Thread by @ShellenbergerMD

Bombshell new study published in @HarvardBiz Review finds that solar panel waste will make the electricity produced by solar panels *four times* more expensive than experts had predicted

Here's why everything they said about solar was wrong

michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/why-everythi…

In 2018 I argued that solar panels weren’t clean & produce 300x more toxic waste than high-level nuclear waste. In contrast to nuclear waste, which is safely stored and never hurts anyone, solar waste threatens poor trash-pickers in sub-Saharan Africa.

forbes.com/sites/michaels…

An influential analyst, @solar_chase called my article, “a fine example of 'prove [renewable energy] is terrible by linking lots of reports which don't actually support your point..."

https://twitter.com/solar_chase/status/997367120022441986?s=20

An energy analyst who is both pro-nuclear and pro-solar, @jmkorhonen , agreed with her, saying “I looked into this waste issue in the past and concur with [her].”

https://twitter.com/jmkorhonen/status/998968213391204352?s=20

Journalist @dana1981 @guardian said solar waste was an “ironic concern from [me], a proponent of nuclear power, which has a rather bigger toxic waste problem."

theguardian.com/environment/cl…

But when reporters eventually looked into the issue they came to the same conclusions I had.

In 2019, @amyyeewrites @nytimes published a long article about toxic old solar panels causing “harm to people who scavenge recyclable materials by hand”

nytimes.com/2019/05/12/cli…

In 2020, @DiscoverMag confirmed “it is often cheaper to discard [panels] in landfills or send them to developing countries. As solar panels sit in dumps, toxic metals can leach into the environment and pose a public health hazard..."

discovermagazine.com/environment/so…

Still, each of those articles stressed that some solar panels were already being recycled, and that more of them one day would be, which was what many of my original critics had pointed out.

The solar analyst who accused me of making unsubstantiated claims, @solar_chase , said the reason “there are few solar panels being recycled to date [is] because most of them are still working fine.”

https://twitter.com/solar_chase/status/997514525434896390?s=20

But a major new study of the economics of solar, published in Harvard Business Review (HBR), finds that the waste produced by solar panels will make electricity from solar panels four times more expensive than the world’s leading energy analysts thought.

hbr.org/2021/06/the-da…

"By 2035, discarded panels would outweigh new units sold by 2.56 times. In turn, this would catapult the LCOE (levelized cost of energy, a measure of the overall cost of an energy-producing asset over its lifetime) to four times the current projection.”

What about recycling? It’s not worth the expense. “While panels contain small amounts of valuable materials such as silver, they are mostly made of glass, an extremely low-value material."

As a result, it costs 10- 30 times more to recycle than to send panels to the landfill.

The problem is the sheer quantity of the hazardous waste, which far exceeds the waste produced by iPhones, laptops, & other electronics

The volume of waste expected from the solar industry, found a team of Indian researchers in 2020, was far higher than from other electronics

“These unforeseen costs could crush industry competitiveness. If we plot future installations according to a logistic growth curve capped at 700 GW by 2050 alongside the early replacement curve, we see the volume of waste surpassing that of new installations by 2031."

It’s not just solar. “The same problem is looming for other renewable-energy technologies. For example, experts expect that more than 720,000 tons worth of gargantuan wind turbine blades will end up in U.S. landfills over the next 20 years."

"According to prevailing estimates, only five percent of electric-vehicle batteries are currently recycled – a lag that automakers are racing to rectify as sales figures for electric cars continue to rise as much as 40% year-on-year.”

@elonmusk @Tesla

The toxic nature of solar panels makes their environmental impacts worse than just the quantity of waste. Solar panels are delicate and break easily. When they do, they instantly become hazardous, and classified as such, due to their heavy metal contents

michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/china-made-s…

Hence, used solar panels are classified as hazardous waste. The authors note that this classification "carries with it a string of expensive restrictions — hazardous waste can only be transported at designated times and via select routes, etc.”

Beyond the shocking nature of the finding itself is what it says about the integrity and credibility of @IRENA the International Renewable Energy Agency.

@flacamera @GauriYSingh @RabiaFerroukhi @laura_secada

IRENA is an intergovernmental organization like the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), funded by taxpayers from Europe, North America, Asia. It's supposed to be objective. Instead, it used unrealistic assumptions to produce results supportive of expanding solar.

IRENA acted like an industry association rather than as a public interest one. IRENA, noted the HBR reporters, “describes a billion-dollar opportunity for recapture of valuable materials rather than a dire threat.” IRENA almost certainly knew better.

For decades, consumers in Germany, California, Japan and other major member nations of IRENA, have been replacing solar panels just 10 or 15 years old. But IRENA hadn’t even modeled solar panel replacements in those time frames.

IRENA wasn’t the only organization that put out rose-tinted forecasts to greenwash solar. For years, the solar industry and its spokespersons have claimed that panels only “degrade” — reduce how much electricity they produce — at a rate of 0.5% per year.

But new research finds that solar panels in use degrade twice as fast as the industry claimed.

pv-tech.org/built-solar-as…

A separate report recently found that solar panels have been suffering a rising failure rate even before entering service.

“One in three manufacturers experienced safety failures relating to junction box defects, an increase from 1 in 5 the year before"

pv-tech.org/solar-module-f…

Dealing with the problem requires regulation. “A first step to forestalling disaster may be for solar panel producers to start lobbying for similar legislation in the United States immediately," write the HBR authors, "instead of waiting for panels to start clogging landfills”

But that’s unlikely since such legislation would significantly increase the cost of solar, and thin profit margins mean that many solar companies would likely go bankrupt.

The result is a self-reinforcing feedback loop. “If legislation comes too late, the remaining players may be forced to deal with the expensive mess that erstwhile Chinese producers left behind.”

As such, taxpayers will likely have to subsidize the clean up of solar panel waste. “Government subsidies are probably the only way to quickly develop capacity commensurate with the magnitude of the looming waste problem,” they write.

None of this means there’s no role whatsoever for solar. I have long been filled by a sense of wonder in how they convert sunlight, photons, into electrons, and we have solar panels in our backyard. Solar panels power satellites and can generate electricity in off-grid areas.

But solar cannot be a primary energy like nuclear or natural gas, for inherently physical reasons relating to the unreliable, dilute nature of their “fuel,” sunlight. Low power densities must induce higher material intensity and spatial requirements and thus higher costs

The subsidies that China gave the solar industry had a purpose beyond bankrupting solar companies in the U.S. and Europe. They enticed the industry to participate in the repression of the Uyghur Muslim population, including using tactics that the U.S. & Germany call “genocide.”

The Guardian reporter claimed, “it’s valid to note that end-of-life solar panel recycling and disposal is an issue that we’ll have to address smartly, but unlike climate change, it’s not a big or urgent concern,” but the Harvard Business study shows that this was never true.

The idea that we should avert our gaze from urgent problems like genocide & toxic waste because they complicate longer-term concerns is precisely the kind of unsustainable thinking that allowed the world to become dependent on toxic solar genocide panels in the first place.

END

Further thoughts

https://twitter.com/shellenbergermd/status/1407077690251759625