Unfounded concerns about photovoltaic toxicity and waste slowing decarbonization
nature.com
nature.com
I do have the feeling so, as soon as the agricultural base of Bavarian conservatives can make more money per acre installing wind and solar power than by planting crips, they are going to be the first to jump at it.
"We removed the metal frames, electric cables, and plastic debris (Fig. 1) and then crushed the panel material into small pieces ... We used acid extract to simulate metal leaching toxicity and acidic corrosion, and then buried TFSPs in three types of soils..."
This is a terrible idea. Scientific publishers should not be in the business of restricting the domain of scientific research. Only democratic public institutions can have that responsibility, and they should use it as little as possible.
I recently was at an information event from our local electricity provider about wind energy projects. And there are those people... There was a conversation going on like: "The people I talked to don't want these things." Event moderator: "What are the reasons?" Guy: "They simply don't want them."
And I am pretty sure that was no fossil fuel lobbyist. It was just a guy who is against things. And there are plenty of those.
In EU countries, at least part of these very significant costs are paid for by everyone - not just the company operating the wind/solar projects who profit from it. Some people don't want to have higher taxes just so a business gets profit.
Where I live people are against solar/wind because they want to go nuclear.
You could put up massive solar and wind farms next year. How long would it be until sufficient nuclear capacity came online?
The only slow thing about nuclear is regulatory approval - hampered by EU that for many years didn't accept nuclear as "green".
Is nuclear more expensive that rebuilding the electrical grid and building enough storage to handle the wind/solar peaks and use the energy later? I don't think it's so clear. The solar/wind power plant itself is not the full cost.
Hinkley C is 3,260 MWe. In 2022 Europe installed a total of 41.4 GW of solar capacity, up from from 28.1 GW in 2021. That means more than 10x Hinkley C in a single year (2022), and cheaper per kWh.
Facts to found here:
https://api.solarpowereurope.org/uploads/5222_SPE_EMO_2022_f...
Nuclear is great stop gap until more renewablea are installed, not more not less.
And before ypu start, no, the German nuclear plants couldn't be run any longer (maintenance, fuel, safety), run time has already been extended multiple times, and the last nuclear exit, the badly organized one, was put in place by tze conservative CDU let government (not that you go and blame the Greens for it).
The fossil fuel industry has a huge interest in spreading FUD around nuclear, and the few accidents have been maximally exploited to hamper the development of nuclear. All the while, it has been known full well that fossil fuels have devastating impact on air quality and climate. Air pollution from fossil fuels alone is estimated at killing >3 million people per year. A great many disasters involving oil and fossil fuels have occurred, killing many more millions.
Yet, we act like nuclear is the danger, but we're happy to accept burning fossil fuels in the midst of our societies and offer up millions of lives each year to satisfy the lords of the fossil fuel industry.
The major exception to the above rule is China, but even that (massive!) government-sponsored nuclear buildout is only expected to reach <18% of electricity generation by 2060. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-04-27/china-nuc...
Coal and gas plants are closing because they cannot compete on price with solar/wind + battery storage.
The cost advantage is not true everywhere but the future is clear. Coal and gas will not become cheaper. Solar and wind is most expensive today it'll ever be.
Storage in particular is so early in the cycle that we can expect the cost will drop at least in half. We've barely started making battery storage, the industry has 100x growth ahead.
And this is without pricing the real costs of using oil & coal & gas like all those people who have asthma (or worse) because they inhale the fumes.
Even living in a city (cars) has clear statistical link to increased asthma and other respiratory diseases compared to places with less cars.
> Coal and gas plants are closing because they cannot compete on price with solar/wind + battery storage.
That did not happen anywhere in Europe. New gas plants are being constructed right now, and coal powerplants had to be restarted when Germans dropped nuclear.
> Storage in particular is so early in the cycle that we can expect the cost will drop at least in half. We've barely started making battery storage, the industry has 100x growth ahead.
