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Comment by jkic47 | Hacker News Reader

I am not familiar enough with the topic to comment on the numbers, but do the costs you quoted for renewables factor in externalities associated with reaponsibly recycling dead solar panels?

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That’s an unnecessary task because the externality is near 0. Modern landfills are cheap, plentiful, and relatively benign to the environment. CO2 emissions are a real problem, landfills are largely an imaginary one.

If solar panels are dumpstered at the end of their life cycle but save CO2 emissions, it’s a non-factor.

And in any case, they’re made largely of aluminum which is profitable to recycle (which means it will actually happen if its own accord) and a solved problem.

Any real negative externalities come in manufacture or installation.

Solar panels have such a long service life that recycling them is the next generation's issue. You can't really predict costs for things 20 or 30 years down the road, given how fast the technology is evolving. In fact if some calculation claims they take into account the costs of recycling solar panels, that would make me extremely suspicious of their results because I do not trust their prediction of recycling costs. You can also look at predictions of solar panel manufacturing costs from 20 years ago and see how wildly wrong these predictions were.

To illustrate how fast this field is, just this month there have been some new results in recycling them: https://interestingengineering.com/energy/solar-panel-recycl...

this is such a strange talking point. Do we factor in recycling all the materials a gas plant is made out of?

Who cares about panel recycling? bury them if we have to, they're non toxic, and would be an infinitesimally small % of total annual landfill. Such an irrelevant "gotcha" i wonder why people keep repeating it?

It’s a really common environmental red herring that came from oil companies promoting recycling so you’d feel less bad about plastic.

It wasn't a talking point, but a genuine question.

This link from the EPA suggested that EoL solar panels could be considered hazardous waste under RCRA due to heavy metal leaching, which is an "externality" like CO2, and the very reason I asked the question.

So, if you believe the EPA, they are not "non-toxic" and could add up to "up to 10 million tonnes" of panels that need to be safely disposed.

https://www.epa.gov/hw/end-life-solar-panels-regulations-and...

So perhaps you should care about panel recycling?

Does the cost of a natural gas electricity factor in externalities associated with responsibly recycling plant?

Obviously not, because if you include externalities the fossil fuel costs would be well north of $100.

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