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That is FUD. > Mary Hutzler, senior fellow at the Institute for Energy Research in Washington D.C., said that solar panels are manufactured using hazardous mat

That is FUD. > Mary Hutzler, senior fellow at the Institute for Energy Research in Washington D.C., said that solar panels are manufactured using hazardous materials — including sulfuric acid and phosphine gas — making them difficult to recycle. They also contain toxic metals like lead, chromium, and cadmium, which can be harmful to humans and are likely to leak from electronic waste dumps into drinking water supplies. Chromium is only in CIGS, which is 0% of the market, Cadmium is only in CdTe, which is a few percent of the market and only manufactured in the US by First Solar. Lead is just in the solder, which is the same issue as with all electronics. How does the use of chemicals purely as part of the manufacturing process make the panel more difficult to recycle, if the material is not in the finished product? IER is a Koch funded nonsense.

acidburnNSA 8y ago
That particular quote as is makes no sense. I think the real statement is that solar panel RECYCLING requires sulfuric acid and phosphine gas. That would make more sense. 13.5 million cumulative tonnes of solar waste in China by 2050 is not FUD at all, that's a statement of success in solar deployment. Are you suggesting that recycling this magnitude of solar waste will be trivial, both environmentally and economically? The 30 year lifetime plus massive deployments leads logically to a recycling challenge that isn't often discussed. I'm not an expert in the field so I can't say enough to suggest it will be trivial or challenging. Gut feeling given those kinds of numbers is that it will be both challenging and expensive. Do you have better data?
- philipkglass 8y ago
  The quote about chemicals makes no sense because it's just promoting fear by association. Phosphine can be used for n-type doping of amorphous silicon layers during certain cell production processes. It never leaves the manufacturing site. It's not used or produced in any module recycling process. Hutzler is smearing solar technology because his institute aims to promote fossil fuels and fight "climate alarmism." https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/tag/climate-alarmism/ https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/tag/climate-alarm... I think that the point about 13.5 million tons of solar waste in China by 2050 is fine by itself. That's still orders of magnitude less waste than would be produced by sourcing equivalent electricity from coal. For comparison, Georgia's Plant Bowen alone has 21 million tons of coal ash sitting in unlined pits and leaching into the water: https://www.southernenvironment.org/news-and-press/news-feed/georgia-power-commits-to-another-29-million-tons-in-coal-ash-cleanup https://www.southernenvironment.org/news-and-press/news-feed... Reading the pie chart from the Sixth Tone article, it looks like about 3/4 of the solar waste material is aluminum, glass, and steel. Those all have efficient, long-established recycling processes. The polymer backsheets and encapsulants, silicon cells, and minor metals used in cell contacts and wiring (copper, silver) are more difficult to deal with because of their heterogeneous nature. The only valuable part of that ~3.375 million tons of heterogenous waste is the copper and silver content. Silicon is low-value and non-hazardous. The polymers need to be treated as plastic waste. Like most plastic waste, they can't be effectively recycled.
  - acidburnNSA 8y ago
    Well scaring people away from renewables is pretty counter-productive to the decarbonizing cause so that was not my intent. I happened upon that article when reading something else earlier today and thought it might be relevant. Certainly coal is worse. We should just be careful to not replace one problem with another. Obviously in mass, coal will dominate. It's most a question of raw material availability or economics of recycling that matter for the vast expansion of energy harvesting we're talking about here. I'm glad that you as a knowledgeable person in the topic are not concerned about any negative implications of vast renewable buildout for electricity, transport, heating, and industry.
    - philipkglass 8y ago
      There is one important material constraint before expanding solar PV technology to the multi-terawatt scale: silver. Right now silver-containing conductive pastes are the overwhelmingly popular choice for forming cell contacts. I expect copper contacts to replace silver pastes at some point. Plated copper has higher conductivity than printed silver paste and of course the raw metal is much cheaper, but it takes more effort to integrate plating into manufacturing flows. SunPower already uses copper metallization at gigawatt scale cell production levels, so I'm pretty confident that other manufacturers can follow when silver costs go up. The one important possibly-constrained battery material is cobalt as a component of lithium-ion battery cathodes. But stationary storage batteries don't need to maximize energy density and therefore don't need to use the same cobalt-bearing cathodes as those in mobile electronics and electric vehicles. The key attribute of a stationary grid-storage battery is lifetime -- encompassing both calendar life and cycle life. Long-life batteries don't need cobalt if the energy density is negotiable. FWIW you can see from my comment history that I have no qualms about the scalability or safety of nuclear power either. I think that deep decarbonization may require additional nuclear power. The cost trajectory for storage-backed renewables just looks more promising than the cost trajectory of new nuclear power right now. It appears that the least-cost decarbonization path will emphasize renewable/storage buildout until the marginal decarbonization cost rises high enough to justify more high-cost (but rock-steady) nuclear reactors.
- Brakenshire 8y ago
  It’s definitely an issue, and I’m interested in the recycling of solar panels in the same way that I’m interested in the recycling of all electronic and industrial products. For instance circular economy regulation which would require manufacturers to make allowances for recycling. I also personally would be wary of allowing Cadmium Telluride panels to be installed. But to be frank most of the objections you see are obviously being cultivated by the IER and similar organizations as a sort of talking point, not out of serious interest, that article and that quote is a prime example.
  - acidburnNSA 8y ago
    Thanks. I'll keep an eye out for IER sources in the future and be more skeptical of their talking points.
    - Brakenshire 8y ago
      Cheers, apologies for piling on.