We need to decarbonize today though. People don't want to pay the high prices, so how does the drop happen?
> And this is without pricing the real costs of using oil & coal & gas like all those people who have asthma (or worse) because they inhale the fumes.
Again, ask Germans about that. Their universal healthcare is going to get expensive soon if they continue on their "green" path.
> Even living in a city (cars) has clear statistical link to increased asthma and other respiratory diseases compared to places with less cars.
Completely orthogonal, people mostly agree on that, but they (where I live) want to charge the electric cars from nuclear energy.
No other European country with as much technical competence has inexplicably failed so hard at renewables over and over.
Now Germany is experiencing a transition in market conditions that is uncomfortably quick.
Are they? Looks like it's Poland who is generating the most CO2 for electricity production.
https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/daviz/co2-emission-i...
According to whom. There is lots of pushback against renewables - in particular wind- in Germany. It takes something crazy like 7 years to approve a wind farm here. The current government is trying to improve the situation. But I would strongly question the premise of your comment e.g. Denmark seems a lot more successful.
First of all, I'm not aware of any large scale battery storage facilities anywhere, they are prohibitively expensive.
Second, coal and gas plant's main cost, at least in EU, is carbon tax. So the fact that they can't compete on price is a result of political decision, not of any shortcomings of the technology itself.
>> Storage in particular is so early in the cycle that we can expect the cost will drop at least in half.
Battery costs will be rising for at least the next decade, before they can fall: we need to ramp up lithium production first, before we can do that there will be significant shortages driving the prices up. The more popular EVs will become the worse it will be.
Grid stabilization is priced in, usually using specific contracts with producers and large consumers (read steel, chemical, paper industrial sites and other with huge electricity needs). In that regard, the European markets are working fine and as intended.
Long term, we have to solve the issue of electricity storage. Short term, we are totally fine with renewables producing <60% of our electricity, and on some days even more. Base load became much less of a problem, most hige consumers in the industrial sectors found ways to be much more flexible in their demand, driven in no small degree by being to make extra money on the spot markets (and we talk 10s of millions here).
[0] https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/lithium-ion-b... [1] https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/batteries/chart-the-rem...
You can add at least two more zeros there, and possibly three or more. Storage right now is mostly dams and all the easy places have been done. Battery storage is really at the proof of concept state and if you take hydro out of the equation you're looking at a tenth of a percent at best.
V2G ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle-to-grid ) and gas turbines burning green hydrogen (generated by water electrolysis using over-produced electricity) are ramping up.
I think generally we are at a point where it is too easy for normal people to be against things and eco friendly things are just the lowest hanging fruit. Normal people nowadays are much more stressed with the world at large, overstimulated by doomscrolling all night, obesse or unhealthy, locked in some financial treadmill, etc, etc...
In such a situation it is easy to see a wind farm next door as an attack on your landscape or the needs of EV mobility as overly complicated and so on and so on.
So its not the facts that matter, it is the lives of the 80% of the population that have just taken a dive for the worst over the last 20 years.
EDIT: preface
We are used to the people pushing against technological progress being someone other than older and somewhat tech-capable men.
These people have been holding out and formed their arguments back when they first learned about renewables, which was twenty or more years ago. Technology has continued to progress but their positions ossified early.
Now that the future they denied is here we are seeing vanilla guilt-backed rationalizing. We just aren’t used to seeing it from these guys because they were always excited back when technological progress generally proved them right.
That's how all propaganda functions. Fossil fuel/nuclear lobbyists pump ideas into the heads of the easily duped via mass media at a range of different intellectual levels and then the readers will absorb it like it was their own idea and echo it back.
The only difference between the upper and the lower intellectual levels of propaganda is that the upper level of propaganda might rely more on logical consistency, misdirection and attempts to make the reader feel smart while the lower levels will rely more on repetition of a simple message.
It also seems true when it comes to innovation: an innovation today becomes/creates a problem tomorrow.
