15 ms·

Solar panels are starting to die, leaving behind toxic trash

141 points by jocker12 6y ago

mensetmanusman 6y ago
You can properly dispose or recycle anything non-radioactive with enough energy, heat and oxygen. Soon this process will be powered by excess renewable energy. Still less toxic than coal.
- aidenn0 6y ago
  That's a bit hand-wavy and optimistic. Li-Ion batteries are notoriously hard to recycle, not because the chemistry is hard, but because the logistics are hard in the face of such a wide variety of batteries in use. Maybe solar panels are more uniform, but the challenges of recycling some non-radioactive items are an existence proof of recycling difficulties.
- jabirali 6y ago
  > You can properly dispose or recycle anything non-radioactive with enough energy, heat and oxygen. With "enough energy" you could recycle anything. In theory you could for instance vaporize any waste mixture (including radioactive compounds), send it through a giant mass spectrometer, and get output beams sorted by atomic number. But in practice, how much energy is "enough energy" is quite important to whether that process is realistic. In this case, the relevant metric is how much energy is spent producing and recycling solar panels compared to the energy the solar panels are expected to produce over their lifetime. As long as that ratio can be made sufficiently low, we should be good.
- refurb 6y ago
  Anything organic. Apply as much energy, heat and oxygen you want to mercury and it’s still mercury.
  - toast0 6y ago
    You can bombard it with neutrons to produce (radioactive) gold, though. https://journals.aps.org/pr/abstract/10.1103/PhysRev.60.473 https://journals.aps.org/pr/abstract/10.1103/PhysRev.60.473 (1941)
    - mensetmanusman 6y ago
      Haha, was going to post this as well, but thought it was too snarky :) So few people know that the alchemists ended up being correct. (they just didn’t have enough energy at their disposal!)
    - samatman 6y ago
      Hey, clean baseline energy and mercury upcycling in one nuclear power plant? What's not to love!
baybal2 6y ago
I don't know what they are writing about. PV wafer reclaim has been around for at least a decade, at least in China. Reclaiming a cell is as easy as polishing off its surface layer, which contains most of defects, and resurfacing it. A much more crude method just heats up the cell to the temperature where most defects from solar radiation disappear, but not hot enough for dopants to start diffusing more than they should, and then reselling it as a lower spec cell.
- casefields 6y ago
  California Department of Toxic Substances Control: https://dtsc.ca.gov/solarpanels/ https://dtsc.ca.gov/solarpanels/
  - yorwba 6y ago
    > Q: How are solar panels hazardous? > A: Solar panel wastes include heavy metals such as silver, copper, lead, arsenic, cadmium, selenium that at certain levels may be classified as hazardous wastes. > Q: What does data show? What are the constituents that make the panels hazardous? > A: In general, data shows that older silicon panels may be hazardous due to lead solder. Some older silicon panels are hazardous for hexavalent chromium coatings. Cadmium tellurium (CdTe) panels are typically hazardous due to the cadmium. Gallium arsenide (GaAs) panels may be hazardous due to the arsenic. Thin film panels, such as copper indium gallium selenide (CIS/CIGS) panels, may be hazardous due to the copper and/or selenium. > Q: What about electronic components associated with the solar panels? What are they hazardous for? > A: The electronic components associated with the solar panels (e.g. drivers, inverters, circuit boards) contain all of the common electronic device hazardous constituents such as lead, arsenic, cadmium, selenium, and chromium.
    - hwillis 6y ago
      > A: Solar panel wastes include heavy metals such as silver, copper, lead, arsenic, cadmium, selenium that at certain levels may be classified as hazardous wastes. Note that this is grouping together ALL kinds of cells, particularly cadmium telluride. These cells -especially gallium-based cells- are a small or tiny minority of solar panels. The vast majority of solar panels do not contain any of these except copper and lead. Lead is actively in the process of removal, but the plan is to do so over the next decade or so. Regardless roughly 2000x more lead is used to make car batteries: https://www.freeingenergy.com/are-solar-panels-really-full-of-toxic-materials-like-cadmium-and-lead/ https://www.freeingenergy.com/are-solar-panels-really-full-o...
iamericfletcher 6y ago
" Voluntary, industry-led recycling efforts are limited in scope." Did anyone else chuckle when they saw this? Also, what will happen to the poor people who cannot detach from the grid? As the amount of people using solar increases, I am sure the costs for those who can't afford solar will increase, right? Also, as solar increases, if it does, the already horrible grid infrastructure will suffer even more so as the utility providers face even less financial incentive to provide upkeep.
- dimitrios1 6y ago
  I am taking a hunch here, but I imagine that it is cheaper for you to provide energy to the grid (once the grid is already established) than for the power companies to provide energy to the grid. IIRC, your unused power you generate goes back into the grid correct?
  - jacoblambda 6y ago
