Great research, Michael. The 'renewable energy market" dynamics have offered a great opportunity for unscrupulous salesmen to over-promise and under-deliver. That is the problem with an emotionally-appealing narrative that lacks a fact basis. The problem that only 5% of EV batteries being recycled is ominous as the electrolyte in lithium-ion batteries is toxic and flammable.
Manufacture, array land footprints and waste disposal life-cycle environmental impacts have been wholly ignored in the rush to "renewable" energy installations.
1) Comparative life cycle assessment of 2.0 MW wind turbines
The work presented examines life cycle environmental impacts of two 2.0 MW wind turbines. Manufacturing, transport, installation, maintenance, and end of life have been considered for both models and are compared using the ReCiPe 2008 impact assessment method. In addition, energy payback analysis was conducted based on the cumulative energy demand and the energy produced by the wind turbines over 20 years. Life cycle assessment revealed that environmental impacts are concentrated in the manufacturing stage, which accounts for 78% of impacts. The energy payback period for the two turbine models are found to be 5.2 and 6.4 months, respectively.”
2) “A 2017 study in Nature Energy found that when accounting for manufacturing and construction, the lifetime carbon footprints of solar, wind, and nuclear power are about one-twentieth of those of coal and natural gas, even when the latter include expensive carbon capture and storage technology. The energy produced during the operation of a solar panel and wind turbine is 26 and 44 times greater than the energy needed to build and install them, respectively. There are many life-cycle assessment studies arriving at similar conclusions.”
You fail to examine or cite nuclear life-cycle advantages with zero operational carbon emissions. And, maybe it's not a carbon problem -- it's a critical energy affordability and reliability problem. "Renewable" wind and solar power facilities have a useful life of 25 to 30 years, while nuclear power facilities have a useful life of 50 years or more.
Oh, does that uranium just mine it self and walk down to the reactor? Nuke is low carbon, it isn't zero carbon.
"Nuclear power is twice as good as coal, with the energy embedded in the power plant and fuel offsetting 5% of its output, equivalent to an EROI of 20:1.
Wind and solar perform even better, at 2% and 4% respectively, equivalent to EROIs of 44:1 and 26:1. ...
"...the footprint of nuclear, wind and solar are much lower than coal and gas with CCS, as well as hydro or bioenergy."
As for longevity, energy specialist M Barnard put it this way:
"The mean age of nuclear reactors globally is 30.7 years. They typically require substantial refurbishment every 20 years and usually more frequently as they age. Lots of reactors are 40–50 years old, with the oldest one operating in the USA having gone into service in 1969.
Refurbishment has, like everything else related to nuclear energy, turned out to be much more expensive and time consuming than originally thought. As a result, quite a bit of refurbishment is just not economically competitive with replacing the reactor with wind and solar, which are much lower risk.
As a result, as reactors age and approach refurbishment, only governmental subsidies and intervention will bridge them for another decade or two of operations. In the USA in less regulated markets, some existing nuclear reactors already can’t compete on the open electricity markets sufficient well to turn even a minor profit, and so are seeing premature decommissioning.”
Nuke isn't zero carbon. It's going away for reasons other than being at least low carbon. Turns out nobody wants to take 15 years and pay $12 billion for a GW when competitors can do it for a fraction of that in two years.
a) cost to build
b) cost of kWh produced
c) time to build
d) risk to investment
e) return on investment
f) waste disposal
g) public acceptance
h) vulnerability to terrorism (dirty bomb)
And, 60 years of over promising and under delivering.
Which is why last year nuke had a net gain of zero installed capacity.
“It is one thing to impose drastic measures and harsh economic penalties when an environmental problem is clear-cut and severe. It is quite another to do so when the environmental problem is largely hypothetical and not substantiated by careful observations. This is definitely the case with global warming.” – Frederick Seitz, Introduction to Fred Singer’s Hot Talk, Cold Science (1999 and 2021))
"largely hypothetical and not substantiated by careful observations."
Oh yes, those old Merchants of Doubt, Singer and Seitz. We have careful observations and the hypothetical passed 50 years ago.
--
"Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming"
"...an important story about the misuse of science to mislead the public on matters ranging from the risks of smoking to the reality of global warming. The people the authors accuse in this carefully documented book are themselves scientists—mostly physicists, former cold warriors who now serve a conservative agenda, and vested interests like the tobacco industry. The authors name these scientists—all with powerful connections in government and the media—including Robert Jastrow, Frederick Seitz, and S. Fred Singer. Seven compelling chapters detail seven issues (acid rain, the dangers of smoking and secondhand smoke, the ozone hole, global warming, the Strategic Defense Initiative, lead in gasoline and the banning of DDT) in which this group aimed to sow seeds of public doubt on matters of settled science. They did so by casting aspersions on the science and the scientists who produce it." http://www.merchantsofdoubt.org/
Fake experts are recyclable and easily retooled. In fact, the CO2 Coalition's founder breaks records on that count.
Siegfried Friedrich Singer, the founder of the CO2 Coalition, is a fake expert par excellence on the following:
- Tobacco is safe!
- Asbestos is safe!
- Acid rain is a hoax!
- The ozone hole and CFC's known properties are a hoax!
- Climate change is a hoax!
- There was an alien civilization on Phobos, a Martian moon!
In natural science journals he has published exactly zero research papers on those subjects, yet he's always there willing to play pretend before Congress when tobacco companies and polluters need him."
Reports of necdotal nuclear failures are echoes of 20th-century alarmism resulting from negligent 20th-century reactor designs and operations. There are about 450 nuclear power plants operating in the world. This does not include numerous nuclear facilities in research labs and medical clinics.
Nuclear power generation has provided safe, affordable and reliable electricity that is critical to human survival since 1954. Nuclear power reactors generate electricity at a 90% annual operational efficiency, while "renewable" wind and solar generate electricity at a 25% annual efficiency. Recent break throughs in Small Modular Reactors (SMR) hold great promise for continuing and expanding the role of nuclear energy in our portfolio of essential electric power sources.
US onshore wind is now above 42%. New offshore wind going in is hitting above 60%.
Department of Energy’s 2016 Wind Technologies Market Report shows how wind capacity factors have evolved over time: “The average 2016 capacity factor among projects built in 2014 and 2015 was 42.5%, compared to an average of 32.1% among projects built from 2004–2011 and just 25.4% among projects built from 1998 to 2001.” …
So modern US wind is up to 42.5 percent and natural gas is at 56 percent. The Haliade-X, according to GE, will have a capacity factor of 63 percent. That is wackadoodle, though it wouldn’t be the highest in the world — the floating offshore turbines in the Hywind Scotland project hit 65 percent recently.
Add all that up and, at a “typical German North Sea site,” GE says, each Haliade-X turbine will produce about 67GWh annually, “enough clean power for up to 16,000 households per turbine, and up to 1 million European households in a 750 MW windfarm configuration.”
Your reasoned, well-researched and cited, and always reasonable dissent from contemporary eco-orthodoxy reminds me of something I read last year in a Catholic newsletter I subscribe to: "When being seen choosing sides is easy, we should be wary." (Stephen P. White, The Catholic Thing, April 16, 2020). Too many people are more interested in choosing the "right" side than in doing any actual discernment. Trying to reduce a discipline like climatology to a bumper sticker is not only a fool's errand, but is a slight to climatology. So thank you for your thoughtful research on these issues.
You are reasoning from false premisses. How about, if you think of it like "if zealous believers in Malthus were inventing things to solve problems that didn't exist, what would all those solutions really be accomplishing?". The answer, is depopulating the earth. Making trash pickers in Africa sick, is actually a feature, not a bug.
We are carbon based life forms. We need CO2 in the atmosphere to continue to survive. Going to "zero carbon" is a suicide pact. For us, not them. Of course.
Zero carbon is only the beginning. Net-zero is the goal and that is totally impossible. It requires direct air capture and geological storage under pressure. Globally, the technology is unable to store even one per-per-million which is almost 8,000 million metric tons. The climate would hardly notice the loss.