acidburnNSA 8y ago

That particular quote as is makes no sense. I think the real statement is that solar panel RECYCLING requires sulfuric acid and phosphine gas. That would make more sense. 13.5 million cumulative tonnes of solar waste in China by 2050 is not FUD at all, that's a statement of success in solar deployment. Are you suggesting that recycling this magnitude of solar waste will be trivial, both environmentally and economically? The 30 year lifetime plus massive deployments leads logically to a recycling challenge that isn't often discussed. I'm not an expert in the field so I can't say enough to suggest it will be trivial or challenging. Gut feeling given those kinds of numbers is that it will be both challenging and expensive. Do you have better data?

philipkglass 8y ago
The quote about chemicals makes no sense because it's just promoting fear by association. Phosphine can be used for n-type doping of amorphous silicon layers during certain cell production processes. It never leaves the manufacturing site. It's not used or produced in any module recycling process. Hutzler is smearing solar technology because his institute aims to promote fossil fuels and fight "climate alarmism." https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/tag/climate-alarmism/ https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/tag/climate-alarm... I think that the point about 13.5 million tons of solar waste in China by 2050 is fine by itself. That's still orders of magnitude less waste than would be produced by sourcing equivalent electricity from coal. For comparison, Georgia's Plant Bowen alone has 21 million tons of coal ash sitting in unlined pits and leaching into the water: https://www.southernenvironment.org/news-and-press/news-feed/georgia-power-commits-to-another-29-million-tons-in-coal-ash-cleanup https://www.southernenvironment.org/news-and-press/news-feed... Reading the pie chart from the Sixth Tone article, it looks like about 3/4 of the solar waste material is aluminum, glass, and steel. Those all have efficient, long-established recycling processes. The polymer backsheets and encapsulants, silicon cells, and minor metals used in cell contacts and wiring (copper, silver) are more difficult to deal with because of their heterogeneous nature. The only valuable part of that ~3.375 million tons of heterogenous waste is the copper and silver content. Silicon is low-value and non-hazardous. The polymers need to be treated as plastic waste. Like most plastic waste, they can't be effectively recycled.
- acidburnNSA 8y ago
  Well scaring people away from renewables is pretty counter-productive to the decarbonizing cause so that was not my intent. I happened upon that article when reading something else earlier today and thought it might be relevant. Certainly coal is worse. We should just be careful to not replace one problem with another. Obviously in mass, coal will dominate. It's most a question of raw material availability or economics of recycling that matter for the vast expansion of energy harvesting we're talking about here. I'm glad that you as a knowledgeable person in the topic are not concerned about any negative implications of vast renewable buildout for electricity, transport, heating, and industry.
  - philipkglass 8y ago
    There is one important material constraint before expanding solar PV technology to the multi-terawatt scale: silver. Right now silver-containing conductive pastes are the overwhelmingly popular choice for forming cell contacts. I expect copper contacts to replace silver pastes at some point. Plated copper has higher conductivity than printed silver paste and of course the raw metal is much cheaper, but it takes more effort to integrate plating into manufacturing flows. SunPower already uses copper metallization at gigawatt scale cell production levels, so I'm pretty confident that other manufacturers can follow when silver costs go up. The one important possibly-constrained battery material is cobalt as a component of lithium-ion battery cathodes. But stationary storage batteries don't need to maximize energy density and therefore don't need to use the same cobalt-bearing cathodes as those in mobile electronics and electric vehicles. The key attribute of a stationary grid-storage battery is lifetime -- encompassing both calendar life and cycle life. Long-life batteries don't need cobalt if the energy density is negotiable. FWIW you can see from my comment history that I have no qualms about the scalability or safety of nuclear power either. I think that deep decarbonization may require additional nuclear power. The cost trajectory for storage-backed renewables just looks more promising than the cost trajectory of new nuclear power right now. It appears that the least-cost decarbonization path will emphasize renewable/storage buildout until the marginal decarbonization cost rises high enough to justify more high-cost (but rock-steady) nuclear reactors.
Brakenshire 8y ago
It’s definitely an issue, and I’m interested in the recycling of solar panels in the same way that I’m interested in the recycling of all electronic and industrial products. For instance circular economy regulation which would require manufacturers to make allowances for recycling. I also personally would be wary of allowing Cadmium Telluride panels to be installed. But to be frank most of the objections you see are obviously being cultivated by the IER and similar organizations as a sort of talking point, not out of serious interest, that article and that quote is a prime example.
- acidburnNSA 8y ago
  Thanks. I'll keep an eye out for IER sources in the future and be more skeptical of their talking points.
  - Brakenshire 8y ago
    Cheers, apologies for piling on.