    The argument they are making is one that you will see a lot in these types of discussions. As renewable energy becomes cheaper and easier to add to individual houses, the supply of cheap energy combined with the decrease in energy demand from wealthy households will drive down energy prices and cut into the operating margins of power companies. If too many people start producing power and not buying it themselves, power companies would not be able to afford maintaining the power grid as effectively or would have to increase prices for people who can't supply their own power. Basically the argument is that a movement for those who can afford to be self-sufficient to do so ends up being a tax on those who can't afford to. There is some level of merit to this argument and if we transition to a heavily renewables based energy system, we will likely see this occur to some extent during the transitional period. There are a handful of solutions to this problem but the easiest is to move maintenance of power infrastructure from the public utility to the government and implement a local tax to pay for the power grid. Power Utilities would still exist however instead of also maintaining the grid, they would just be responsible for producing power and supplying sufficient redundancy to minimise/eliminate brown- and black-outs. With this solution, everybody shares the burden of maintaining the grid rather than just those who can't afford to be self-sufficient. Those who are able to be self-sufficient can feed back into the grid to help recuperate their expenses on their energy equipment as well as some of the tax they paid in.
thetinguy 6y ago
Solar panels still use leaded solder?
- seventytwo 6y ago
  Not the ones manufactured today, but the ones on the article are 30 or 40 years old, so many of those might have had leaded solder.
  - samatman 6y ago
    Which is good news, because thanks to the exponential growth of solar, panels manufactured in the bad old days may as well not exist. The vast majority of solar panels were manufactured in the last ten years: they are largely free of toxic atoms, and built to a higher standard of power delivery and reliability. In short, the article is clickbait.
- kube-system 6y ago
  Most leaded solder regulations apply to consumer electronics, don’t they? I industrial uses are usually exempt. https://www.rohsguide.com/rohs-categories.htm https://www.rohsguide.com/rohs-categories.htm
andys627 6y ago
Just remember that the greenest kilowatt hour is the kilowatt hour never produced.
- pas 6y ago
  Green is great, but probably the most moral kilowatt is that both green (as in accounts for the environmental load, so it minimizes eco-debt that future humans would have to "pay back") and maximizes current humans' needs, eg. powers homes, schools, hospitals where currently there millions live without stable electricity.
- option 6y ago
  Of those produced, statistically, nuclear is both cleanest and safest [1] [1] https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
  - avmich 6y ago
    Until nuclear waste is taken into account (specifically, its radiotoxicity).
    - notabee 6y ago
      Much of the issue with the waste is that it still doesn't have proper disposal logistics. It's mostly just piling up next to reactors with no place to go.[1] If we still can't solve the storage problem after decades of effort, why should we have any confidence in promises made by that particular industry? [2] If one goes to search for information on the problem, you can see some very obvious SEO manipulation to bring up only industry-positive sites. 1. https://www.npr.org/2019/04/30/716837443/as-nuclear-waste-piles-up-private-companies-pitch-new-ways-to-store-it https://www.npr.org/2019/04/30/716837443/as-nuclear-waste-pi... 2. https://slate.com/technology/2019/06/department-of-energy-nuclear-waste-reclassification-yucca.html https://slate.com/technology/2019/06/department-of-energy-nu...
      - blargmaster33 6y ago
moneytide1 6y ago
Is there a way to mass-disassemble panels and replace the cells? Panel sizes could have been long standardized. I used to buy slightly damaged 6x6 cells on eBay from the factory, so could this be the size template for the automated tooling and robotic maneuvering required to switch out the active material?
jeffbee 6y ago
PV: By 2050, 6 million metric tons of pre-vitrified, almost perfectly inert and easily recycled "waste" material that had a 50-year service life. Coal: 140 million metric tons of toxic glop, at least 100 parts per million of mercury and 10 ppm of uranium, every year, right now.
- hamilyon2 6y ago
  Comparing the problem at hand to other problems isn't going to make it tiny little bit less. Even coal doesn't necessarily produce waste. It is our choice not to capture waste/harmful byproducts makes it so dangerous and "bad".
  - jacoblambda 6y ago
    I think that is the point they are making though. PV is still harmful to the environment in its current form but it isn't as bad as Coal is in its current form. Both can be clean and zero-impact however in practice neither are. PV is still "cleaner" than coal in its current form but neither are truly clean. It's the significant lesser of two evils until we make the effort to go net-zero.
    - jandrese 6y ago
      No energy source will ever be purely clean. PV is several orders of magnitude less polluting than Coal.
      - syedkarim 6y ago
        How much cleaner is solar thermal than PV? I assume that depends on how dirty it is to produce the metal for the turbines (steam or air, in the case of solar towers).
        jeffbee 6y ago
        All of these are very clean compared to coal. Solar thermal is vulnerable to attacks from media articles about dead birds and the fact that some of them have to burn natural gas to start the plant in the morning. You can find both varieties of article courtesy of Fox News: https://www.foxnews.com/politics/taxpayer-backed-solar-plant-actually-a-carbon-polluter https://www.foxnews.com/politics/taxpayer-backed-solar-plant... https://www.foxnews.com/science/emerging-solar-plants-scorch-birds-in-mid-air https://www.foxnews.com/science/emerging-solar-plants-scorch... Solar thermal does have one huge advantage over PV: the plants contain their own short-term energy storage and keep running well after dark. Unfortunately due to market forces solar thermal is currently dead in America. All planned plants have been canceled.