Good luck Michael in your fight against the solar lobby. You are up against the biggest and most powerful corporations in the world. I used to have a dairy farm in Decatur county Georgia which lies just north of Tallahassee, FL. where I now live. Solar entrepreneurs are offering over $700
per acre yearly rents to landowners to lease their for solar panels. This is over 3 times as much
as local farmers can afford to pay. Decatur county ranks second in Georgia for annual crop production mostly peanuts, cotton, corn, tomatoes and pecans Thousands of acres of some
of the most productive irrigated farmland in the world are taken over by solar panels. Pastures and forests are being destroyed as well. The local economy which depends on agriculture will be severely impacted as local farmers lose their leases. The jobs created supplying these farms,
transporting the harvest and working the farm it self will be gone. All the income from the solar
leases will go to a handful of multimillionaire landowners as well as huge tax and zero carbon incentives. All this destruction just to produce a few hundred megawatts of electricity.
This area gets very little sunshine in the summer months of peak demand. Since June 1st
we have had less than 10 days with consistent sunshine. Cloud cover has been
80 per cent or more nearly everyday and we get showers and thunderstorms nearly everyday.
I would be shocked if a 100 megawatt installation could produce 10 megawatts a day in the summer.
So in the not distant future I will see mile after mile of solar ugliness on my drive through
Decatur county rather than mile after mile of pine forests, peanut and tomato fields. It seems
like to go Green we need to eliminate the green landscape we now enjoy. And you could cover the entire county with solar panels and the effect on the Earth's climate would be zero.
Near where we live in Tennessee there is a large coal fired generating station, producing up to 2.47 GW of power into the grid. The plant is dated, plans for its future are under discussion. One path has the plant being replaced with a combined cycle gas turbine, the other path some are advocating is solar. So I was curious as to how much solar it would take to replace the plants output on a cold December morning. I used the NREL PV Watts calculator, to keep the numbers simple I looked at a 1kW scenario, operating 24 hours / day (24 kWh output). To produce this capacity in December would require 10.4kW of PV, this factors in the shorter days and average cloud coverage. I’m not so sure about cloud coverage & storage, however the DNI for our zip code is ~4.7 kWh / m2, and PV Watts assumed 2.89 kWh / m2, which might suggest 40% cloud coverage, which doesn’t seem unusual. So in December, 12 days will see reduced panel output, relying more on stored energy. If we assume on those days panel output is reduced 50%, this might suggest 12 kWh comes from batteries, requiring 144kWh of storage assuming the cloudy days were sequential. These are averages, we don’t want a brown out should there be prolonged periods of cloudy weather, so maybe add a safety factor of 2X, or 288 kWh of storage.
This is for a 1 kW source (like a small generator), scaling this up to the 2.47GW plant, 25.7 gW of PV solar would be required with 711 gWh of storage. I haven’t thought about real estate required, cost, or managing the storm water runoff from such a facility, but this illustrates the challenges of providing reliable base load on a 24/7 basis from a source that has diurnal, seasonal and weather based variability. And we are expecting it to get wetter in our area due to climate change.
"But solar panels cannot be a primary energy source like nuclear, natural gas, or coal, for inherently physical reasons relating to the unreliable and dilute nature of their “fuel,” sunlight. Low power densities must induce higher material intensity and spatial requirements, and thus higher physical costs. "
Your article might be about solar, but the arguments made me accept this too, and the world makes more sense as a result!
It's not about whether your personal solar panels still work today or in 50 years. It's about what people are doing as statistically as global trends in aggregate. Solar panels lose efficiency over time, sometimes as much as 1% per year. It's not hard to believe why people in China, Germany, or anywhere else will replace their solar panels after 10, 15, or 20 years instead of the 30 years assumed by the industry, especially if they're not experts in this stuff. And the quality of glass in your solar panels can't be attested to, but for many people it cannot be recycled as float glass due to impurities like plastic, lead, cadmium and antimony.
Must be aggravating to write an article like this and have it ripped to pieces by people who know what they are talking about. What, did you get four people who agreed with your premise and 40 who proved you wrong? Perhaps you should fire your research staff.
"in contrast to nuclear waste, which is safely stored and never hurts anyone": "Radioactive waste is a huge concern. Waste from nuclear power plants can remain active for hundreds of thousands of years. Currently, much of the radioactive waste from nuclear power plants has been stored at the power plant. Due to space constraints, eventually the radioactive waste will need to be relocated. Plans have been proposed to bury the radioactive waste contained in casks in the Yucca Mountains in Nevada.
There are several issues with burying the radioactive waste. Waste would be transported in large trucks. In the event of an accident, the radioactive waste could possibly leak. Another issue is uncertainty about whether the casks will leak after the waste is buried. The current amount of radioactive waste requiring long-term storage would fill the Yucca Mountains and new sites would need to be found to bury future radioactive waste. There is no current solution to deal with the issue of radioactive waste. Some scientists feel that the idea of building more nuclear power plants and worrying about dealing with the waste later has the potential of a dangerous outcome."
Some kinds of radioactive material can be used as a fuel source for nuclear energy. Part of the reason for the amount of radioactive waste in the US is because the green movement has successfully campaigned against the upgrades to lower waste versions of nuclear energy. This is not to say that nuclear energy doesn't generate waste, just that US nuclear is not a good benchmark for it since our technology is a half century behind most of the world.
The decline in solar cost blows all of this away. If a person upgrades their solar because it has so improved in cost and quality, this article pretends people don't know how to add to their system, or sell their used panels to someone else. Solar panels in the US are currently lasting 33 years on average and have had an 85% cost decrease in a decade. Now a new US program intends to cut the cost in half in the next decade and increase that life expectancy to 50 years.
The great wave of retirements will be in the coming decades, recycling resources are, and will be, coming along to deal with this as volume goes up. I'll give five examples from around the world.
-
USA
1) Game-changing solar company recycles old panels into new ones
The first wave of solar panels is reaching the end of their useful lives. Now they can become new solar panels instead of trash.
"...At a recycling plant in Ohio, next to the company’s manufacturing facility, First Solar uses custom technology to disassemble and recycle old panels, recovering 90% of the materials inside. It runs similar recycling systems in Germany and Malaysia.
"...The E.U. requires solar producers to recycle products, and similar laws are in the works in some other parts of the world, including Japan and India.
"...By recycling materials, the total environmental impact of each panel drops. The original solar panel, ...might last 30 or even 40 years. If 95% of the semiconductor material can be recovered and put back in a new panel, and the cycle continues to repeat, the original material could stay in use as long as 1,200 years.”
2) First Solar began investing in recycling and established the first voluntary global panel recycling program in 2005. They now have recycling facilities in the US, Malaysia and Germany and offer customers a service to recover and process panels globally. Their technology involves a continuous flow process and claims to result in the recovery and recycling of over 90% of the semiconductor material and approximately 90% of the glass used in its panels. This material is then re-used in new First Solar modules and for new glass or rubber products8.”
4) Italy: Mechanical technique for PV module recycling
“An Italian consortium has developed a panel recycling process that can recover up to 99% of raw materials. The developers claim their technique takes only 40 seconds to fully recycle a standard panel, depending on size and recycling site conditions.”
5) Australia: One of Australia’s first solar PV recycling facilities is up and running in Melbourne’s north, The plant will recycle 100% of end-of-life solar PV modules and all associated materials recovered – inverters, cables, optimisers, mounting structures – using no chemicals.
The final components are:
- High grade aluminium
- High grade silica dust
- The silica cells which will be reused by some manufacturers.
- Copper
- PVC
- Silver
100% of the materials separated from this process will be reused and given a second life. All inverters, rail components, cable can be processed in this facility.”
IF GERMany=433 g is doing so good with RE and Recycling why 10X the EMISSIONS= CO2/KWHR of Nuclear FRANCE=38 g ??? After conducting an investigation and then the ensuing debate among member nations, the European Commission has decided on an 18-month extension to antidumping (AD) and anti-subsidy duties applied to Chinese solar exports to the EU. Hard to compete against CHINA#1 SLAVE LABOR? https://www.electricitymap.org/zone/FR
France is coasting on some old nuke. It's not 1980 anymore so we can't build anymore of that. Germany is coming along fine.