This has been going on for so long we are now in an era where for a sizable percentage of the population truth no longer matters. That was the long term goal all along, once climate change became otherwise undeniable the people would be disassociated from reality and still support the fossil fuel industry.
Usually this is when the low death toll is brought up but it's not just about deaths. It's about environmental destruction. And the potential to do so in the far future through its waste.
I don't think we should move away from nuclear altogether but use it as a buffer only for the times when the real green sources are low (eg solar and wind). And we should find a permanent waste solution.
I didn't remember to mention it because it was not an energy generation installation that melted down but a military one for nuclear weapon manufacturing.
About those filters, a quote from wikipedia:
> They became known as "Cockcroft's Folly" as many regarded the delay they caused and their great expense to be a needless waste. During the fire the filters trapped about 95% of the radioactive dust and arguably saved much of northern England from becoming a nuclear wasteland. Terence Price said "the word folly did not seem appropriate after the accident"
https://www.trouw.nl/nieuws/bijna-meltdown-kernreactor-pette...
And that's the one that is public, there is at least one more that is still under wraps and possibly more than that. Nuclear is only as safe as the people running it and that is a major issue even before you bring in economics. You can't treat safety as a cost in installations like these and inevitably that's what happens. What I also find disingenuous is that in calculating the cost of electricity production from nuclear power capex required for the eventual dismantling isn't taken into account at all, and those costs are inevitably massive.
Seems like the incidents happened in part because the operators couldn't see in the dark after a power outage, and the emergency torch had been taken by someone to fix their car... :X You can't make this stuff up.
You can't fix human nature and that's the root cause of many of these problems. And because of that I'm very much against nuclear power, no matter what the short term advantages may seem to be. Sooner or later every plant needs to be de-commissioned, will have an incident or will end up as a target or a casualty of something or other. Multiply that by the number of power plants that you'd need to make the world reliant on nuclear power and the number of accidents would quickly rise above what is acceptable (if we're not already there).
Nuclear proponents are quick to argue that this was all with old technology and newer designs are safer but people are still the same and even new technology resulting in working installations will eventually see those same installations age.
Thats why the taxpayer is forced into providing free insurance for every nuclear power plant. The private sector would only ever build solar and wind and storage if externalities like this or CO2/coal pollution were fully priced in. Since the government has a vested (military) reason for wanting a thriving civilian nuclear industrial ecosystem, however, they provide lavish subsidies - some budgeted, while others (like this one) are not.
There is a lot of PR sourced from profit driven pro nuclear lobbies telling us that "contrary to popular opinion" it's totally 110% safe now though - none of which acknowledge the private sector's categorical refusal to assume the financial risks, obviously.
Presumably Greenpeace, who are apparently motivated purely by a desire to protect the environment and fully funded by donations from the environmentally conscious must be the ones who are misleading us. After all, "young climate activists" say it is being "old fashioned": https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/dear-greenpeace-nuclear...
Is solar or wind energy not "free" in the same sense?
Also: are the balancing costs of the network paid by those people selling the "free" renewable energy? As I see they often don't pay for that (not to mention the pollution that causes, which is still not paid by any energy producer)
Regarding organizations: They're probably either driven by the people above or money...
Sad really because the green economy could provides lots of jobs, great opportunities to export etc. It's not a coincidence that the UK imports a lot of high-efficiency building products from Germany and Scandinavia, it is because those countries have invested in the tech and are reaping the rewards.
And banning ICE vehicles is not up for discussion anymore, is it? Legislature or not, no company will be able to sell you a new one come 2035 anyway.
A more general thought so, one that troubles me, is that both "sides" of the public opinion cobflicts we see in the west today seem to be totally fine with using authoritarian measures for the greater good, some more than others and the far right actively advocating for it. It will be liberals that loose with that approach, as the goals of the political liberals can easily be framed as "they want to take away things", hence the far right gets a huge opening.
Law must always adapt to the society greater good and that means adding new one and removing the obsoletes.
