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> If we wanted to we could cover the Sahara with solar panels and have several times more electricity than we know what to do with. Do we have enough rare-Eart
by whoooooo123 6y ago
> If we wanted to we could cover the Sahara with solar panels and have several times more electricity than we know what to do with.
Do we have enough rare-Earth minerals to build this many solar panels? What do we do with the panels when they reach the end of their lifecycle twenty years from now? What do we do when it's nighttime in the Sahara?
- adrianN 6y agoPanels are almost exclusively sand by weight. When panels are at the end of their life we either recycle them into new panels or simply store them somewhere. They're not particularly difficult to store safely. Right now there is not much recycling going on because there simply isn't the volume of old panels available to make this interesting from an economic perspective. To cover nights in the Sahara we use some of the absurd excess energy we get from covering the whole desert to make some Hydrogen or Methane and convert that back to electricity. If we don't want PV and gas synthesis for some reason to we can also just store heat in molten salt in solar-thermal installations and drive steam turbines. That's just a bit more expensive than PV today.
- imtringued 6y agohttps://imgur.com/QwKBMvn https://imgur.com/QwKBMvn I'm not sure why rare Earth minerals would be a bottleneck. They aren't rare in the element abundance sense, just uneconomical to extract, which is why they are being extracted in countries where human rights violations are happening all the time.
- baybal2 6y ago> Do we have enough rare-Earth minerals to build this many solar panels? The are no rare-Earth minerals in silicon solar cells.
- whoooooo123 6y agoD'oh. TIL
- pfdietz 6y agoWhy does this canard about rare earths in PV show up in the comments to every one of these nuclear posts? Where did you hear this, and why did you believe it?