Germany sees largest emissions drop since 2009 recession
“Germany’s… track record on cutting climate-damaging greenhouse gas emissions is mixed. One major reason is continued coal-fired power production. But the country is now eyeing a coal phase-out by 2038 at the very latest, and gross renewable electricity generation almost caught up with combined lignite (soft or brown coal) and hard coal power production last year.”
Lower emissions in Germany help CO2 reduction across EU
“CO2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion decreased by 2.5% in the EU in 2018 compared to 2017, partly driven by a decrease of 5.4% in Germany, the EU's biggest emitter.”
GERMan Political Thought, Destroying the 21st century as in the 20th! GERMan Emissions are ~ 8X greater compared to France NUCLEAR==1/2 the ERATE$$$ https://www.electricitymap.org/zone/FR
France built that nuke decades ago and I'm glad they did. Times have changed since 1980, with the cost of wind and solar dropping by a factor of as much as 100-200x. Here's how France's latest attempt is going.
-
France's Revolutionary Nuclear Reactor Is a Leaky, Expensive Mess
With a bloated budget, endless delays, and shoddy construction, EPR looks like a big mistake.
A revolutionary French reactor design is 10 years overdue and nearly four times over budget.
The latest extension takes the project timeline from 13 years to 17 at least.
“It’s three times over cost and three times over time where it’s been built in Finland and France,” says Paul Dorfman, from the UCL Energy Institute. “This is a failed and failing reactor.”
These are not scientific responses but rather propaganda. Have you read them yourself? I welcome a specific critique of the Shellenberger article but these aren’t it.
Well. My main concern is waste from batteries, solar panels and wind turbines when they reach end of life. I am by no means technical and tend to rely on the evidence before me and Occams Razor. Looking at what happens with obsolete TVs, mobile phones, computers, fridges etc etc. we have become the opposite of our parents who kept the same TV for 20 years. As technology improves people will turnover their electric cars and solar panels for something better. Pollution from fossil fuels will be replaced by some other form of pollution. I just can’t believe the recycling of batteries, solar panels etc will really happen.
All of the world's wind turbines blades combined (inert, non-hazardous and recyclable) are less volume than the coal ash from a single large coal fired power plant for just one year. Coal also does this:
“On top of emitting 1.9 billion tons of carbon dioxide each year, coal-fired power plants in the United States also create 120 million tons of toxic waste. That means each of the nation's 500 coal-fired power plants produces an average 240,000 tons of toxic waste each year.”
Note: As the number of wind turbines on the planet increases, the volume of waste will increase. “Strathclyde says blade waste could hit 400,000 tons a year in 2030.”
Contrast: One US coal plant = 240,000 tons of toxic waste per year.
All wind turbine blades on earth combined, 9 years from now, maybe = 400,000 tons of inert waste per year.
Coal produces 200x the volume of waste as wind power, per unit of energy generated. Seems the concern should be with coal, not this vastly better renewable replacement.
And more good news. We know how to recycle them. Wind turbines already have a recyclability rate of 85% to 90%.
"Decommissioned wind turbine blades used for cement co-processing
An initiative to recycle wind turbine blades includes the use of recycled glass fiber composites for cement manufacturing, replacing raw material and saving energy."
Blade recycling: Top priority for the wind industry
Wind turbines already have a recyclability rate of 85% to 90%.
Vestas announced its plans for zero-waste turbines. 14k wind turbine blades will be decommissioned in Europe next 5 years. The recycling of these old blades is a top priority for the wind industry."
GE announces wind turbine blade recycling contract with Veolia
GE Renewable Energy has announced it has signed a multi-year agreement with Veolia North America (VNA) to recycle blades removed from its US-based onshore turbines during upgrades and repowering efforts.
So even if we landfilled them all, it would be vastly better than burning coal. But the materials will be reused. Wind power has quadrupled in the last decade, so the market to reuse their materials will naturally grow with that.
The great wave of panel retirements will be in the coming decades, recycling resources are, and will be, coming along to deal with this as volume goes up. I'll give five examples from around the world.
-
USA
1) Game-changing solar company recycles old panels into new ones
The first wave of solar panels is reaching the end of their useful lives. Now they can become new solar panels instead of trash.
"...At a recycling plant in Ohio, next to the company’s manufacturing facility, First Solar uses custom technology to disassemble and recycle old panels, recovering 90% of the materials inside. It runs similar recycling systems in Germany and Malaysia.
"...The E.U. requires solar producers to recycle products, and similar laws are in the works in some other parts of the world, including Japan and India.
"...By recycling materials, the total environmental impact of each panel drops. The original solar panel, ...might last 30 or even 40 years. If 95% of the semiconductor material can be recovered and put back in a new panel, and the cycle continues to repeat, the original material could stay in use as long as 1,200 years.”
2) First Solar began investing in recycling and established the first voluntary global panel recycling program in 2005. They now have recycling facilities in the US, Malaysia and Germany and offer customers a service to recover and process panels globally. Their technology involves a continuous flow process and results in the recovery and recycling of over 90% of the semiconductor material and approximately 90% of the glass used in its panels. This material is then re-used in new First Solar modules and for new glass or rubber products.”
4) Italy: Mechanical technique for PV module recycling
“An Italian consortium has developed a panel recycling process that can recover up to 99% of raw materials. The developers claim their technique takes only 40 seconds to fully recycle a standard panel, depending on size and recycling site conditions.”
5) Australia: One of Australia’s first solar PV recycling facilities is up and running in Melbourne’s north, The plant will recycle 100% of end-of-life solar PV modules and all associated materials recovered – inverters, cables, optimisers, mounting structures – using no chemicals.
The final components are:
- High grade aluminium
- High grade silica dust
- The silica cells which will be reused by some manufacturers.
- Copper
- PVC
- Silver
100% of the materials separated from this process will be reused and given a second life. All inverters, rail components, cable can be processed in this facility.”
The 41 panels that provide 100% of my home power, minus the glass and steel take up perhaps 12 cubic feet. They should offset about 800,000lbs of Co2 during the course their life. About the carbon equivalent of planting 6,000 trees, while only taking up 750 sq feet of otherwise unused roofspace.
This seems a very good investment of a small amount of material.
"concern is waste from batteries, solar panels and wind turbines">>
Excellent selections. I'll address each one with evidence and reference.
1) Batteries.
We've been recycling batteries for 150 years, the components are rather valuable. There is surprisingly little lithium in a lithium battery, my plugin hybrid has about 2lbs of lithium in its 8.8kw battery (about $10 worth) and it will prevent me from burning about 10,000 gallons of gas during the life of the vehicle and putting 200,000lbs of Co2 in the air (charged with home solar). That seems a very good investment of a very small amount of a non-toxic material. The new Tesla battery doesn't have cobalt, as promised. Tesla reports it is capturing 100% of its used batteries, as Toyota has been doing for about 22 years with the Prius.
Recycling capacity is cropping up all over, of course, as the demand is coming along. Some examples:
--
“Canadian firm Li-Cycle will begin constructing a US $175 million plant in Rochester, N.Y., on the grounds of what used to be the Eastman Kodak complex. When completed, it will be the largest lithium-ion battery-recycling plant in North America.
The plant will have an eventual capacity of 25 metric kilotons of input material, recovering 95 percent or more of the cobalt, nickel, lithium, and other valuable elements through the company’s zero-wastewater, zero-emissions process.”
Southeast Asia's 1st battery recycling facility opens in S'pore, can recycle up to 14 tonnes of lithium batteries a day
“TES B is described as a "multi-million-dollar, state-of-art facility", and will recycle lithium batteries to recover precious metals like nickel, lithium and cobalt.
The facility will be able to recycle up to 14 tonnes a day, or the equivalent of 280,000 lithium-ion smartphone batteries, and can recycle up to 5,000 tonnes annually.
Its technology is said to have over 90 per cent recovery rate of precious metals, and yields a purity level of almost 99 per cent.
This means that the metals TES B recovers from the lithium batteries will be commercially ready for reuse and fresh battery production.”
Volkswagen has also recently opened its first recycling plant, in Salzgitter, Germany, and plans to recycle up to 3,600 battery systems per year during the pilot phase.