The people who scare me moat, are tjose convinced to be right and morally superior. They can justify any atrocity by claiming to do it for the "greater good". The path to hell is covered by good intentions, and if I dare say so, we marched as a species already more than once.
By the way, if you want to get broad, public support for measures to fight climate change, argueing fro draconian enforxement is exaclty what people are affraid of. And what populists use to get support. In the end, you will achieve the opposite of what you want.
So there are things that are not just “not perfect” but actually harmful, and you can't just blindly deploy “not perfect” things.
The main reason why people focus on renewable without getting into the details of whether or not it improves thing, is because it gives the impression of addressing the problem without changing the status quo (mass-consumption society, individual cars, disposable packaging, the search for endless growth…)
The western world's energy and resource consumption isn't sustainable, no matter how you get the energy from, and “decarbonation”, like recycling, is just a fallacy that's been invented to avoid addressing this issue.
That is an urban legend and not supported by any evidence. Full solar lifecycle emissions are around an order of magnitude lower than fossil fuels.
Nuclear, solar, wind, geothermal, etc are all better than coal and gas. We need to build more, upgrade infrastructure, not limit ourselves to one solution as our energy needs and decarbonization efforts will evolve over time. But the alternative to solar isn’t nuclear its the status quo of gas and coal.
No, and this vision is the problem. Hydro, geothermal, nuclear, are other options that can make sense depending on the context (of course you don't want to start a nuclear program from scratch, but if you already have a nuclear industry and you're in northern Europe, then it makes much more sense than solar).
But sometimes solar is not the alternative to the status quo, that's what I meant. By in many places of the US, solar is actually a viable choice though, and banning it there is as stupid as subsidizing it near the polar circle (something we actually do in Europe…).
> but also convince locals that nuclear energy is a viable alternative when enough people were able to convince the local government that large scale solar projects are harmful to environment.
In Europe the biggest, and by far, source of opposition to nuclear comes from renewable energy proponents, even in countries where it doesn't make sense (especially solar). That's how we got Germany to get rid of their perfectly functional nuclear plants, spending tons of money investing in inferior solutions (for the context), and consuming millions of tons of coal in the meantime. Similarly idiotic to your county banning solar…
This is nonsense. First of all, “fossil fuel” doesn't mean much as depending on the technology involved the CO2 amount per kWh varies a lot (GTCC vs dumb lignite plant, that's more than a 2x ratio). Then, when you're adding a solar panel you can't compare its output to the same amount of energy produced by “fossil fuel”, you must compare it to the energy mix of the country you're deploying it into (to take the most extreme example: if you're adding a solar panel in France, you're basically replacing nuclear with solar, so you're just adding CO2 emissions). Overall, with the very low solar yields we have in most Europe (everywhere but the Mediterranean) and the fact that in many country the electricity mix is multiple time less carbon-heavy than what coal gives you, your “order of magnitude” is gone.
And I'm not even talking about the substitution effect here, where one Euro invested in solar in Europe is one Euro that doesn't get invested in a better decarbonation project (solar being financed elsewhere, wind, geothermal, nuclear), but that's also something to consider when advocating for a technology.
Is that true for the complete lifetime (which is what matters in the end) of, say, a PV installation in one's home? Or even for the complete PV industry?
[1] https://energy.utexas.edu/news/nuclear-and-wind-power-estima...
Seeing the annual output of a typcial rather small 5kW peak home PV installation in Western Europe or even Denmark, it just seems unlikely that it would not offset whatever emissions it takes during its mining/production/shipment/installation during its lifetime.
I linked to the source in one of my other comments. Also, Finland installed a ton of solar lasr year, so I guess if someone is doing sometjing someone else claims is impossible, it is possible regardless of what people say and believe.
The price doesn't have anything to do with the carbon footprint though…
> Also, Finland installed a ton of solar lasr year, so I guess if someone is doing sometjing someone else claims is impossible, it is possible regardless of what people say and believe.
