That Dirty Green Energy

"The state, once known for its plentiful, cheap and reliable energy supplies, is now dealing with rolling blackouts as its green energy infrastructure buckles under the strain of summer heat," we said Thursday, because the wind sometimes refuses to blow and the sun isn't always shining, not even in California.

"The problem of solar panel disposal 'will explode with full force in two or three decades and wreck the environment' because it 'is a huge amount of waste and they are not easy to recycle,'" writes energy analyst Michael Shellenberger, quoting a Chinese recycling official.

In his 2018 Forbes column headlined "If Solar Panels Are So Clean, Why Do They Produce So Much Toxic Waste?" Shellenberger also quotes a four-decade veteran of America's solar industry, who said "The reality is that there is a problem now, and it's only going to get larger, expanding as rapidly as the PV industry expanded 10 years ago"; and researchers from the Institute for Photovoltaics in Stuttgart, Germany, who found that "Contrary to previous assumptions, pollutants such as lead or carcinogenic cadmium can be almost completely washed out of the fragments of solar modules over a period of several months, for example by rainwater."

More recently, Hazardous Waste Experts reported worn-out solar panels are "a potent source of hazardous waste," producing a "Dilemma" that "Is especially virulent in California, Oregon, and Washington, as those states started adopting solar energy earliest in the game - suggesting that eco-virtue mightn't necessarily be its own reward."

Just as solar and wind chew up immense tracts of real estate too, will the retirement of solar energy's constituent parts.

"If solar and nuclear produce the same amount of electricity over the next 25 years that nuclear produced in 2016, and the wastes are stacked on football fields, the nuclear waste would reach the height of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, while the solar waste would reach the height of two Mt. Everests," says Environmental Progress, which also tells us that "Solar panels create 300 times more toxic waste per unit of energy than do nuclear power plants."

While nuclear waste is contained in heavy drums and regularly monitored, solar waste outside of Europe today ends up in the larger global stream of electronic waste.

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/08/24/that-dirty-green-energy/