Okay, you got me with your strawman “quote”… they probably don’t produce mountains of ash. However… They probably involve materials that involve some nasty mine drainage. There is good potential to contaminate aquifers even if the wastes are disposed of properly – not sure what the design basis for years of containment is for hazmat disposal sites, but I think that they are just clay-lined dump sites (arsenic/cadmium/etc doesn’t get any less toxic as years go by).
Not spreading Mountains of FUD (I’m pro solar), just wrote two sentences addressing what I thought was a less-than-accurate blanket statement.
Not spreading Mountains of FUD (I’m pro solar), just wrote two sentences addressing what I thought was a less-than-accurate blanket statement.
Understood, and I apologize for insinuating you spread FUD. But, I think it’s helpful to provide context in a world where many in the fossil fuel industry very actively use false equivalencies and half-truths to promote their agendas via forums such as this one.
There’s no doubt that the manufacture of solar cells, etc. isn’t 100% green by any stretch, but it needs to be put into perspective of the vastly worse alternatives or it can give many the wrong impression that solar isn’t vastly more renewable than coal, etc.
One in 7 U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq was killed while guarding a fuel convoy or fueling station. Outfitting the armed forces with renewables makes sense, and will save lives.
Here’s a recent article that has the hard numbers from California solar manufacturers reports to the State:
The state records show the 17 companies, which had 44 manufacturing facilities in California, produced 46.5 million pounds of sludge and contaminated water from 2007 through the first half of 2011. Roughly 97 percent of it was taken to hazardous waste facilities throughout the state, but more than 1.4 million pounds were transported to nine other states: Arkansas, Minnesota, Nebraska, Rhode Island, Nevada, Washington, Utah, New Mexico and Arizona. Several solar energy experts said they have not calculated the industry’s total waste and were surprised at what the records showed.
The roughly 20-year life of a solar panel still makes it some of the cleanest energy technology currently available. Producing solar is still significantly cleaner than fossil fuels. Energy derived from natural gas and coal-fired power plants, for example, creates more than 10 times more hazardous waste than the same energy created by a solar panel, according to Mulvaney.
Edit – was curious about how this would compare to nuclear… (I know, apples/oranges)
Just looked at the Nuclear Energy Institute’s waste info page – US reactors produce a total of ~5 million lbs of used fuel a year. The article above implies over 10 million lbs per year of toxic waste just from California PV manufacturers. The physicist in me needs to point out that the reactor waste at least becomes less toxic with time – the PV waste will likely remain toxic until swallowed by our red-giant sun.
Who was it who said, “You don’t go to the hardware store because you need a drill, you get a drill because you need a hole”?
These topics are so frustrating for me to try to have some sort of balanced perspective because it’s counter intuitive to puzzle out how much enery I’m actually using day to day. When I swap out batteries or put gas in my car’s tank, there’s a very real sense of cause and effect. But each time I use water or electricity, it’s just the turn of a lever or a flip of the switch, and I have to go out of my way to figure out just how much I’ve used.
On the larger scale I look at the energy and water used up by a place like Las Vegas, and wonder just what kind of costs we are willing to pay to keep such a thing going?
My favorite thought experiment right now is to try to compare the cost of keeping somebody warm over the winter in a place like Minneapolis, compared to the cost of sending them south in the fall and bringing them back up north in the spring. It would be easy to imagine a scheme that would be a net loss, but what if you couldn’t externalize any of the variables?
People reflexively equate scaling back with a downgrade in lifestyle, but I still like the smaller and smarter paradigm. It’s hard to sell that when the whole economy seems dependent on cancerous rates of growth.
Well, unless the raw ingredients for solar panels come out of a unicorns butt, they have the same mountains of waste associated with them – mining waste and petrochemicals. When just looking at creating the device producing power, Wind followed by Solar has the highest material requirements per MW produced (most tons of raw materials per MW) – their big benefit is that they don’t need much input afterwards (at least solar doesn’t).
Wait about ten years, then you will likely be able to see piles of discarded solar panels waiting for an economic recycling/disposal option.
I’m a big fan of Solar Power (not Wind) – I just limit my expectations to what reality can deliver.
The other big problem with solar right now is having the ability to go truly off of the grid in an environmentally friendly manner (i.e. power storage without a big environmental hit – get the lead out). Without an economic/envriro-friendly storage ability, one is still dependent on some sort of reliable baseline power (typically, coal/nuke).
That’s easily solved at the small-to-medium-production level by NOT going off the grid, and instead going to net metering. Sell your surplus power to the electric company; they can dynamically reduce production elsewhere. Staying on the grid also covers you for the times when you aren’t producing suffiicent power but someone else is.
No storage elements, no storage inefficiencies.
Yes, we need to continue work on the city-sized energy storage mechanisms, to buffer the output of truly large-scale episodic energy production. But net metering solves the problem at the consumer level.
(Looks like the electric company is likely to owe me money this month. I don’t have an especially large solar installation, but I’ve also done a lot of work on improving efficiency.)
Well, unless the raw ingredients for solar panels come out of a unicorns butt, they have the same mountains of waste associated with them – mining waste and petrochemicals.
Once again, it’s nowhere near the same as fossil fuels. Not even close. I thought we discussed this?
Wait about ten years
In ten years, the technology will be even much cleaner than it is today. You cannot say that for fossil fuels which can only be made slightly cleaner over time. With fossil fuels, it’s hopeless. With more sustainable energy, it’s inevitable.