Sure it is possible to install solar in Finland, if you're a politician and you want to do a PR move it's probably even a good idea, but it's not for producing electricity.
Disclaimer: Obviously, installing PV around the arctic circle is better during summer than winter...
Thanks for this fabulously insightful take. Here's a similar one: “Coal, once burned, has closed to zero CO2 emissions”. I mean, yes, for sure, but that's a bit strange of an analysis isn't it?
> Not by politicians, but by people investing in the projects.
Well, first of all it is also done by politicians. And then “people investing in the project” is also a common sentence when discussing NFTs so I'm not sure how convincing you think it is.
Each euros that goes to solar in Finland and doesn't get to hydro, wind, biomasse or whatever, is wasted. Wasted in terms of energy production, and have a much bigger carbon footprint per kWh, but hey it's trendy (mostly because it makes total sense in California, the cultural center of the Western world).
> Funny, how otherwise reasonable people insist to argue against reality...
Funny indeed.
And regardless of NFTs, people investing in PV, as opposed to me putting one on my roof, expect returns on said investment. These returns come from selling electricity. Of thos equation isn't working, people don't invest. If it does, people invest. And that is proof that solar works out financially. Even in Finland.
Funny as well, how people use the "market" as argument for anything working, only to turn around and totally ignore it if the market confirms something they don't want to believe.
Reality is, Finland becomes a market for solar, believe it or not. That also being the case for utility scale projects, means it is financially viable. Those arw verifiable facts. Now you can choose to ignore them, or not, I don't care. What I care about is HN turning into a olace where people ignore facts and realizy, just to confirm their points. We can do better around here, because if not, there is no point in sticking around here anymore.
You're making a fallacy here, that it's either coal or PV. It's not. In tropical and subtropical places, solar make sense, else where you're better off with anything else that's not fossil. In fact, PV is not even a good substitute for coal, because coal plants can't be turned on and off easily twice a day (unlike gas turbines).
> people investing in PV, as opposed to me putting one on my roof, expect returns on said investment. These returns come from selling electricity. Of thos equation isn't working, people don't invest.
People investing in NFTs is a proof that NFTs make economical sense then? People invest because they believe, no matter if those believes are grounded or not, so using the existence of market as a proof of something working in completely self-referential believes confirmation.
> Funny as well, how people use the "market" as argument for anything working, only to turn around and totally ignore it if the market confirms something they don't want to believe.
Funny to see that people use the market as a justification for things working, when we have plenty of evidences of markets for things that made no economic sense (crypto, NFT, tulips, etc.).
> What I care about is HN turning into a olace where people ignore facts and realizy, just to confirm their points. We can do better around here, because if not, there is no point in sticking around here anymore.
Please be the change you want to see in the world then, and stop drinking cool-aid and using rhetorical fallacy instead of arguments…
Summary: You say PV in Finland isn't feasible. People building PV, and profiting from it, disagree. Those people put their money where their mouth is. Same goes for the Netherlands. I'll stop now, if you want the sky to be red and clouds be purple, sure, belive that... I linked to a comprehensive report on solar in Europe elsewhere, all you do is moving goal posts and repeating false claims...
Not that I think you'll read this, but here you go:
https://api.solarpowereurope.org/uploads/5222_SPE_EMO_2022_f...
Pages for Finland:
37 & 38, 43: Finland will achieve its NCEP tarhets a lot earlier
52: Finland will be a GW solar market in 2025
These reports, they are publoshed annually, turned out to be largely correct since tgey are published. While the IAEA is usually of by almost an order of magnitude, underestimating solar growth, these folks are sometimes a bit too pesimistic. Good thing, I did read one of there reports again, the last one was before Covid...
I think you missed the memo: institutional investors definitely invested in NFTs during the peak fad in 2021.
> Summary: You say PV in Finland isn't feasible.