Renault, meanwhile, is now recycling all its electric car batteries.
Just observing and referring to rather obvious energy realities, none of which will be affected by your, or my, mere opinion. Perhaps avoid the lame attempts at insult and instead try focusing on the topic with some substance and evidence supporting your claims. I recommend my method to you.
So much good news in the clean energy sector for those renewables:
--
“The wind power sector installed 93 gigawatts (GW) of new capacity in 2020, a record figure which represents a year-on-year jump of more than 50%. Over the last decade, the global wind power market has almost quadrupled.”
-In 2020, annual renewable capacity additions increased 45% to almost 280 GW – the highest year-on year increase since 1999.
-Exceptionally high capacity additions become the “new normal” in 2021 and 2022, with renewables accounting for 90% of new power capacity expansion globally.
-Solar PV development will continue to break records, with annual additions reaching 162 GW by 2022 – almost 50% higher than the pre-pandemic level of 2019.
There is a lot of things that I disagree with Micheal on but I haven't noticed solar waste being encased in concrete so your attempt to accuse nuclear waste management as being equal or even greater to that of solar panels is, quite frankly, absurd. Furthermore, in what universe is the Ecologist neutral on the issue of nuclear power?!? As for that Science Direct "study" it is so biased against the actual worldwide data on nuclear safety as to be absurd as well. Fact: E=MC2 means that atomic fission requires an extremely insignificant amount of mass to produce a humongous amount of energy hence the "waste" stream is actually so small as to be inconsequential and almost all of it reusable as fuel in meltdown proof advanced Gen IV reactors such as the Natrium reactor which is slated to replace a coal plant in Wyoming. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2021/06/05/wyoming-to-lead-the-coal-to-nuclear-transition/?sh=40eab446de17
Here’s the deal, Brian. After 60 or so years we have about 400GW of nukes for the world. In each of 2017, 2018, 2019 the world deployed over 170 GW of renewables. Last year it was 280GW. In four years that’s 790GW.
If you take into account the difference in capacity factors in about six years at those rates, renewables would have deployed about the same real capacity as it took 60 years for nuke to build.
That’s more than ten times faster. Nuke can add a little around the edges, but it's not going to be a main player. The dominance of RE is inevitable.
1) “…despite the pandemic, renewable energy accounted for 90% of new electricity generation. In the next five years, the International Energy Agency (IEA) expects renewable sources to overtake fossil fuels as the world’s dominant form of electricity generation.”
2) “To date, 11 countries have reached or exceeded 100% renewable electricity; 12 countries have passed laws to reach 100% renewable electricity by 2030; 49 countries have passed laws to reach 100% renewable electricity by 2050; 14 U.S. states and territories have passed laws or executive orders to reach up to 100% renewable electricity by between 2030 and 2050; over 300 cities worldwide have passed laws to reach 100% renewable electricity by no later than 2050; and over 280 international businesses have committed to 100% renewables across their global operations.”
Engineering and Fulfilling These goals even with Nuclear is highly improbable even with Nuclear. ; 49 countries have passed laws to reach 100% renewable electricity by 2050; 14 U.S. states and territories have passed laws or executive orders to reach up to 100% renewable electricity by between 2030 and 2050; over 300 cities worldwide have passed laws to reach 100% renewable electricity by no later than 2050==CRAP!
Ok. Interesting and if like to know more. But What makes you think the nuclear energy industry is less trustworthy than the industry making batteries and solar panels? I’m often amazed when friends suspend their skepticism about companies producing so called ‘sustainable energy’ products (batteries, solar, wind turbines) compared to fuel companies.
Nuke peaked about 20 years ago. It's in decline for well understood reasons.
Nuclear technology’s role in the world’s energy supply is shrinking
Anniversaries of the Fukushima and Chernobyl disasters highlight the challenges of relying on nuclear power to cut net carbon emissions to zero.
“Today, nuclear power supplies about 10% of the world’s energy, down from 13% in 2010.
...Clearly, nuclear energy will be with us for some time. New plants are being built and older ones will take time to decommission. But it is not proving to be the solution it was once seen as for decarbonizing the world’s energy market. Nuclear power has benefits, but its continued low take-up indicates that some countries think these are outweighed by the risks. For others, the development of nuclear energy is unaffordable. If the world is to achieve net zero carbon emissions, the focus must be on renewable energies — and one of their greatest benefits is that their sources are available, freely, to all nations.”
Great research, Michael. The 'renewable energy market" dynamics have offered a great opportunity for unscrupulous salesmen to over-promise and under-deliver. That is the problem with an emotionally-appealing narrative that lacks a fact basis. The problem that only 5% of EV batteries being recycled is ominous as the electrolyte in lithium-ion batteries is toxic and flammable.
Manufacture, array land footprints and waste disposal life-cycle environmental impacts have been wholly ignored in the rush to "renewable" energy installations.
Los Angeles Ecopolitics Columnist
They haven't been ignored.
1) Comparative life cycle assessment of 2.0 MW wind turbines
The work presented examines life cycle environmental impacts of two 2.0 MW wind turbines. Manufacturing, transport, installation, maintenance, and end of life have been considered for both models and are compared using the ReCiPe 2008 impact assessment method. In addition, energy payback analysis was conducted based on the cumulative energy demand and the energy produced by the wind turbines over 20 years. Life cycle assessment revealed that environmental impacts are concentrated in the manufacturing stage, which accounts for 78% of impacts. The energy payback period for the two turbine models are found to be 5.2 and 6.4 months, respectively.”
https://www.inderscienceonline.com/doi/abs/10.1504/IJSM.2014.062496?
2) “A 2017 study in Nature Energy found that when accounting for manufacturing and construction, the lifetime carbon footprints of solar, wind, and nuclear power are about one-twentieth of those of coal and natural gas, even when the latter include expensive carbon capture and storage technology. The energy produced during the operation of a solar panel and wind turbine is 26 and 44 times greater than the energy needed to build and install them, respectively. There are many life-cycle assessment studies arriving at similar conclusions.”
https://www.carbonbrief.org/solar-wind-nuclear-amazingly-low-carbon-footprints
Nature article: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-017-0032-9
You fail to examine or cite nuclear life-cycle advantages with zero operational carbon emissions. And, maybe it's not a carbon problem -- it's a critical energy affordability and reliability problem. "Renewable" wind and solar power facilities have a useful life of 25 to 30 years, while nuclear power facilities have a useful life of 50 years or more.
Claim: "zero operational carbon emissions."
Oh, does that uranium just mine it self and walk down to the reactor? Nuke is low carbon, it isn't zero carbon.
"Nuclear power is twice as good as coal, with the energy embedded in the power plant and fuel offsetting 5% of its output, equivalent to an EROI of 20:1.
Wind and solar perform even better, at 2% and 4% respectively, equivalent to EROIs of 44:1 and 26:1. ...
"...the footprint of nuclear, wind and solar are much lower than coal and gas with CCS, as well as hydro or bioenergy."
https://www.carbonbrief.org/solar-wind-nuclear-amazingly-low-carbon-footprints?
As for longevity, energy specialist M Barnard put it this way:
"The mean age of nuclear reactors globally is 30.7 years. They typically require substantial refurbishment every 20 years and usually more frequently as they age. Lots of reactors are 40–50 years old, with the oldest one operating in the USA having gone into service in 1969.
Refurbishment has, like everything else related to nuclear energy, turned out to be much more expensive and time consuming than originally thought. As a result, quite a bit of refurbishment is just not economically competitive with replacing the reactor with wind and solar, which are much lower risk.
As a result, as reactors age and approach refurbishment, only governmental subsidies and intervention will bridge them for another decade or two of operations. In the USA in less regulated markets, some existing nuclear reactors already can’t compete on the open electricity markets sufficient well to turn even a minor profit, and so are seeing premature decommissioning.”
--Michael Barnard
https://www.quora.com/Will-nuclear-plants-tend-to-disappear-in-50-years-or-will-they-continue-to-thrive/answer/Michael-Barnard-14
The "zero operational carbon emissions" is correct for nuclear at grid-scale where wind and solar fail baseload performance.
It doesn't take a piano tuner to understand that there is no such thing as "zero-emission" in the application of energy production technologies.