2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago
I bring this up every time solar panels are talked about as some god's gift to energy production. Nobody wants to talk about the insane amounts of e-waste it brings. Not to mention they're constantly improving so people throw out perfectly panels for new ones. I'm pro solar but it does have a few downsides that we shouldn't ignore.
robotbikes 6y ago
Cananyone explain the mechanism through which a solar panel dies or even loses efficiency ? I understand physical damage to the panel but how does a solar panel degrade ? Are stored solar panels losing efficiency or is it a result of an interaction with the solar/ultraviolet or some other radiation ? Is anyone working on solar panels that degrade less and last longer. One issue with solar panels right now I'd imagine is that even 25 years and the ROI are quite long periods of time for many Americans who don't plan on staying in their houses for that long and solar isn't mainstream enough that people appreciate the value it adds.
- sunstone 6y ago
  It's not impossible that as solar tech gets better and cheaper older panels may be replaced for financial reasons even though they are still functional.
- osamagirl69 6y ago
  Solar cells themselves do loose efficiency very slowly (less than 1% per year for most modern monocrystaline silicon cells) due to defects collecting in the semiconductor material. It is the same reason that LEDs slowly loose power over time. Due to the extreme conditions in the semiconductor material (high electric fields, often moderate to high temperatures) the dopants can diffuse into places they do not belong, or cluster together both of which hurt the performance. That said, most panels die before the cells themselves go bad due to mechanical failure of the cells (cracking, etc) or failures in the electrical wiring in the panel due to corrosion. It is the same problem as with LED lighting. I have not seen a single LED bulb which lasted long enough for the actual semiconductor devices to age noticeably, but I have seen dozens of bulbs where thermal cycling caused the electrical contacts to the chip fail or the power supply capacitors have gone bad. Also, due to the rapidly increasing efficiency and decreasing costs of solar cells, it can often be economically viable to replace your array with fresh cells just for the added power output you get. If you took cells form 20 years ago and replace them with current cells you can quadruple your output power for the same area!
_iyig 6y ago
The Stirling engine's time has finally come! :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EahfGfDdgNY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EahfGfDdgNY Not really, but it's a neat alternative for turning solar energy into mechanical power. Achievable (at grossly inefficient power outputs) by the hobbyist without expensive tools or nasty chemicals. Much easier to recycle at the end of a system's useful life.
colechristensen 6y ago
The word toxic has become a great indicator for bullshit.
throwawaysea 6y ago
Wind turbines also suffer from a similar problem. After some number of years, they just get landfilled. See https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-02-05/wind-turbine-blades-can-t-be-recycled-so-they-re-piling-up-in-landfills https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-02-05/wind-turb... or https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2020-02-06/wind-turbine-blades https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2020-02-06/wind-turbi... for more on that. Similar concerns were raised around solar panels by Michael Moore in a recent documentary, which claimed that the total lifetime cost of a solar-powered society makes these alternative green technologies not really green. See https://medium.com/@tejasgole67/is-michael-moore-right-8603f982d049 https://medium.com/@tejasgole67/is-michael-moore-right-8603f... and https://medium.com/@tejasgole67/is-michael-moore-right-part-ii-84f75e5d9343 https://medium.com/@tejasgole67/is-michael-moore-right-part-... for a discussion around that. Ultimately there may be no getting around the fact that we simply need to reduce demand. And reducing demand, if we want to preserve our quality of life, likely means population control.
- acidburnNSA 6y ago
  The Moore Documentary got lots of flack but does raise some pretty good points, particularly about combustion of biofuel. You can see the whole thing here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zk11vI-7czE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zk11vI-7czE I disagree with the movie's conclusion, which seems identical to yours. We can use tech to keep quality of life high by using responsible and sustainable energy systems like nuclear/wind/solar/hydro. PoTH hardly even mentioned nuclear, which tears their whole "we must depopulate" narrative apart easily.
akerro 6y ago
That's not the only "clean" energy that's hard to keep for long with low costs: Wind Turbine Blades Can’t Be Recycled, So They’re Piling Up in Landfills https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-02-05/wind-turbine-blades-can-t-be-recycled-so-they-re-piling-up-in-landfills https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-02-05/wind-turb...
- anticensor 6y ago