Nope, I said building PV there is possible, albeit nonsensical. People put their money where their mouth is, and sometime it doesn't make sense and they get burned. If you think markets are always right, I have some tulips to sell you.
And again, as I said at the very beginning of the thread, there's no link between economic performance and CO2 footprint, something can be a very profitable endeavor even if it's completely counter-productive in terms of climate change, or even electricity production.
> I linked to a comprehensive report on solar in Europe elsewhere, all you do is moving goal posts and repeating false claims...
“Please check my gigantic comment history if you care about facts, I promise it's totally related to the current discussion”. Yeah sure.
Funny how you at the same time write in a very confident way (one could even say “arrogant”), and at the same time only respond to very small portions of my messages (“California”, “NFT”), putting the annoying parts under the rug.
We're losing the climate battle by a large margin, but shills like you are in full “this is fine” mode “solar will save us”, this is so depressing…
Like solar? Want to invest in it? Then finance solar panels where it make sense, in the middle East, in India, in Africa, in South America, and stop wasting them in Finland or Canada… Otherwise it's as stupid as Germany that got rid of its perfectly working nuclear plants before spending a decade trying to catch-up in terms of CO2 emissions (it's still has among the most CO2-heavy electricity mix in the EU to date), wasting hundred of billions in the process (while increasing its dependency to Russian gas, which their economy has now been paying a dire price since the beginning of the invasion of Ukraine: play stupid games, win stupid price…)
The panels are less efficient when it is hot, so at summer Denmark is the right place. They are even using solar on Svalbard [0] with good results 9 months a year
[0]https://nordregioprojects.org/blog/2019/11/28/archipelago-of...
Panels are less efficient when hot (which is a problem), but they are even less efficient when the sun is low on the horizon, which is the case even in summer in Denmark, and when there are clouds. These a reason why the most efficient plants aren't actually in Denmark but in Arizona…
> with good results 9 months a year
Nothing in your link allows assessing how good the results are supposed to be. The fact that, without any quantitative elements, you assume the results presented here to be “good” tells a lot about your confirmation bias.
If god wanted us to have infinite energy and resources he would have put a gigantic fusion reactor in the sky. (OH on Twitter)
This has nothing to to with supply chain, but with the fact that the Nederlands and Seattle aren't especially sunny places…
https://www.euractiv.com/section/politics/news/the-netherlan...
USSR used to grow orange in Siberia too, that a state program can do it doesn't mean it's efficient in any way…
That tells something about your local electricity market though, not about the energy or CO2 emission efficiency.
It seems to me that, in the UK at least, as the two main parties align more and more on economic and social issues that they are needing to find new wedge issues to differentiate themselves.
Not sure if this is also the case in countries with PR governments.
It might seem that everything is along political lines because you view it that way. There are non-political reasons to get annoyed at things.
ULEZ was a tiny central part of London. New ULEZ is...all of London[0].
[0] https://tfl.gov.uk/modes/driving/ultra-low-emission-zone/ule... - the map shows the red outlined congestion charge zone (old ULEZ) vs the new blue area (new ULEZ)
The next federal elections will be "fun", I just hope us Germans, as a whole, do the same thing that happened across Europe lately: prevent the more extremenright from getting the power of government (I know the post-fasiscts won in Italy).
That being said, I do think that most of the pro-AfD votes come from people deeply affraid of the change they see happening, affraid that someone will take away things from them. Not that this is the case, but it sure seems like it sometimes (I can see it myself). Unless a true pro-democratic coalition forms (explicitly incl. media), we will be stuck in this situation for the time being.
Firstly, as stated by others, accepting these things requires us to accept that our lifestyles are not sustainable, even if we can afford them financially, so we make excuses.
Secondly, I think there probably is an amount of ego involved where the armchair experts honestly think that they have thought of something that "the politicians" or the "experts" have missed. You see people on forums/TV saying with no irony or doubt that "Electric cars are not environmentally friendly because of Lithium batteries", or whatever, without actually having any figures to back this up.