And, spare our readers your renewables hobby of cut and paste from green industrial complex propaganda pieces.
Nuke isn't zero carbon. It's going away for reasons other than being at least low carbon. Turns out nobody wants to take 15 years and pay $12 billion for a GW when competitors can do it for a fraction of that in two years.
a) cost to build
b) cost of kWh produced
c) time to build
d) risk to investment
e) return on investment
f) waste disposal
g) public acceptance
h) vulnerability to terrorism (dirty bomb)
And, 60 years of over promising and under delivering.
Which is why last year nuke had a net gain of zero installed capacity.
RE had 280GW.
https://www.electricitymap.org/zone/FR uses 12 g CO2/ KWHR and 11g = WIND and 45 g SOLAR IPCC2014 what is your data?? https://www.electricitymap.org/zone/FR
“It is one thing to impose drastic measures and harsh economic penalties when an environmental problem is clear-cut and severe. It is quite another to do so when the environmental problem is largely hypothetical and not substantiated by careful observations. This is definitely the case with global warming.” – Frederick Seitz, Introduction to Fred Singer’s Hot Talk, Cold Science (1999 and 2021))
"largely hypothetical and not substantiated by careful observations."
Oh yes, those old Merchants of Doubt, Singer and Seitz. We have careful observations and the hypothetical passed 50 years ago.
--
"Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming"
"...an important story about the misuse of science to mislead the public on matters ranging from the risks of smoking to the reality of global warming. The people the authors accuse in this carefully documented book are themselves scientists—mostly physicists, former cold warriors who now serve a conservative agenda, and vested interests like the tobacco industry. The authors name these scientists—all with powerful connections in government and the media—including Robert Jastrow, Frederick Seitz, and S. Fred Singer. Seven compelling chapters detail seven issues (acid rain, the dangers of smoking and secondhand smoke, the ozone hole, global warming, the Strategic Defense Initiative, lead in gasoline and the banning of DDT) in which this group aimed to sow seeds of public doubt on matters of settled science. They did so by casting aspersions on the science and the scientists who produce it." http://www.merchantsofdoubt.org/
Fred Singer, fake NAS
https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=National_Association_of_Scholars
Fake experts are recyclable and easily retooled. In fact, the CO2 Coalition's founder breaks records on that count.
Siegfried Friedrich Singer, the founder of the CO2 Coalition, is a fake expert par excellence on the following:
- Tobacco is safe!
- Asbestos is safe!
- Acid rain is a hoax!
- The ozone hole and CFC's known properties are a hoax!
- Climate change is a hoax!
- There was an alien civilization on Phobos, a Martian moon!
In natural science journals he has published exactly zero research papers on those subjects, yet he's always there willing to play pretend before Congress when tobacco companies and polluters need him."
Reports of necdotal nuclear failures are echoes of 20th-century alarmism resulting from negligent 20th-century reactor designs and operations. There are about 450 nuclear power plants operating in the world. This does not include numerous nuclear facilities in research labs and medical clinics.
Nuclear power generation has provided safe, affordable and reliable electricity that is critical to human survival since 1954. Nuclear power reactors generate electricity at a 90% annual operational efficiency, while "renewable" wind and solar generate electricity at a 25% annual efficiency. Recent break throughs in Small Modular Reactors (SMR) hold great promise for continuing and expanding the role of nuclear energy in our portfolio of essential electric power sources.
Los Angeles Ecopolitics Columnist
Worldwide nuclear CF is 81%.
World nuclear organisation performance report 2020 ... global fleet < 400GW
Global capacity factor 81%.
https://www.world-nuclear.org/getattachment/Our-Association/Publications/Global-trends-reports/World-Nuclear-Performance-Report/world-nuclear-performance-report-2018.pdf.aspx
US onshore wind is now above 42%. New offshore wind going in is hitting above 60%.
Department of Energy’s 2016 Wind Technologies Market Report shows how wind capacity factors have evolved over time: “The average 2016 capacity factor among projects built in 2014 and 2015 was 42.5%, compared to an average of 32.1% among projects built from 2004–2011 and just 25.4% among projects built from 1998 to 2001.” …
So modern US wind is up to 42.5 percent and natural gas is at 56 percent. The Haliade-X, according to GE, will have a capacity factor of 63 percent. That is wackadoodle, though it wouldn’t be the highest in the world — the floating offshore turbines in the Hywind Scotland project hit 65 percent recently.
Add all that up and, at a “typical German North Sea site,” GE says, each Haliade-X turbine will produce about 67GWh annually, “enough clean power for up to 16,000 households per turbine, and up to 1 million European households in a 750 MW windfarm configuration.”
https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/3/8/17084158/wind-turbine-power-energy-blades
Your reasoned, well-researched and cited, and always reasonable dissent from contemporary eco-orthodoxy reminds me of something I read last year in a Catholic newsletter I subscribe to: "When being seen choosing sides is easy, we should be wary." (Stephen P. White, The Catholic Thing, April 16, 2020). Too many people are more interested in choosing the "right" side than in doing any actual discernment. Trying to reduce a discipline like climatology to a bumper sticker is not only a fool's errand, but is a slight to climatology. So thank you for your thoughtful research on these issues.
You are reasoning from false premisses. How about, if you think of it like "if zealous believers in Malthus were inventing things to solve problems that didn't exist, what would all those solutions really be accomplishing?". The answer, is depopulating the earth. Making trash pickers in Africa sick, is actually a feature, not a bug.
We are carbon based life forms. We need CO2 in the atmosphere to continue to survive. Going to "zero carbon" is a suicide pact. For us, not them. Of course.
Zero carbon is only the beginning. Net-zero is the goal and that is totally impossible. It requires direct air capture and geological storage under pressure. Globally, the technology is unable to store even one per-per-million which is almost 8,000 million metric tons. The climate would hardly notice the loss.
Good luck Michael in your fight against the solar lobby. You are up against the biggest and most powerful corporations in the world. I used to have a dairy farm in Decatur county Georgia which lies just north of Tallahassee, FL. where I now live. Solar entrepreneurs are offering over $700
per acre yearly rents to landowners to lease their for solar panels. This is over 3 times as much
as local farmers can afford to pay. Decatur county ranks second in Georgia for annual crop production mostly peanuts, cotton, corn, tomatoes and pecans Thousands of acres of some
of the most productive irrigated farmland in the world are taken over by solar panels. Pastures and forests are being destroyed as well. The local economy which depends on agriculture will be severely impacted as local farmers lose their leases. The jobs created supplying these farms,
transporting the harvest and working the farm it self will be gone. All the income from the solar
leases will go to a handful of multimillionaire landowners as well as huge tax and zero carbon incentives. All this destruction just to produce a few hundred megawatts of electricity.
This area gets very little sunshine in the summer months of peak demand. Since June 1st
we have had less than 10 days with consistent sunshine. Cloud cover has been
80 per cent or more nearly everyday and we get showers and thunderstorms nearly everyday.
I would be shocked if a 100 megawatt installation could produce 10 megawatts a day in the summer.
So in the not distant future I will see mile after mile of solar ugliness on my drive through
Decatur county rather than mile after mile of pine forests, peanut and tomato fields. It seems
like to go Green we need to eliminate the green landscape we now enjoy. And you could cover the entire county with solar panels and the effect on the Earth's climate would be zero.
Near where we live in Tennessee there is a large coal fired generating station, producing up to 2.47 GW of power into the grid. The plant is dated, plans for its future are under discussion. One path has the plant being replaced with a combined cycle gas turbine, the other path some are advocating is solar. So I was curious as to how much solar it would take to replace the plants output on a cold December morning. I used the NREL PV Watts calculator, to keep the numbers simple I looked at a 1kW scenario, operating 24 hours / day (24 kWh output). To produce this capacity in December would require 10.4kW of PV, this factors in the shorter days and average cloud coverage. I’m not so sure about cloud coverage & storage, however the DNI for our zip code is ~4.7 kWh / m2, and PV Watts assumed 2.89 kWh / m2, which might suggest 40% cloud coverage, which doesn’t seem unusual. So in December, 12 days will see reduced panel output, relying more on stored energy. If we assume on those days panel output is reduced 50%, this might suggest 12 kWh comes from batteries, requiring 144kWh of storage assuming the cloudy days were sequential. These are averages, we don’t want a brown out should there be prolonged periods of cloudy weather, so maybe add a safety factor of 2X, or 288 kWh of storage.