  > A wind turbine’s blades can be longer than a Boeing 747 wing, so at the end of their lifespan they can’t just be hauled away. This is wrong, the trucks that bring those blades could well re-take them to recycling plant. It would be a special transport, but a well pre-planned one.
- goda90 6y ago
  An article on alternative blade materials: https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2019/06/wooden-wind-turbines.html https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2019/06/wooden-wind-turbines...
- Nasrudith 6y ago
  So non-toxic waste is somehow a catastrophe compared to all of the other nonrecycalbe garbage already being produced? That is a blatantly stricter standard than literally anything else is held to.
  - pfdietz 6y ago
    I"m pretty sure one could cut those expired turbine blades into short pieces if they were too large.
fyfy18 6y ago
I was under the impression that - baring physical damage - solar panels won't just stop working one day as the article implies, but they merely decrease in efficiency over time. Most solar panels today come with a manufacturer's guarantee that after 25 years, they will still be 80-something percent efficient. At this point they would have paid for themselves over many times, and would now be generating free electricity, so for most installations there is little point in replacing them.
- vz8 6y ago
  The last time I had an estimate for solar, the break-even was 18 years, so it made no sense whatsoever, financially speaking. When you mention after 25 years they would have paid for themselves many times over, based on what criteria? I'd love to revisit this topic -- power costs in Florida are very high. Edit: Just curious on why the downvotes? Not enough context? Negative sentiment? (not intended, genuinely curious about revisiting solar)
  - shiftpgdn 6y ago
    What is "very high"? Much of the reason it takes so long to payback is labor, permitting costs, etc. If you reduce or remove those costs payback is in the order of 5 years at 10 cents/kwh. People will point out that it's silly to factor out labor and permitting but those costs drop radically on grid scale 10MW+ systems where as they make up nearly 50% of the cost on a household scale system.
    - vz8 6y ago
      Very high: for the hottest months of the year, power is $1100+/mo. Average for the last 24 months is just under $900/mo. It's a larger 1-story home: we've tried to address insulation, low-e glass, and AC SEER ratings. Working and teaching from home = consistent cooling demands throughout the day, every day.
      - chefkoch 6y ago
        For someone from Europe that sounds insane.
sh1mmer 6y ago
While this issue is worth exploring and talking about from a policy and science perspective it’s disappointing that the article doesn’t mention that solar e-waste is still considerably less harmful, and much smaller in scale than fossil fuel waste. I sent this to a friend of mine who is an energy expert who reminded me about how terrible coal ash is: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Dan_River_coal_ash_spill https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Dan_River_coal_ash_spil...
- acidburnNSA 6y ago
  A more interesting comparison, moving forward, in my mind, is with nuclear waste. Solar and nuclear both make low carbon electricity and prevent air pollution heath impacts of combustion. Yet most people oppose nuclear because of the waste products. Here we have to compare solar making large amounts of moderately toxic waste from solar that remains toxic forever vs. nuclear making very small amounts of extremely toxic waste that becomes less toxic over time. Clearly more people dislike nuclear waste, but the E=MC² thing makes it so small that it can be completely internalized. At the very least, it is valuable to talk about the negative externalities of decarbonizing at scale with solar as we debate the details of the clean energy transition.
beervirus 6y ago
> A solar panel is essentially an electronic sandwich. The filling is a thin layer of crystalline silicon cells, which are insulated and protected from the elements on both sides by sheets of polymers and glass. It’s all held together in an aluminum frame. On the back of the panel, a junction box contains copper wiring that channels electricity away as it’s being generated. None of this sounds like much of a problem in a landfill. I guess some panels might use lead-based solder, but I would be shocked if it’s more than a handful. If it’s not economical to recycle them, why shouldn’t they go in a landfill?
- acidburnNSA 6y ago
  One reason is that you end up using a lot of raw materials if you aren't recycling when you build out solar electricity at a scale that matters for deeply decarbonizing the world.
  - beervirus 6y ago
    In that case, recycling them should be a money saver, and people should do it for economic reasons.
jokoon 6y ago
I wonder how many solar panels + storage you need versus your average nuclear plant
throwaway189262 6y ago
Uh aren't solar panels mostly glass and silicon? The article says silicon is "valuable" for recycling. It's not. It's sand, it's worthless. Glass and silicon are both rocks. Putting them back into the ground isn't going to hurt anything
- phendrenad2 6y ago
  The problem is the toxic chemicals in between the glass. Are we going to bury the panes as deep as we dug them up? Or will they be near the surface, creating a layer of toxicity for future generations?
  - pfdietz 6y ago
    Which chemicals are those?
    - phendrenad2 6y ago
      TBH I'm just taking this and various article'a word that they exist.
      - pfdietz 6y ago
        Don't be a conduit for misinformation.

