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Just make sure the solar panel components contain no heavy metals or other toxic substances. Same with the batteries. These materials do leach & contaminate the

Just make sure the solar panel components contain no heavy metals or other toxic substances. Same with the batteries. These materials do leach & contaminate the ecosystem & water table. Bonus points if no children were compelled to mine or manufacture the material.

renewiltord 4y ago
Comment made me curious so I looked it up. They do contain heavy metals and toxic substances. As do the batteries. Looking it up, it appears that the contamination occurs during disposal so it's not a good idea to dispose of these in the kind of landfill where they can get into the water table, and it's preferable to recycle them. It appears that mining these materials in formalized industrial mines has no child labour according to Human Rights Watch. It's artisanal independent mines that are risky from this perspective. Overall, the technology seems safe.
- xbar 4y ago
  I would amend your conclusion to say "Overall, the technology seems to be safely manageable." Let to rot after funding is depleted is a recipe for disaster. Consider the original decommissioning plan for San Onofre nuclear power plant: https://sanonofresafety.org/nuclear-waste/ https://sanonofresafety.org/nuclear-waste/
  - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
    That kind of true for every human activity. Anything is dangerous if incompetent / malevolent actors are in charge. Even pig farms cause runoff of manure and fertiliser into rivers, where they cause Eutrophication - massive algae blooms that consume all oxygen in the water, killing all the local fish and fauna and producing massive swaths of hte ocean where the only living thing is Jellyfish.
    - briantakita 4y ago
      Some tech is easier to manage & has been around longer to understand the implications than other technologies though.
- jeffbee 4y ago
  Mass-produced PV panels contain hardly any heavy metal. Some of them contain lead in the solder but this is avoidable. Most of the noise is about cadmium, but you will note that CdTe thin film panels enjoyed brief market success before being stomped again by the irresistible decline of the price of Plain Old Silicon. Even CdTe panels are basically inert, coming from the factory as a stable, insoluble glass. If you read the research papers about the possibility of cadmium pollution in soil from CdTe panels, their methodology is to grind the panel into a fine powder and scatter that on the ground. Why would anyone do that? Look at the funding for the papers. The "research" was designed as anti-renewable propaganda.
  - upsidesinclude 4y ago
    > in soil from CdTe panels, their methodology is to grind the panel into a fine powder and scatter that on the ground. Sounds a bit off, but consider the effect of having the glass thrown into a landfill where it will be bulldozed, day after day, for several years. It is just jumping to the end of what would be the eventual outcome after a few decades of disposal. I don't find that to be an arguable study design. "Anti-renewable propoganda" is certainly a thing, but it's also true that many champions of renewables keep their blinders on when it comes to making assessments. Solar and nuclear are the demonstrably effective means of producing large scale power, but they don't provide portable energy density (the kind we demand). Battery technology has finally come into the realm of competition, but that has been with extensive and persistent research for decades.
    - jeffbee 4y ago
      If chucking PV panels into landfills were actually a widespread practice, I am sure you could produce some statistics about how much of that has actually occurred. The fact is that PV panel economic lifetime is way, way longer than reactionary renewable opponents want you to believe. It is not 15 years, or 25 years, it is more like 100-400 years. Nobody needs to decommission them en masse, yet. And even if they suddenly did, it still does not present a disposal issue. Suppose there are 100 million PV panels in California. This is the right order of magnitude for our peak generating capacity. If you took every PV assembly in the entire state, stacked them 50 deep so they were about as high as a man, and just put them in a field, they would not even cover 500 acres. That's less than a square mile. Total non-issue.

renewiltord 4y ago

Comment made me curious so I looked it up. They do contain heavy metals and toxic substances. As do the batteries. Looking it up, it appears that the contamination occurs during disposal so it's not a good idea to dispose of these in the kind of landfill where they can get into the water table, and it's preferable to recycle them. It appears that mining these materials in formalized industrial mines has no child labour according to Human Rights Watch. It's artisanal independent mines that are risky from this perspective. Overall, the technology seems safe.

xbar 4y ago
I would amend your conclusion to say "Overall, the technology seems to be safely manageable." Let to rot after funding is depleted is a recipe for disaster. Consider the original decommissioning plan for San Onofre nuclear power plant: https://sanonofresafety.org/nuclear-waste/ https://sanonofresafety.org/nuclear-waste/
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago
  That kind of true for every human activity. Anything is dangerous if incompetent / malevolent actors are in charge. Even pig farms cause runoff of manure and fertiliser into rivers, where they cause Eutrophication - massive algae blooms that consume all oxygen in the water, killing all the local fish and fauna and producing massive swaths of hte ocean where the only living thing is Jellyfish.
  - briantakita 4y ago
    Some tech is easier to manage & has been around longer to understand the implications than other technologies though.
jeffbee 4y ago
Mass-produced PV panels contain hardly any heavy metal. Some of them contain lead in the solder but this is avoidable. Most of the noise is about cadmium, but you will note that CdTe thin film panels enjoyed brief market success before being stomped again by the irresistible decline of the price of Plain Old Silicon. Even CdTe panels are basically inert, coming from the factory as a stable, insoluble glass. If you read the research papers about the possibility of cadmium pollution in soil from CdTe panels, their methodology is to grind the panel into a fine powder and scatter that on the ground. Why would anyone do that? Look at the funding for the papers. The "research" was designed as anti-renewable propaganda.
- upsidesinclude 4y ago
  > in soil from CdTe panels, their methodology is to grind the panel into a fine powder and scatter that on the ground. Sounds a bit off, but consider the effect of having the glass thrown into a landfill where it will be bulldozed, day after day, for several years. It is just jumping to the end of what would be the eventual outcome after a few decades of disposal. I don't find that to be an arguable study design. "Anti-renewable propoganda" is certainly a thing, but it's also true that many champions of renewables keep their blinders on when it comes to making assessments. Solar and nuclear are the demonstrably effective means of producing large scale power, but they don't provide portable energy density (the kind we demand). Battery technology has finally come into the realm of competition, but that has been with extensive and persistent research for decades.
  - jeffbee 4y ago
    If chucking PV panels into landfills were actually a widespread practice, I am sure you could produce some statistics about how much of that has actually occurred. The fact is that PV panel economic lifetime is way, way longer than reactionary renewable opponents want you to believe. It is not 15 years, or 25 years, it is more like 100-400 years. Nobody needs to decommission them en masse, yet. And even if they suddenly did, it still does not present a disposal issue. Suppose there are 100 million PV panels in California. This is the right order of magnitude for our peak generating capacity. If you took every PV assembly in the entire state, stacked them 50 deep so they were about as high as a man, and just put them in a field, they would not even cover 500 acres. That's less than a square mile. Total non-issue.