This is for a 1 kW source (like a small generator), scaling this up to the 2.47GW plant, 25.7 gW of PV solar would be required with 711 gWh of storage. I haven’t thought about real estate required, cost, or managing the storm water runoff from such a facility, but this illustrates the challenges of providing reliable base load on a 24/7 basis from a source that has diurnal, seasonal and weather based variability. And we are expecting it to get wetter in our area due to climate change.
solar panels don't convert photons into electrons, they just make already existing electrons move.
"But solar panels cannot be a primary energy source like nuclear, natural gas, or coal, for inherently physical reasons relating to the unreliable and dilute nature of their “fuel,” sunlight. Low power densities must induce higher material intensity and spatial requirements, and thus higher physical costs. "
Your article might be about solar, but the arguments made me accept this too, and the world makes more sense as a result!
Total bullshit.
1) panels I bought in 1992 are still working.
2) The glass is high quality and can be reused as is in new panels.
3) the aluminum frames can be reused or recycled.
It's not about whether your personal solar panels still work today or in 50 years. It's about what people are doing as statistically as global trends in aggregate. Solar panels lose efficiency over time, sometimes as much as 1% per year. It's not hard to believe why people in China, Germany, or anywhere else will replace their solar panels after 10, 15, or 20 years instead of the 30 years assumed by the industry, especially if they're not experts in this stuff. And the quality of glass in your solar panels can't be attested to, but for many people it cannot be recycled as float glass due to impurities like plastic, lead, cadmium and antimony.
The glass in solar panels is of the highest quality low impurity glass that can be reused as is or recycled.
The frames are aluminum and would be valuable to recycle.
At this point I imagine the glass and frame are more valuable that the solar cells. Then there is the silver in the cells / wiring.
Must be aggravating to write an article like this and have it ripped to pieces by people who know what they are talking about. What, did you get four people who agreed with your premise and 40 who proved you wrong? Perhaps you should fire your research staff.
He’s absolutely right.
LOVE the Photo of SCAM GUY, sums up Solar PV SCAM
"in contrast to nuclear waste, which is safely stored and never hurts anyone": "Radioactive waste is a huge concern. Waste from nuclear power plants can remain active for hundreds of thousands of years. Currently, much of the radioactive waste from nuclear power plants has been stored at the power plant. Due to space constraints, eventually the radioactive waste will need to be relocated. Plans have been proposed to bury the radioactive waste contained in casks in the Yucca Mountains in Nevada.
There are several issues with burying the radioactive waste. Waste would be transported in large trucks. In the event of an accident, the radioactive waste could possibly leak. Another issue is uncertainty about whether the casks will leak after the waste is buried. The current amount of radioactive waste requiring long-term storage would fill the Yucca Mountains and new sites would need to be found to bury future radioactive waste. There is no current solution to deal with the issue of radioactive waste. Some scientists feel that the idea of building more nuclear power plants and worrying about dealing with the waste later has the potential of a dangerous outcome."
https://sciencing.com/nuclear-energy-affect-environment-4566966.html
Some kinds of radioactive material can be used as a fuel source for nuclear energy. Part of the reason for the amount of radioactive waste in the US is because the green movement has successfully campaigned against the upgrades to lower waste versions of nuclear energy. This is not to say that nuclear energy doesn't generate waste, just that US nuclear is not a good benchmark for it since our technology is a half century behind most of the world.
The decline in solar cost blows all of this away. If a person upgrades their solar because it has so improved in cost and quality, this article pretends people don't know how to add to their system, or sell their used panels to someone else. Solar panels in the US are currently lasting 33 years on average and have had an 85% cost decrease in a decade. Now a new US program intends to cut the cost in half in the next decade and increase that life expectancy to 50 years.
The great wave of retirements will be in the coming decades, recycling resources are, and will be, coming along to deal with this as volume goes up. I'll give five examples from around the world.
-
USA
1) Game-changing solar company recycles old panels into new ones
The first wave of solar panels is reaching the end of their useful lives. Now they can become new solar panels instead of trash.
"...At a recycling plant in Ohio, next to the company’s manufacturing facility, First Solar uses custom technology to disassemble and recycle old panels, recovering 90% of the materials inside. It runs similar recycling systems in Germany and Malaysia.
"...The E.U. requires solar producers to recycle products, and similar laws are in the works in some other parts of the world, including Japan and India.
"...By recycling materials, the total environmental impact of each panel drops. The original solar panel, ...might last 30 or even 40 years. If 95% of the semiconductor material can be recovered and put back in a new panel, and the cycle continues to repeat, the original material could stay in use as long as 1,200 years.”
https://www.fastcompany.com/90562056/this-game-changing-solar-company-recycles-old-panels-into-new-ones?
2) First Solar began investing in recycling and established the first voluntary global panel recycling program in 2005. They now have recycling facilities in the US, Malaysia and Germany and offer customers a service to recover and process panels globally. Their technology involves a continuous flow process and claims to result in the recovery and recycling of over 90% of the semiconductor material and approximately 90% of the glass used in its panels. This material is then re-used in new First Solar modules and for new glass or rubber products8.”
https://www.newenergysolar.com.au/renewable-insights/renewable-energy/solar-panel-recycling?
3) Canada: Solar X revolutionizes the solar industry in Canada with the launch of its new solar panel reuse + recycle program
https://pvbuzz.com/solar-x-launch-solar-panel-reuse-recycle-program/?
4) Italy: Mechanical technique for PV module recycling
“An Italian consortium has developed a panel recycling process that can recover up to 99% of raw materials. The developers claim their technique takes only 40 seconds to fully recycle a standard panel, depending on size and recycling site conditions.”
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2020/04/01/a-mechanical-technique-for-pv-module-recycling/
5) Australia: One of Australia’s first solar PV recycling facilities is up and running in Melbourne’s north, The plant will recycle 100% of end-of-life solar PV modules and all associated materials recovered – inverters, cables, optimisers, mounting structures – using no chemicals.
The final components are:
- High grade aluminium
- High grade silica dust
- The silica cells which will be reused by some manufacturers.
- Copper
- PVC
- Silver
100% of the materials separated from this process will be reused and given a second life. All inverters, rail components, cable can be processed in this facility.”
https://reneweconomy.com.au/australias-first-solar-panel-recycling-plant-swings-into-action/
Etc.
IF GERMany=433 g is doing so good with RE and Recycling why 10X the EMISSIONS= CO2/KWHR of Nuclear FRANCE=38 g ??? After conducting an investigation and then the ensuing debate among member nations, the European Commission has decided on an 18-month extension to antidumping (AD) and anti-subsidy duties applied to Chinese solar exports to the EU. Hard to compete against CHINA#1 SLAVE LABOR? https://www.electricitymap.org/zone/FR
France is coasting on some old nuke. It's not 1980 anymore so we can't build anymore of that. Germany is coming along fine.
Germany sees largest emissions drop since 2009 recession
“Germany’s… track record on cutting climate-damaging greenhouse gas emissions is mixed. One major reason is continued coal-fired power production. But the country is now eyeing a coal phase-out by 2038 at the very latest, and gross renewable electricity generation almost caught up with combined lignite (soft or brown coal) and hard coal power production last year.”
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/germany-sees-largest-emissions-drop-2009-recession-govt-agency
Lower emissions in Germany help CO2 reduction across EU
“CO2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion decreased by 2.5% in the EU in 2018 compared to 2017, partly driven by a decrease of 5.4% in Germany, the EU's biggest emitter.”
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/lower-emissions-germany-contribute-co2-reduction-across-eu-2018
Germany's reduced coal generating capacity.... from 50 GW in 2010 to 43 in 2020.
https://www.energy-charts.de/power_inst.htm?