141 points by jocker12 6y ago

You can properly dispose or recycle anything non-radioactive with enough energy, heat and oxygen. Soon this process will be powered by excess renewable energy. Still less toxic than coal.

aidenn0 6y ago
That's a bit hand-wavy and optimistic. Li-Ion batteries are notoriously hard to recycle, not because the chemistry is hard, but because the logistics are hard in the face of such a wide variety of batteries in use. Maybe solar panels are more uniform, but the challenges of recycling some non-radioactive items are an existence proof of recycling difficulties.
jabirali 6y ago
> You can properly dispose or recycle anything non-radioactive with enough energy, heat and oxygen. With "enough energy" you could recycle anything. In theory you could for instance vaporize any waste mixture (including radioactive compounds), send it through a giant mass spectrometer, and get output beams sorted by atomic number. But in practice, how much energy is "enough energy" is quite important to whether that process is realistic. In this case, the relevant metric is how much energy is spent producing and recycling solar panels compared to the energy the solar panels are expected to produce over their lifetime. As long as that ratio can be made sufficiently low, we should be good.
refurb 6y ago
Anything organic. Apply as much energy, heat and oxygen you want to mercury and it’s still mercury.
- toast0 6y ago
  You can bombard it with neutrons to produce (radioactive) gold, though. https://journals.aps.org/pr/abstract/10.1103/PhysRev.60.473 https://journals.aps.org/pr/abstract/10.1103/PhysRev.60.473 (1941)
  - mensetmanusman 6y ago
    Haha, was going to post this as well, but thought it was too snarky :) So few people know that the alchemists ended up being correct. (they just didn’t have enough energy at their disposal!)
  - samatman 6y ago
    Hey, clean baseline energy and mercury upcycling in one nuclear power plant? What's not to love!

baybal2 6y ago

I don't know what they are writing about. PV wafer reclaim has been around for at least a decade, at least in China. Reclaiming a cell is as easy as polishing off its surface layer, which contains most of defects, and resurfacing it. A much more crude method just heats up the cell to the temperature where most defects from solar radiation disappear, but not hot enough for dopants to start diffusing more than they should, and then reselling it as a lower spec cell.

casefields 6y ago
California Department of Toxic Substances Control: https://dtsc.ca.gov/solarpanels/ https://dtsc.ca.gov/solarpanels/
- yorwba 6y ago
  > Q: How are solar panels hazardous? > A: Solar panel wastes include heavy metals such as silver, copper, lead, arsenic, cadmium, selenium that at certain levels may be classified as hazardous wastes. > Q: What does data show? What are the constituents that make the panels hazardous? > A: In general, data shows that older silicon panels may be hazardous due to lead solder. Some older silicon panels are hazardous for hexavalent chromium coatings. Cadmium tellurium (CdTe) panels are typically hazardous due to the cadmium. Gallium arsenide (GaAs) panels may be hazardous due to the arsenic. Thin film panels, such as copper indium gallium selenide (CIS/CIGS) panels, may be hazardous due to the copper and/or selenium. > Q: What about electronic components associated with the solar panels? What are they hazardous for? > A: The electronic components associated with the solar panels (e.g. drivers, inverters, circuit boards) contain all of the common electronic device hazardous constituents such as lead, arsenic, cadmium, selenium, and chromium.
  - hwillis 6y ago
    > A: Solar panel wastes include heavy metals such as silver, copper, lead, arsenic, cadmium, selenium that at certain levels may be classified as hazardous wastes. Note that this is grouping together ALL kinds of cells, particularly cadmium telluride. These cells -especially gallium-based cells- are a small or tiny minority of solar panels. The vast majority of solar panels do not contain any of these except copper and lead. Lead is actively in the process of removal, but the plan is to do so over the next decade or so. Regardless roughly 2000x more lead is used to make car batteries: https://www.freeingenergy.com/are-solar-panels-really-full-of-toxic-materials-like-cadmium-and-lead/ https://www.freeingenergy.com/are-solar-panels-really-full-o...

iamericfletcher 6y ago

" Voluntary, industry-led recycling efforts are limited in scope." Did anyone else chuckle when they saw this? Also, what will happen to the poor people who cannot detach from the grid? As the amount of people using solar increases, I am sure the costs for those who can't afford solar will increase, right? Also, as solar increases, if it does, the already horrible grid infrastructure will suffer even more so as the utility providers face even less financial incentive to provide upkeep.

