are saying this will be a problem. So I'd say it is good that there is data to addres…

Why would you consider HBR an authority on waste stream issues?

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

#153

Post by therealdrag0 » Mon, Nov 14, 2022, 1:56 AM UTC

cjlars wrote: post #5

>The report projected that the United States would have a cumulative total of 7.5 to 10 million metric tons of solar panel waste in 2050. This compares to 292 million tons of total landfill waste in 2018 alone [1], putting solar panel waste on the order of 0.1% of total waste produced in the US between now and 2050. [1] https://www.epa.gov/facts-and-figures-about-materials-waste-...

Proportion of total is interesting, but less interesting IMO then comparison with other energy producers. Kinda like how we have kWh per square km, would be nice to have kWh per X and Y unit of waste.

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

#154

Post by nl » Mon, Nov 14, 2022, 1:58 AM UTC

solardev wrote: post #152

3D30497420 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is taking an overly critical view of the article. I did a very quick search and this HBR article, which makes it sound like solar panel waste is expected to be a significant problem, was the top result: https://hbr.org/2021/06/the-dark-side-of-solar-power So clearly some people, including presumably some prominent ones, are saying this will be a problem. So I'd say it is good that there is data to addres…

Why would you consider HBR an authority on waste stream issues?

HBR is a pretty reasonable consensus view of what business leaders in the US are thinking.

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

#155

Post by solardev » Mon, Nov 14, 2022, 2:10 AM UTC

nl wrote: post #154

solardev wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you consider HBR an authority on waste stream issues?

HBR is a pretty reasonable consensus view of what business leaders in the US are thinking.

Are business leaders the people best equipped to evaluate environmental issues, especially ones that may have a conflict of interest with their existing investments?

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

#156

Post by Schroedingersat » Mon, Nov 14, 2022, 2:20 AM UTC

thrown_22 wrote: post #141

Schroedingersat wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 CO2…

You're ignoring what it takes to bring the coal to the powerplant too. OP was making the point that boiler to wheels efficiency of electrics is higher than ices. It isn't when you factor in all the conversion losses. It's a really simple point that battery zealots fail to grasp.

> You're ignoring what it takes to bring the coal to the powerplant too.

908g/kWh is the mine to wall socket emissions figure I was using. Do you have a better supported one?

https://insideevs.com/news/347916/tesla-model-3-epa-energy-c...

In EPA tests the tesla from the wall uses about 260Wh/km. Real world reports say range is from 80% to 110% of claimed, so we'll bump it up to 300Wh/km

Our Mazda gets 8L/100km claimed (over 9 real world https://www.fuelly.com/car/mazda/cx-5) or 665Wh/km. A Civic is about the same real world if you wanted to compare that.

If we burn that exact same gasolene (probably the most energy intensive fuel to extract) in a 58% efficient CCGT and use the 6% transmission loss of the US grid we get 330Wh.

If you stop taking all of your rounding in the direction that favours the ICE you get around 240Wh for the EV vs 400Wh for the ICE. An Ioniq is slightly more efficient again.

Even a fully fossil fueled grid requires less energy for the most popular EV than the most popular ICE car no matter which way you slice it. As soon as you use gas or coal or relax the assumptions where you drive the EV hard with the heater on and the ICE carefully with both on the highway you get more than double per energy input.

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

#157

Post by Schroedingersat » Mon, Nov 14, 2022, 2:28 AM UTC

pjc50 wrote: post #44

akira2501 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the Gallium Arsenide, from my understanding. There are processes to recover the Gallium, but it produces a waste that's very high in Arsenic.

Hmm.. there are a number of different chemistries, and they're not all clearly labelled like batteries. It appears the switch from phosphoros/boron dopants to gallium was quite recent: https://theconversation.com/the-sunlight-that-powers-solar-p... But that's gallium dopant rather than GaAs. There's also CIGS and CdTe "thin film" solar cells, which are extremely toxic in even small amounts. But those chemistries were…

Most commercially viable cells use silver front side metallization (or both sides for bifacial).

This represents about 50g/kW net of silver depending on location, but there are methods in the production pipeline to reduce it to 25g/kW. Tandem cells will reduce it to less silver than a control rod uses, but the commercialisationnpathway isn't set in stone yet.

Worst case scenario, we hit silver limits, they get switched to Al front side and efficiencies drop back to 17%

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

#158

Post by Schroedingersat » Mon, Nov 14, 2022, 2:29 AM UTC

__pache__ wrote: post #148

Schroedingersat wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

what does that even mean? how does this scale? is it the same cost at 1000x the demand to support things? ugh... this is so disingenuous. a nuclear install might support millions of people but the same solar would be insanely huge AND require multiple backups/batteries.. it is so clear solar/wind is worse than nuclear. it is increasingly clear that our co2 output isn't that scary. we are "greening" the Earth. Sea lev…

Weren't you just asserting expertise on the contents of a solar cell and energy content of generation? How do you not know the relevant terms or name for the dominant variety? Did you even know there were different types before you made up numbers?

Energy payback time. Passive Emitter Rear Contact photovoltaics They're made of sand and a tiny bit of silver. The amount of silver used total is going down per year in spite of production going up, and there are technologies being commercialized to make it use less silver than a nuclear reactor.

Similarly LFP batteries only require a few dozen times as much energy to produce as one charge. Sodium uses even less, only requires abundant materials and is scaling up now. Then there are all of the other storage and load shifting methods.

You'd have to increase uranium mining 5x to meet last year's renewable capacity additions, and 8x for next year's. The mines would make more land uninhabitable than the solar panels would cover (even if they weren't compatible with other land use). Trying to make a puny backwards imitation of a star with a few tiny scraps of left over supernova dust is woefully insufficient. Getting energy directly from the source is the only place there's enough available unless we want massive degrowth.

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

#159

Post by bamboozled » Mon, Nov 14, 2022, 2:37 AM UTC

On a side note, why aren't governments providing rebates so people start putting solar panels everywhere?

Like, by now, considering we're facing major environmental catastrophe without seriously drastic action, wouldn't it just be wise to put panels almost everywhere there is at least sunshine for a decent part of the year.

Like what are we doing? ha

I'm trying to buy a block of land next door with a decent sized shed on it for this very reason. So we can cover the roof of the shed with panels. I'll be doing this out of my own pocket, and yes I'll get cheaper energy bills, but still, bit of a not to be doing it. ?

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

#160

Post by Schroedingersat » Mon, Nov 14, 2022, 2:39 AM UTC

vidarh wrote: post #136

Schroedingersat wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's not at all what they said. The point is France have a bunch of reactors approaching the same level of wear, and by building a few more and staggering the maintenance,they'd spread the maintenance out and avoid this problem for the future.

That would be a very nice story if it fit the data at all

https://www.edf.fr/en/the-edf-group/who-we-are/activities/op...

Show me on the histogram the tight cluster of reactor start dates representing the outages.

The 100% consistent lying about everything from nuclear proponents makes trusting statements like 'we will definitely do things safely if the rules are relaxed' pretty hard to swallow.