Solar panels are starting to die, leaving behind toxic trash

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... )

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

> 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.

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.

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.

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

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...

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

> 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.

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

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.

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

> Does the silicon itself take UV damage or something?

Yes, exactly that. Solar radiation causes crystal defects.

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.

> 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/

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Unfunded externalities.

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.

> 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.

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.

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

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

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

Which chemicals are those?

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.

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