Without an economic/envriro-friendly storage ability, one is still dependent on some sort of reliable baseline power (typically, coal/nuke).
Give it time and there’ll be much more sustainable storage as well along with a grid that makes us far less reliant on storage in the first place.
Gas isn’t great, but it’s also a more sustainable alternative than coal/nukes if the process of acquiring gas is properly regulated. Electricity from natural gas produces less CO2 per kilowatt-hour than electricity from coal if it’s done right.
Boulder, CO is doing it right and doing it very well despite the oppressive forces of industry that tried to subvert its citizens with propaganda filled with lies and half-truths. Boulder will require gas suppliers to certify their leakage rates, etc. and will switch to bio-gas when it’s possible.
In the meantime, Boulder is going to show the rest of the USA how it’s done and much more aggressively switch over to renewable energy as much is feasible (despite the forces that work against them).
Where there’s a will, there’s a goddam way.
When I told some people back in the day that we were going to make marijuana legal in my town, I was scoffed at …mocked… derided… Who’s laughing now, bitches?
Sure, we got to keep trying harder to get more sustainable energy increasingly sustainable, but please, once again… keep it in proper perspective of the much worse alternatives.
No. As was clearly said, not mountains. No-one’s claiming they’re entirely waste-free, but producing solar panels doesn’t involve mountains of waste; that’s simply a false equivalency.
Remember, in the case of coal, we’re talking about literal, climbable, visible-from-space mountains of waste.
Sorry, just meant that part of those mountains belong to Solar and Wind. Not trying to defend coal/oil/etc…
There just tends to be a cognitive dissonance with many people when it comes to comparing “Green” stuff with “Traditional” stuff were they just blissfully ignore all of the negatives of one while keeping laser focus on the negatives of the other (and they typically have no desire to even try to understand the reality of the situation because they just KNOW – I get the same “vibe” from fundamentalist religious folks). I just happen to be the idiot who has a pathological tendency to try injecting a bit of balance when stuff seems one sided – I was a laugh riot on a Apologetics email list-serve back in my university days.
I was just looking at some Energy Return on Investment (energy in vs. energy out) documents, and it appears that Wind is much better than I recalled – I guess my preference for Solar over Wind is biased by the fact that it is a much better economic option for individual consumers.
Simple solution to the coal waste issue – just use it to replace the mountains that were flattened to mine the coal in the first place. [ Ducks and runs… ]
Unless you are conducting a witch hunt, I don’t know why you wouldn’t be interested in information about the “other” that might change your perspective/understanding of the “other” – I guess some people are just naturally prejudiced and have no interest in challenging those prejudices… It is difficult for me to understand that sort of close-minded stance.
Not sure what the “sides” are – just discussing different modes of generating electricity and attempting to present balanced information about to them.
I do have a need for truth and when I see a deliberately unbalanced presentation of information it tends to get my goat – I immediately discount what they have presented as “woo” until I have checked it myself.
In cases where it is very unbalanced, a quick search using the information presented usually leads back to groups/movements that are very similar to fundamentalist organizations – closed-circuit, echo chamber of information presented by a few charismatic “experts”. All information from outsiders is ignored because the outsiders have an agenda (pot calling kettle black).
I am interested in storage as a means of dealing with grid reliability – not true off grid usage… Living in southern CA, I have experienced more power outages than I did growing up in rural northern WI. I want the ability to island during any disconnect from the grid – 6-8 hours would be nice since that would likely give enough juice to weather an extended (“the big one”) outage (3-4 hr is the average “real” outage with many 5-10 minute ones).
Ah. That’s certainly valid. My approach for that would be to selective about what actually needs to be powered, rather than attempting to maintain full capacity… which would mean my solution would look more like a UPS unit (or several) powering specific devices (or circuits) rather than being able to go completely off-grid.
One of the questions I asked my solar vendor was whether there was any off-grid mode. Since I’m doing net metering, the system is designed to shut down if the grid goes down, to avoid putting power onto lines that the repair crew may have to handle. The answer was, no, the designers didn’t trust consumers to reliably isolate their systems – and from the safety point of view, on a product intended for the mass market, I really can’t argue with that.
Personally, I haven’t seen this particular topic being a very one-sided discussion, The very fact that the word “might” was used in the headline is some indication that folks are trying to look at all the numbers before making recommendations – it recognizes that “might not” is still on the table.
And I think everyone is very aware that “renewable energy” currently still has its own dependencies on non-renewable resources, and likely always will. (Gotta mine for metals, and at least for now drill for plastics, no matter what the actual energy source is, and that’s going to remain true even if we move to fusion and orbital solar.) It isn’t a black-and-white issue by any means… but I think the issues you want to make sure folks consider really have already been factored in. They may not always be explicitly stated, but they’re present.
Short term, we’re stuck with using everything from coal to nuclear to you-name-it. Longer term, I think and hope we can do better. Longest term, our whole technological society is unsustainable, as entropy takes its toll; even mining the re-concentrations of garbage dumps and tremendously improved recycling will only stretch it so far before there is no longer any practical source of raw materials. All we can do is stretch that as far as we can, while doing our best to keep the world a place worth living in.
Coal mining seems to do sufficient damage to that last point to make phasing it out ASAP highly desirable. I expect we’ll eventually be forced to come back to it, but hopefully by then we’ll have thought of better ways to extract and use it that aren’t so damaging to the environment.