dimitrios1 6y ago
I am taking a hunch here, but I imagine that it is cheaper for you to provide energy to the grid (once the grid is already established) than for the power companies to provide energy to the grid. IIRC, your unused power you generate goes back into the grid correct?
- jacoblambda 6y ago
  The argument they are making is one that you will see a lot in these types of discussions. As renewable energy becomes cheaper and easier to add to individual houses, the supply of cheap energy combined with the decrease in energy demand from wealthy households will drive down energy prices and cut into the operating margins of power companies. If too many people start producing power and not buying it themselves, power companies would not be able to afford maintaining the power grid as effectively or would have to increase prices for people who can't supply their own power. Basically the argument is that a movement for those who can afford to be self-sufficient to do so ends up being a tax on those who can't afford to. There is some level of merit to this argument and if we transition to a heavily renewables based energy system, we will likely see this occur to some extent during the transitional period. There are a handful of solutions to this problem but the easiest is to move maintenance of power infrastructure from the public utility to the government and implement a local tax to pay for the power grid. Power Utilities would still exist however instead of also maintaining the grid, they would just be responsible for producing power and supplying sufficient redundancy to minimise/eliminate brown- and black-outs. With this solution, everybody shares the burden of maintaining the grid rather than just those who can't afford to be self-sufficient. Those who are able to be self-sufficient can feed back into the grid to help recuperate their expenses on their energy equipment as well as some of the tax they paid in.

thetinguy 6y ago

Solar panels still use leaded solder?

seventytwo 6y ago
Not the ones manufactured today, but the ones on the article are 30 or 40 years old, so many of those might have had leaded solder.
- samatman 6y ago
  Which is good news, because thanks to the exponential growth of solar, panels manufactured in the bad old days may as well not exist. The vast majority of solar panels were manufactured in the last ten years: they are largely free of toxic atoms, and built to a higher standard of power delivery and reliability. In short, the article is clickbait.
kube-system 6y ago
Most leaded solder regulations apply to consumer electronics, don’t they? I industrial uses are usually exempt. https://www.rohsguide.com/rohs-categories.htm https://www.rohsguide.com/rohs-categories.htm

andys627 6y ago

Just remember that the greenest kilowatt hour is the kilowatt hour never produced.

pas 6y ago
Green is great, but probably the most moral kilowatt is that both green (as in accounts for the environmental load, so it minimizes eco-debt that future humans would have to "pay back") and maximizes current humans' needs, eg. powers homes, schools, hospitals where currently there millions live without stable electricity.
option 6y ago
Of those produced, statistically, nuclear is both cleanest and safest [1] [1] https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
- avmich 6y ago
  Until nuclear waste is taken into account (specifically, its radiotoxicity).
  - notabee 6y ago
    Much of the issue with the waste is that it still doesn't have proper disposal logistics. It's mostly just piling up next to reactors with no place to go.[1] If we still can't solve the storage problem after decades of effort, why should we have any confidence in promises made by that particular industry? [2] If one goes to search for information on the problem, you can see some very obvious SEO manipulation to bring up only industry-positive sites. 1. https://www.npr.org/2019/04/30/716837443/as-nuclear-waste-piles-up-private-companies-pitch-new-ways-to-store-it https://www.npr.org/2019/04/30/716837443/as-nuclear-waste-pi... 2. https://slate.com/technology/2019/06/department-of-energy-nuclear-waste-reclassification-yucca.html https://slate.com/technology/2019/06/department-of-energy-nu...
    - blargmaster33 6y ago

moneytide1 6y ago

Is there a way to mass-disassemble panels and replace the cells? Panel sizes could have been long standardized. I used to buy slightly damaged 6x6 cells on eBay from the factory, so could this be the size template for the automated tooling and robotic maneuvering required to switch out the active material?

jeffbee 6y ago

PV: By 2050, 6 million metric tons of pre-vitrified, almost perfectly inert and easily recycled "waste" material that had a 50-year service life. Coal: 140 million metric tons of toxic glop, at least 100 parts per million of mercury and 10 ppm of uranium, every year, right now.

hamilyon2 6y ago
Comparing the problem at hand to other problems isn't going to make it tiny little bit less. Even coal doesn't necessarily produce waste. It is our choice not to capture waste/harmful byproducts makes it so dangerous and "bad".
- jacoblambda 6y ago
  I think that is the point they are making though. PV is still harmful to the environment in its current form but it isn't as bad as Coal is in its current form. Both can be clean and zero-impact however in practice neither are. PV is still "cleaner" than coal in its current form but neither are truly clean. It's the significant lesser of two evils until we make the effort to go net-zero.
  - jandrese 6y ago
    No energy source will ever be purely clean. PV is several orders of magnitude less polluting than Coal.
    - syedkarim 6y ago
      How much cleaner is solar thermal than PV? I assume that depends on how dirty it is to produce the metal for the turbines (steam or air, in the case of solar towers).
      - jeffbee 6y ago
        All of these are very clean compared to coal. Solar thermal is vulnerable to attacks from media articles about dead birds and the fact that some of them have to burn natural gas to start the plant in the morning. You can find both varieties of article courtesy of Fox News: https://www.foxnews.com/politics/taxpayer-backed-solar-plant-actually-a-carbon-polluter https://www.foxnews.com/politics/taxpayer-backed-solar-plant... https://www.foxnews.com/science/emerging-solar-plants-scorch-birds-in-mid-air https://www.foxnews.com/science/emerging-solar-plants-scorch... Solar thermal does have one huge advantage over PV: the plants contain their own short-term energy storage and keep running well after dark. Unfortunately due to market forces solar thermal is currently dead in America. All planned plants have been canceled.