I agree that doing something, even if not perfect, is better than nothing but I did a Penn and Teller show where their logic was "do nothing now because it is expensive. Wait until we have better/cheaper technology and do it later". Again, seems illogical but people do believe that.
It is more like a side effect of equally treating all voices as important and not giving weight to peer review scientific literature or critically analyzing the talking points.
The propaganda is motivated by profit (carbon lobby, nuclear lobby) and the demands of the military (the nuclear-military industrial complex needs a civilian nuclear-industrial ecosystem to keep a lid on costs).
The propaganda tries to tap into that innate ego you referenced though. "Well, actually, the sun doesn't shine at night", "what do we do when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing? Not use power?", "but geography for pumped storage is very rare isn't it?", "wind farms are very bad for birds!", "nuclear power may be expensive but it's very stable!", "enough batteries to cover solar/wind would be prohibitively expensive", "germany is trying to decarbonize completely the wrong way it's so stupid!" etc. All of these things are in line with the above money flows, are quite wrong, but plausible. They are carefully positioned as being the smart person's take on a complex issue.
There are 30-40 regular talking points, many of which appear regularly on hacker news. I think I've had to post the same academic study about how pumped storage geography is actually very common at least 15 times, for instance. You don't get such specific mass misconceptions on such a large scale without some level of money behind the message. It typically filters through from lobby group -> mass media -> average citizen -> hacker news comments.
Here are a couple of good pieces of such propaganda for you:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26673987
A bit longer: there are a ton of vested interests that couldn't care less about destroying the world for future generations as long as they get theirs now. This sort of selfishness is institutionalized to a degree that I'm not sure if we'll be able to deal with it short of a total system collapse and even then it might be resurrected.
And a prediction that you'll be able to observe in the coming decades: a lot of those "minor" and "invented" concerns will be front and center once we all have EVs and solar in order to nudge us onto the next thousands of dollars spending or to tax us or simply to keep the eco spirituality of "humans bad" alive.
Technological solutions simply aren't wanted by "your" side and so, eventually, all technology will be attacked just as fossil fuel based ones are now.
Gaia still loves you. Hydrocarbon technology never cared in the first place. No one blames you for being deceived.
Btw, it's not me being deceived but eventually you'll figure that out, I am sure.
Is this false dichotomy you’ve communicated something you’ve cultivated because you are afraid of what would happen without these things, or because without consideration for other viewpoints you chose to value your comfort and tiny world-view over a clearer understanding of reality?
Having written it out, there is no need for you to respond, really. It is just fear either way.
People: Corpo greenwashing, energy source disagreements between nuclear, multiple inconsistent sources, "I don't wanna pay 2-3* more for green electricity while in some third world country not a single car has a cat and they burn tires for metal+heating while dumping acid in the nearby river from the outsourced chrome keychain factory"
"Oh yeah, we will give you 10 years warranty for your panels, buy! Cheap!"
Only the necessary seals are shoddy and the panel dies much sooner from water incursion. At which moment you find out that the producer has gone out of business, so no recourse.
This is not a fault of the technology per se, rather of humanity as usual, but I can see why several such incidents in your proximity will cause distrust.
The solution would be "buy from reputable vendors only", but IDK how many Chinese vendors are reputable and if they didn't decide to entshittify their products right now.
https://solarpowernerd.com/top-solar-panel-manufacturers/
Buy from a "bankable" brand, and you are good to go. Bankable, as in bank are willing ot finance GWp sized utility projects using modules from those manufacturers. And as you see, those big ones are around for quite a while.
Sure, I have never seen an industry as plagued by shady people and practices as solar module importers in the EU (they literally smuggled them at scale sometimes to circumvent import tariffs and taxes), but the big mabufacturers are, and have to be, serious and reliable. Otherwise they'd be out of the GW scale project market, which is where they make their money and sales volumes.