GERMan Political Thought, Destroying the 21st century as in the 20th! GERMan Emissions are ~ 8X greater compared to France NUCLEAR==1/2 the ERATE$$$ https://www.electricitymap.org/zone/FR
France built that nuke decades ago and I'm glad they did. Times have changed since 1980, with the cost of wind and solar dropping by a factor of as much as 100-200x. Here's how France's latest attempt is going.
-
France's Revolutionary Nuclear Reactor Is a Leaky, Expensive Mess
With a bloated budget, endless delays, and shoddy construction, EPR looks like a big mistake.
A revolutionary French reactor design is 10 years overdue and nearly four times over budget.
The latest extension takes the project timeline from 13 years to 17 at least.
“It’s three times over cost and three times over time where it’s been built in Finland and France,” says Paul Dorfman, from the UCL Energy Institute. “This is a failed and failing reactor.”
https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a33499619/france-nuclear-reactor-epr-expensive-mess/?
3.3GW for $14 billion. 17 years. It was supposed to be running in 2012, for about $4 billion.
Recycling solar panels must be a REQUIREMENT and it should be paid for by the manufacturers.
These are not scientific responses but rather propaganda. Have you read them yourself? I welcome a specific critique of the Shellenberger article but these aren’t it.
Pick what you think are Shellenberger's best, strongest, three points and I'll unpack them.
Well. My main concern is waste from batteries, solar panels and wind turbines when they reach end of life. I am by no means technical and tend to rely on the evidence before me and Occams Razor. Looking at what happens with obsolete TVs, mobile phones, computers, fridges etc etc. we have become the opposite of our parents who kept the same TV for 20 years. As technology improves people will turnover their electric cars and solar panels for something better. Pollution from fossil fuels will be replaced by some other form of pollution. I just can’t believe the recycling of batteries, solar panels etc will really happen.
c) main concern is waste from... wind turbines">>
Let's do a little comparison:
A single turbine makes about 100,000 mWh
Fuel:
Coal = 55,000 tons of coal, mined and delivered.
Wind = none of that. Delivered for free
Emissions:
Coal = 114,730 tons of Co2 during production
Wind = zero emissions
Waste:
Coal = 5,000 tons of toxic coal ash
Wind = zero waste from production
All of the world's wind turbines blades combined (inert, non-hazardous and recyclable) are less volume than the coal ash from a single large coal fired power plant for just one year. Coal also does this:
“On top of emitting 1.9 billion tons of carbon dioxide each year, coal-fired power plants in the United States also create 120 million tons of toxic waste. That means each of the nation's 500 coal-fired power plants produces an average 240,000 tons of toxic waste each year.”
https://www.gem.wiki/Coal_waste#:~:text=Coal%20ash%20and%20scrubber%20sludge,-The%201.05%20billion&text=On%20top%20of%20emitting%201.9,of%20toxic%20waste%20each%20year.
Note: As the number of wind turbines on the planet increases, the volume of waste will increase. “Strathclyde says blade waste could hit 400,000 tons a year in 2030.”
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/23/offshore-wind-firm-to-work-with-researchers-and-tackle-blade-waste.html
Contrast: One US coal plant = 240,000 tons of toxic waste per year.
All wind turbine blades on earth combined, 9 years from now, maybe = 400,000 tons of inert waste per year.
Coal produces 200x the volume of waste as wind power, per unit of energy generated. Seems the concern should be with coal, not this vastly better renewable replacement.
And more good news. We know how to recycle them. Wind turbines already have a recyclability rate of 85% to 90%.
"Decommissioned wind turbine blades used for cement co-processing
An initiative to recycle wind turbine blades includes the use of recycled glass fiber composites for cement manufacturing, replacing raw material and saving energy."
https://www.compositesworld.com/blog/post/recycled-composites-from-wind-turbine-blades-used-for-cement-co-processing?
Global Fiberglass Solutions offers pioneering fiberglass recycling and green-product manufacturing.
We help wind energy and other industries avoid landfills, build customer trust, and achieve true sustainability.
https://www.globalfiberglassinc.com/?
Blade recycling: Top priority for the wind industry
Wind turbines already have a recyclability rate of 85% to 90%.
Vestas announced its plans for zero-waste turbines. 14k wind turbine blades will be decommissioned in Europe next 5 years. The recycling of these old blades is a top priority for the wind industry."
https://windeurope.org/newsroom/news/blade-recycling-a-top-priority-for-the-wind-industry/?
GE announces wind turbine blade recycling contract with Veolia
GE Renewable Energy has announced it has signed a multi-year agreement with Veolia North America (VNA) to recycle blades removed from its US-based onshore turbines during upgrades and repowering efforts.
https://www.renewableenergymagazine.com/wind/ge-announces-wind-turbine-blade-recycling-contract-20201208?
Etc.
So even if we landfilled them all, it would be vastly better than burning coal. But the materials will be reused. Wind power has quadrupled in the last decade, so the market to reuse their materials will naturally grow with that.
Hope this helps.
Cheers.
b) "main concern is waste from... solar panels">>
The great wave of panel retirements will be in the coming decades, recycling resources are, and will be, coming along to deal with this as volume goes up. I'll give five examples from around the world.
-
USA
1) Game-changing solar company recycles old panels into new ones
The first wave of solar panels is reaching the end of their useful lives. Now they can become new solar panels instead of trash.
"...At a recycling plant in Ohio, next to the company’s manufacturing facility, First Solar uses custom technology to disassemble and recycle old panels, recovering 90% of the materials inside. It runs similar recycling systems in Germany and Malaysia.
"...The E.U. requires solar producers to recycle products, and similar laws are in the works in some other parts of the world, including Japan and India.
"...By recycling materials, the total environmental impact of each panel drops. The original solar panel, ...might last 30 or even 40 years. If 95% of the semiconductor material can be recovered and put back in a new panel, and the cycle continues to repeat, the original material could stay in use as long as 1,200 years.”
https://www.fastcompany.com/90562056/this-game-changing-solar-company-recycles-old-panels-into-new-ones?
2) First Solar began investing in recycling and established the first voluntary global panel recycling program in 2005. They now have recycling facilities in the US, Malaysia and Germany and offer customers a service to recover and process panels globally. Their technology involves a continuous flow process and results in the recovery and recycling of over 90% of the semiconductor material and approximately 90% of the glass used in its panels. This material is then re-used in new First Solar modules and for new glass or rubber products.”
https://www.newenergysolar.com.au/renewable-insights/renewable-energy/solar-panel-recycling?
3) Canada: Solar X revolutionizes the solar industry in Canada with the launch of its new solar panel reuse + recycle program
https://pvbuzz.com/solar-x-launch-solar-panel-reuse-recycle-program/?
4) Italy: Mechanical technique for PV module recycling
“An Italian consortium has developed a panel recycling process that can recover up to 99% of raw materials. The developers claim their technique takes only 40 seconds to fully recycle a standard panel, depending on size and recycling site conditions.”
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2020/04/01/a-mechanical-technique-for-pv-module-recycling/
5) Australia: One of Australia’s first solar PV recycling facilities is up and running in Melbourne’s north, The plant will recycle 100% of end-of-life solar PV modules and all associated materials recovered – inverters, cables, optimisers, mounting structures – using no chemicals.
The final components are:
- High grade aluminium
- High grade silica dust
- The silica cells which will be reused by some manufacturers.
- Copper
- PVC
- Silver
100% of the materials separated from this process will be reused and given a second life. All inverters, rail components, cable can be processed in this facility.”
https://reneweconomy.com.au/australias-first-solar-panel-recycling-plant-swings-into-action/
Etc.
The 41 panels that provide 100% of my home power, minus the glass and steel take up perhaps 12 cubic feet. They should offset about 800,000lbs of Co2 during the course their life. About the carbon equivalent of planting 6,000 trees, while only taking up 750 sq feet of otherwise unused roofspace.
This seems a very good investment of a small amount of material.
"concern is waste from batteries, solar panels and wind turbines">>
Excellent selections. I'll address each one with evidence and reference.
1) Batteries.