2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago

I bring this up every time solar panels are talked about as some god's gift to energy production. Nobody wants to talk about the insane amounts of e-waste it brings. Not to mention they're constantly improving so people throw out perfectly panels for new ones. I'm pro solar but it does have a few downsides that we shouldn't ignore.

robotbikes 6y ago

Cananyone explain the mechanism through which a solar panel dies or even loses efficiency ? I understand physical damage to the panel but how does a solar panel degrade ? Are stored solar panels losing efficiency or is it a result of an interaction with the solar/ultraviolet or some other radiation ? Is anyone working on solar panels that degrade less and last longer. One issue with solar panels right now I'd imagine is that even 25 years and the ROI are quite long periods of time for many Americans who don't plan on staying in their houses for that long and solar isn't mainstream enough that people appreciate the value it adds.

sunstone 6y ago
It's not impossible that as solar tech gets better and cheaper older panels may be replaced for financial reasons even though they are still functional.
osamagirl69 6y ago
Solar cells themselves do loose efficiency very slowly (less than 1% per year for most modern monocrystaline silicon cells) due to defects collecting in the semiconductor material. It is the same reason that LEDs slowly loose power over time. Due to the extreme conditions in the semiconductor material (high electric fields, often moderate to high temperatures) the dopants can diffuse into places they do not belong, or cluster together both of which hurt the performance. That said, most panels die before the cells themselves go bad due to mechanical failure of the cells (cracking, etc) or failures in the electrical wiring in the panel due to corrosion. It is the same problem as with LED lighting. I have not seen a single LED bulb which lasted long enough for the actual semiconductor devices to age noticeably, but I have seen dozens of bulbs where thermal cycling caused the electrical contacts to the chip fail or the power supply capacitors have gone bad. Also, due to the rapidly increasing efficiency and decreasing costs of solar cells, it can often be economically viable to replace your array with fresh cells just for the added power output you get. If you took cells form 20 years ago and replace them with current cells you can quadruple your output power for the same area!

_iyig 6y ago

The Stirling engine's time has finally come! :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EahfGfDdgNY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EahfGfDdgNY Not really, but it's a neat alternative for turning solar energy into mechanical power. Achievable (at grossly inefficient power outputs) by the hobbyist without expensive tools or nasty chemicals. Much easier to recycle at the end of a system's useful life.

colechristensen 6y ago

The word toxic has become a great indicator for bullshit.

throwawaysea 6y ago

Wind turbines also suffer from a similar problem. After some number of years, they just get landfilled. See https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-02-05/wind-turbine-blades-can-t-be-recycled-so-they-re-piling-up-in-landfills https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-02-05/wind-turb... or https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2020-02-06/wind-turbine-blades https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2020-02-06/wind-turbi... for more on that. Similar concerns were raised around solar panels by Michael Moore in a recent documentary, which claimed that the total lifetime cost of a solar-powered society makes these alternative green technologies not really green. See https://medium.com/@tejasgole67/is-michael-moore-right-8603f982d049 https://medium.com/@tejasgole67/is-michael-moore-right-8603f... and https://medium.com/@tejasgole67/is-michael-moore-right-part-ii-84f75e5d9343 https://medium.com/@tejasgole67/is-michael-moore-right-part-... for a discussion around that. Ultimately there may be no getting around the fact that we simply need to reduce demand. And reducing demand, if we want to preserve our quality of life, likely means population control.

acidburnNSA 6y ago
The Moore Documentary got lots of flack but does raise some pretty good points, particularly about combustion of biofuel. You can see the whole thing here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zk11vI-7czE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zk11vI-7czE I disagree with the movie's conclusion, which seems identical to yours. We can use tech to keep quality of life high by using responsible and sustainable energy systems like nuclear/wind/solar/hydro. PoTH hardly even mentioned nuclear, which tears their whole "we must depopulate" narrative apart easily.

akerro 6y ago

That's not the only "clean" energy that's hard to keep for long with low costs: Wind Turbine Blades Can’t Be Recycled, So They’re Piling Up in Landfills https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-02-05/wind-turbine-blades-can-t-be-recycled-so-they-re-piling-up-in-landfills https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-02-05/wind-turb...