One should not save money on cheap panels so. Neither shoupd you import yourself, only buy from brands that have an EU legal presence, import themselves and are in the business for decades (JA, Jinko, Trina and Canadian Solar come to mind). If the brand has some large utility projects runnning (either their own as suppliers, doesn't really matter) even better, that means they have contractual agreents with large, repeat customers, basically assuring support for guarantee cases down the road. Be mindful so, not all are very customer friendly when it comes to claims, so take one with a solid startegy for the roof top / consumer market.
I spent some time at one of those mentioned, years ago.
The ROI for private installation gets better all the time so, Wp prices fall, panel capacity increases, resulting in cheaper and larger installations on the same surface. No idea whwre labour is nowadays, propably through the roof with availability in 2030s or so.
First, fossil fuels are not viable without massive subsidies but we almost never this statistic in the news. This is trillions of dollars in subsidies and growing! Last year, fuels that drive climate change and pollute the air were underpriced to the tune of $7 trillion. [1].
We will see so much news of how land is being used for solar, but nobody talks about 40 million acres for ethanol, which is a small additive to fossil fuels and the agricultural subsidies. Worldwide, this is 100 million acres. So much talk about food inflation, these 100 million acres could be used to grow food instead. but "news" don't want to talk about an easy win of stopping fossil fuel subsidies, which will also bring the prices.
Facts like fossil fuel shipping account for 40% of global shipping, account for the largest water withdrawals[3], account for 10 million pollution deaths (but we do see 1.5 birds killed by wind turbines, lets never talk about the billions of birds killed by cats or buildings), these are never part of the conversation.
Lets also never talk about the easiest metrics to use is deaths per TWH, renewables and nuclear are 2000x better.[4]
I put together a comparison worksheet for kids [5] (fossils vs renewables), any 10+ year old can work through this sheet and figure out that fossil fuels are a horrible idea.
Lastly, and more importantly, lets never talk about price-fixing Oil, a commodity doesn't behave like most commodities do, Eg: Salt (and lots of industrial products manufactured at scale - millions of tons) which is so incredibly cheap that no one thinks or budgets for buying salt[6]. OPEC has a monopoly and pricing power and they destroy demand to keep prices up. Nobody has a problem with this!
And, lets spend trillions of dollars on military budgets to protect oil supply. Why don't we let the oil companies pay for defense of their own infrastructure? This is not factored into any of the subsidies.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-10-16/climat...
[2] https://qz.com/2113243/forty-percent-of-all-shipping-cargo-c....
[3] U.S. thermoelectric plants are the largest source of U.S. water withdrawals, accounting for more than 40% of total U.S. water withdrawals in 2015: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=50698#:~:tex....
[4] https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...
[5] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1y_VFQC5qMuLYKoqLg0ooKIgV...
[6] https://www.amazon.com/Turning-Oil-Into-Salt-Independence/dp...
Thank you for pointing this out. It is indeed quite puzzling.
What's even more puzzling is: I felt exactly the same way about anti-vaxxer movement. Although, the anti-vax movement is far worse in the sense that there's literally no human who benefits from it. With climate change, there's a huge fossil fuels lobby that benefits financially from the lies/misinformation around climate change. But, I don't know who benefits from this anti-vax nonsense.
Anti-vax lies literally killed people. In the US, it ironically, even with the party that championed anti-vax lies (i.e. the Republican Party), the only effect these lies had was that they literally caused additional unneeded deaths of GOP voters. Not sure why a rational GOP would champion that, but yea I have no idea. It's insanity and madness. It's evil too, in a sense.
To have some sane/rational explanation of these things would be amazing.....
https://www.axios.com/2017/12/15/big-oils-electric-fight-aga...
https://www.greenpeace.org/eu-unit/issues/climate-energy/462...
I mean, yes, we will need some new mines. We'll have to mine different things. But overall, renewables will reduce mining. A lot. Why? Most mining today is fossil fuel mining.
Cars are everywhere and few people spare a thought for how much copper they use.