We've been recycling batteries for 150 years, the components are rather valuable. There is surprisingly little lithium in a lithium battery, my plugin hybrid has about 2lbs of lithium in its 8.8kw battery (about $10 worth) and it will prevent me from burning about 10,000 gallons of gas during the life of the vehicle and putting 200,000lbs of Co2 in the air (charged with home solar). That seems a very good investment of a very small amount of a non-toxic material. The new Tesla battery doesn't have cobalt, as promised. Tesla reports it is capturing 100% of its used batteries, as Toyota has been doing for about 22 years with the Prius.
Recycling capacity is cropping up all over, of course, as the demand is coming along. Some examples:
--
“Canadian firm Li-Cycle will begin constructing a US $175 million plant in Rochester, N.Y., on the grounds of what used to be the Eastman Kodak complex. When completed, it will be the largest lithium-ion battery-recycling plant in North America.
The plant will have an eventual capacity of 25 metric kilotons of input material, recovering 95 percent or more of the cobalt, nickel, lithium, and other valuable elements through the company’s zero-wastewater, zero-emissions process.”
https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/batteries-storage/lithiumion-battery-recycling-finally-takes-off-in-north-america-and-europe?
Southeast Asia's 1st battery recycling facility opens in S'pore, can recycle up to 14 tonnes of lithium batteries a day
“TES B is described as a "multi-million-dollar, state-of-art facility", and will recycle lithium batteries to recover precious metals like nickel, lithium and cobalt.
The facility will be able to recycle up to 14 tonnes a day, or the equivalent of 280,000 lithium-ion smartphone batteries, and can recycle up to 5,000 tonnes annually.
Its technology is said to have over 90 per cent recovery rate of precious metals, and yields a purity level of almost 99 per cent.
This means that the metals TES B recovers from the lithium batteries will be commercially ready for reuse and fresh battery production.”
https://mothership.sg/2021/03/singapore-battery-recycling-facility/?
Volkswagen has also recently opened its first recycling plant, in Salzgitter, Germany, and plans to recycle up to 3,600 battery systems per year during the pilot phase.
Renault, meanwhile, is now recycling all its electric car batteries.
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-56574779?
Etc.
The piano tuner is tone deaf. And intoxicated on Green Industrial Complex sales propaganda... and probably one of their salesmen.
Just observing and referring to rather obvious energy realities, none of which will be affected by your, or my, mere opinion. Perhaps avoid the lame attempts at insult and instead try focusing on the topic with some substance and evidence supporting your claims. I recommend my method to you.
So much good news in the clean energy sector for those renewables:
--
“The wind power sector installed 93 gigawatts (GW) of new capacity in 2020, a record figure which represents a year-on-year jump of more than 50%. Over the last decade, the global wind power market has almost quadrupled.”
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/16/a-quantum-leap-monster-wind-turbines-are-going-to-get-even-bigger.html?
-In 2020, annual renewable capacity additions increased 45% to almost 280 GW – the highest year-on year increase since 1999.
-Exceptionally high capacity additions become the “new normal” in 2021 and 2022, with renewables accounting for 90% of new power capacity expansion globally.
-Solar PV development will continue to break records, with annual additions reaching 162 GW by 2022 – almost 50% higher than the pre-pandemic level of 2019.
https://www.iea.org/reports/renewable-energy-market-update-2021?
There is a lot of things that I disagree with Micheal on but I haven't noticed solar waste being encased in concrete so your attempt to accuse nuclear waste management as being equal or even greater to that of solar panels is, quite frankly, absurd. Furthermore, in what universe is the Ecologist neutral on the issue of nuclear power?!? As for that Science Direct "study" it is so biased against the actual worldwide data on nuclear safety as to be absurd as well. Fact: E=MC2 means that atomic fission requires an extremely insignificant amount of mass to produce a humongous amount of energy hence the "waste" stream is actually so small as to be inconsequential and almost all of it reusable as fuel in meltdown proof advanced Gen IV reactors such as the Natrium reactor which is slated to replace a coal plant in Wyoming. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2021/06/05/wyoming-to-lead-the-coal-to-nuclear-transition/?sh=40eab446de17
Good Points Solar=Low Energy density=Large Volume of Waste. Nuclear=High Energy density=Low Volume of Waste.
Net nuke added last year = zero
Net RE added last year = 280GW.
Here’s the deal, Brian. After 60 or so years we have about 400GW of nukes for the world. In each of 2017, 2018, 2019 the world deployed over 170 GW of renewables. Last year it was 280GW. In four years that’s 790GW.
If you take into account the difference in capacity factors in about six years at those rates, renewables would have deployed about the same real capacity as it took 60 years for nuke to build.
That’s more than ten times faster. Nuke can add a little around the edges, but it's not going to be a main player. The dominance of RE is inevitable.
VERY GOOD! Comrade, keep up the good work!! China#1 poised to overtake US in nuclear power by 2030
Beijing and Moscow seize initiative in global reactor construction as G-7 steps back https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Energy/China-poised-to-overtake-US-in-nuclear-power-by-2030 Comrade Darrel, continue to promote us=weak & wimpy = greedy Green Profit$ of us importing SLAVE Labor Islam MFG CHINA#1 USELESS Solar Panels. Your Mission == destroy usa! and CHINA#1!
Gee, those renewables don't look useless.
1) “…despite the pandemic, renewable energy accounted for 90% of new electricity generation. In the next five years, the International Energy Agency (IEA) expects renewable sources to overtake fossil fuels as the world’s dominant form of electricity generation.”
https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/offshore-wind-rise-and-future/?
2) “To date, 11 countries have reached or exceeded 100% renewable electricity; 12 countries have passed laws to reach 100% renewable electricity by 2030; 49 countries have passed laws to reach 100% renewable electricity by 2050; 14 U.S. states and territories have passed laws or executive orders to reach up to 100% renewable electricity by between 2030 and 2050; over 300 cities worldwide have passed laws to reach 100% renewable electricity by no later than 2050; and over 280 international businesses have committed to 100% renewables across their global operations.”
https://global100restrategygroup.org/
Engineering and Fulfilling These goals even with Nuclear is highly improbable even with Nuclear. ; 49 countries have passed laws to reach 100% renewable electricity by 2050; 14 U.S. states and territories have passed laws or executive orders to reach up to 100% renewable electricity by between 2030 and 2050; over 300 cities worldwide have passed laws to reach 100% renewable electricity by no later than 2050==CRAP!
The Ecologist Formed by Nature == another Malthusian----- Channelling the Malthusian Roots of Climate Extremism https://quillette.com/2019/10/05/channelling-the-malthusian-roots-of-climate-extremism/
Ok. Interesting and if like to know more. But What makes you think the nuclear energy industry is less trustworthy than the industry making batteries and solar panels? I’m often amazed when friends suspend their skepticism about companies producing so called ‘sustainable energy’ products (batteries, solar, wind turbines) compared to fuel companies.
Easy, Nuclear is MADE in USA with MOSTLY UNION LABOR. nuclear fuel is 50% + SITU Mined and very low enviro footprint. Solar is 90 % + IMPORTED and 80 % + of the Polysilicone and other components comes from CHINA#1 SLAVE ISLAM LABOR! https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2021/05/19/china-made-solar-cheap-through-coal-subsidies--forced-labor-not-efficiency/?sh=2dcb8e9871ec
Nuke peaked about 20 years ago. It's in decline for well understood reasons.
Nuclear technology’s role in the world’s energy supply is shrinking
Anniversaries of the Fukushima and Chernobyl disasters highlight the challenges of relying on nuclear power to cut net carbon emissions to zero.
“Today, nuclear power supplies about 10% of the world’s energy, down from 13% in 2010.
...Clearly, nuclear energy will be with us for some time. New plants are being built and older ones will take time to decommission. But it is not proving to be the solution it was once seen as for decarbonizing the world’s energy market. Nuclear power has benefits, but its continued low take-up indicates that some countries think these are outweighed by the risks. For others, the development of nuclear energy is unaffordable. If the world is to achieve net zero carbon emissions, the focus must be on renewable energies — and one of their greatest benefits is that their sources are available, freely, to all nations.”
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00615-w?
YES NUCLEAR BEST CHINA#1 building 17 Reactors 2021 BECAUSE it is the BEST TECH! SELLING Cheap = Slave Labor Islam MFG Solar Panels to WEST.