anticensor 6y ago
> A wind turbine’s blades can be longer than a Boeing 747 wing, so at the end of their lifespan they can’t just be hauled away. This is wrong, the trucks that bring those blades could well re-take them to recycling plant. It would be a special transport, but a well pre-planned one.
goda90 6y ago
An article on alternative blade materials: https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2019/06/wooden-wind-turbines.html https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2019/06/wooden-wind-turbines...
Nasrudith 6y ago
So non-toxic waste is somehow a catastrophe compared to all of the other nonrecycalbe garbage already being produced? That is a blatantly stricter standard than literally anything else is held to.
- pfdietz 6y ago
  I"m pretty sure one could cut those expired turbine blades into short pieces if they were too large.

fyfy18 6y ago

I was under the impression that - baring physical damage - solar panels won't just stop working one day as the article implies, but they merely decrease in efficiency over time. Most solar panels today come with a manufacturer's guarantee that after 25 years, they will still be 80-something percent efficient. At this point they would have paid for themselves over many times, and would now be generating free electricity, so for most installations there is little point in replacing them.

vz8 6y ago
The last time I had an estimate for solar, the break-even was 18 years, so it made no sense whatsoever, financially speaking. When you mention after 25 years they would have paid for themselves many times over, based on what criteria? I'd love to revisit this topic -- power costs in Florida are very high. Edit: Just curious on why the downvotes? Not enough context? Negative sentiment? (not intended, genuinely curious about revisiting solar)
- shiftpgdn 6y ago
  What is "very high"? Much of the reason it takes so long to payback is labor, permitting costs, etc. If you reduce or remove those costs payback is in the order of 5 years at 10 cents/kwh. People will point out that it's silly to factor out labor and permitting but those costs drop radically on grid scale 10MW+ systems where as they make up nearly 50% of the cost on a household scale system.
  - vz8 6y ago
    Very high: for the hottest months of the year, power is $1100+/mo. Average for the last 24 months is just under $900/mo. It's a larger 1-story home: we've tried to address insulation, low-e glass, and AC SEER ratings. Working and teaching from home = consistent cooling demands throughout the day, every day.
    - chefkoch 6y ago
      For someone from Europe that sounds insane.

sh1mmer 6y ago

While this issue is worth exploring and talking about from a policy and science perspective it’s disappointing that the article doesn’t mention that solar e-waste is still considerably less harmful, and much smaller in scale than fossil fuel waste. I sent this to a friend of mine who is an energy expert who reminded me about how terrible coal ash is: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Dan_River_coal_ash_spill https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Dan_River_coal_ash_spil...

acidburnNSA 6y ago
A more interesting comparison, moving forward, in my mind, is with nuclear waste. Solar and nuclear both make low carbon electricity and prevent air pollution heath impacts of combustion. Yet most people oppose nuclear because of the waste products. Here we have to compare solar making large amounts of moderately toxic waste from solar that remains toxic forever vs. nuclear making very small amounts of extremely toxic waste that becomes less toxic over time. Clearly more people dislike nuclear waste, but the E=MC² thing makes it so small that it can be completely internalized. At the very least, it is valuable to talk about the negative externalities of decarbonizing at scale with solar as we debate the details of the clean energy transition.

beervirus 6y ago

> A solar panel is essentially an electronic sandwich. The filling is a thin layer of crystalline silicon cells, which are insulated and protected from the elements on both sides by sheets of polymers and glass. It’s all held together in an aluminum frame. On the back of the panel, a junction box contains copper wiring that channels electricity away as it’s being generated. None of this sounds like much of a problem in a landfill. I guess some panels might use lead-based solder, but I would be shocked if it’s more than a handful. If it’s not economical to recycle them, why shouldn’t they go in a landfill?

acidburnNSA 6y ago
One reason is that you end up using a lot of raw materials if you aren't recycling when you build out solar electricity at a scale that matters for deeply decarbonizing the world.
- beervirus 6y ago
  In that case, recycling them should be a money saver, and people should do it for economic reasons.

jokoon 6y ago

I wonder how many solar panels + storage you need versus your average nuclear plant

throwaway189262 6y ago

Uh aren't solar panels mostly glass and silicon? The article says silicon is "valuable" for recycling. It's not. It's sand, it's worthless. Glass and silicon are both rocks. Putting them back into the ground isn't going to hurt anything

phendrenad2 6y ago
The problem is the toxic chemicals in between the glass. Are we going to bury the panes as deep as we dug them up? Or will they be near the surface, creating a layer of toxicity for future generations?
- pfdietz 6y ago
  Which chemicals are those?
  - phendrenad2 6y ago
    TBH I'm just taking this and various article'a word that they exist.
    - pfdietz 6y ago
      Don't be a conduit for misinformation.