This is the Cerrejon coal mine in Colombia, it's the biggest open-cast coal mine in Latin America and one of the largest surface coal mining operations in the world. It is having detrimental impacts on the environment and on local communities. #GreenEnergy 🧵 
It takes a great deal of this coal to make what? Solar wafers. In fact in order to make 1 ton of MG-Si (Kato, et. al) it takes 550 kg of this coal and for 1 ton of MG-Si (Globe) it takes 1.4 tonnes.
The Cerrejón open-pit mine in Columbia supplies “Blue Gem” coal, a primary source of carbon for
solar silicon smelters around the world.
solar silicon smelters around the world.
They always omit all of the coal, trees, quartz, and other raw materials needed for smelting metallurgical silicon from ore because they don't want you to know how dirty green energy actually is.
They wont tell you, but I will.
Another ingredient they don't tell you about is oil coke. In order to make 1 ton of MG-Si it takes 200 kg of oil coke. So what is oil coke?
Petroleum coke, abbreviated coke or petcoke, is a final carbon-rich solid material that derives from oil refining, and is one type of the group of fuels referred to as cokes. So in order to make solar panels we need oil.
Now what about trees? Yes we need a lot of trees to make solar panels. To generate heat and electricity for the subsequent polysilicon, ingot, wafer, cell, and module production steps 600kg of charcoal is used and 300 kg - 2 tons of wood chips are used.
And don't forget the quartz. 2.5 tonnes of quartz is used to make 1 ton MG-Si. Now add in all the diesel and oil to power all the shovels, trucks, bulldozers etc. as well as all the electricity and chemicals need for the milling process. So how green is a solar panel?
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