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Comment by ledgerdev | Hacker News Reader

I used to think this was a wonderful idea, with the greatest of intentions, what could possibly go wrong? Turns out it's inevitable that a hail storm hits or mother nature somehow will break/cracks those panels, allowing heavy metals to leach into the soil and make it unusable for farming in perpetuity. This actually happened to a guy I spoke with during lunch one day.

So seeing the actual reality over a longer timeframe of solar farms, and wind turbines (those huge blades made of not friendly chemicals last only 10 years, do you know how they are disposed of?), have greatly reduced any excitement I had for solar/wind as environmentally friendly longer term sustainable solutions. I guess it's sort of good to diversify but they most definitely aren't "earth friendly" as advertised. Fusion seem our only real hope.

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not sure where you're getting 10 years for windd turbines from, but it's closer to 20. they also aren't nasty chemicals. it's fiberglass and epoxy and are disposed the same way pretty much everything is disposed of, putting them in a pit in the middle of nowhere.

I would actually consider epoxy pretty nasty. 10 years for actual use is pretty accurate, 20 years is extremely optimistic. They are just buried or piled up somewhere, not burned as far as I know.

I'm not sure wind turbines are quite as bad as you assert:

https://www.nationalgrid.com/stories/energy-explained/can-wi...

That seems like a pretty biased source, how about these actual cases at the top of google search? We are just getting started perhaps 10 years into this, now imagine this after another 100 years? And of course maybe they can technically be "recycled" now but it's not actually happening in a significant way yet.

https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/sweetwater-wind-t... https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-02-05/wind-turb...

For now we have to be realistic, but hopeful that some better use than landfills can be found and be viable.

Solar panels don't contain heavy metals as far as I know.

They typically contain copper, silver, lead, and tin, but those don't leach out of them at a significant rate, and of those four heavy metals, only lead is a real toxicity risk even if you digest the panels in acid instead of leaving them out in the rain. Another comment suggests that the dopants in the silicon are the relevant heavy metals, but those are present at parts-per-million levels, locked inside the silicon's diamond-structures crystalline lattice, and passivated with silicon dioxide, so that's not plausible either.

The most likely explanation is that this is a lie.

CdTe solar panels [0] do, but it's a bit of red herring because almost nobody is using those panels for large scale installations (they're mainly used where being "thin and light" is important. The common crystalline silicon panels [1] don't have any major toxic components.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadmium_telluride_photovoltaic... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystalline_silicon

Some do, perhaps they were older panels this farmer had on his land.

Solar panels are giant photodiodes. Heavy metal doped silicon. a-Si something or SiGe or GaAs or InP or whatever pairs and trios of toxic metals. Generally more toxic more electronically open to trade therefore broader spectral response and better performance. You can't do, say, Al substrate PtFeCu semiconductor, that's not going to make sense.

They're not merely similar to a photodiode, but using giant photodiodes as batteries is literally the idea.

There are some versions based on toxic organic chemicals in place of toxic inorganic elements, few and far between, and I guess the technology will eventually move onto engineered nanoparticles later in this century after they've cracked fusion, but that hasn't happened yet.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schottky_junction_solar_cell

You can always insure them.

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