[briantakita]

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

Bonus points if no children were compelled to mine or manufacture the material.

[renewiltord]

Comment made me curious so I looked it up.

They do contain heavy metals and toxic substances. As do the batteries.

Looking it up, it appears that the contamination occurs during disposal so it's not a good idea to dispose of these in the kind of landfill where they can get into the water table, and it's preferable to recycle them.

It appears that mining these materials in formalized industrial mines has no child labour according to Human Rights Watch. It's artisanal independent mines that are risky from this perspective.

Overall, the technology seems safe.

[jeffbee]

Mass-produced PV panels contain hardly any heavy metal. Some of them contain lead in the solder but this is avoidable. Most of the noise is about cadmium, but you will note that CdTe thin film panels enjoyed brief market success before being stomped again by the irresistible decline of the price of Plain Old Silicon. Even CdTe panels are basically inert, coming from the factory as a stable, insoluble glass. If you read the research papers about the possibility of cadmium pollution in soil from CdTe panels, their methodology is to grind the panel into a fine powder and scatter that on the ground. Why would anyone do that? Look at the funding for the papers. The "research" was designed as anti-renewable propaganda.

[upsidesinclude]

> in soil from CdTe panels, their methodology is to grind the panel into a fine powder and scatter that on the ground.

Sounds a bit off, but consider the effect of having the glass thrown into a landfill where it will be bulldozed, day after day, for several years. It is just jumping to the end of what would be the eventual outcome after a few decades of disposal.

I don't find that to be an arguable study design.

"Anti-renewable propoganda" is certainly a thing, but it's also true that many champions of renewables keep their blinders on when it comes to making assessments.

Solar and nuclear are the demonstrably effective means of producing large scale power, but they don't provide portable energy density (the kind we demand). Battery technology has finally come into the realm of competition, but that has been with extensive and persistent research for decades.

[jeffbee]

If chucking PV panels into landfills were actually a widespread practice, I am sure you could produce some statistics about how much of that has actually occurred.

The fact is that PV panel economic lifetime is way, way longer than reactionary renewable opponents want you to believe. It is not 15 years, or 25 years, it is more like 100-400 years. Nobody needs to decommission them en masse, yet. And even if they suddenly did, it still does not present a disposal issue. Suppose there are 100 million PV panels in California. This is the right order of magnitude for our peak generating capacity. If you took every PV assembly in the entire state, stacked them 50 deep so they were about as high as a man, and just put them in a field, they would not even cover 500 acres. That's less than a square mile. Total non-issue.

[briantakita]

In a perfect world, everything goes according to plan & within specs. In an imperfect world, things break when they are not supposed to in the field, adequate maintenance is not performed & other corners are cut, budgets fluctuate, toxic events are covered up, poorly constructed products are deployed, etc.

The problem is there are studies that show heavy metals polluting the water table. That is what has been observed. I'm of the mindset that not all toxic events are observed, less are documented, & even less are expressed to the public.

Also the toxins released & human rights issues in the supply side have not been addressed in this thread.

It would be great to have better options for energy production, but we have observed some implications of solar cells as the 1st generations reach end of life & the impacts of in field breakages. There is enough of a history to take a sober look at what needs to be improved. Saying it's a "non issue" is frankly an irresponsible approach & makes me question if these issues are taken seriously. Claiming that everyone who brings up issues is anti renewable or an oil shill is also the wrong approach. Is there even proper risk assessment or is this the wild west?

[henearkr]

Almost no PV panels are using CdTe, so that's not even worth arguing about. And newly constructed PV farms certainly do not use this tech.

That's why invoking toxicity of PV panels is just pure anti-renewable propaganda.

[upsidesinclude]

That's a reasonable and fair argument I can accept.

However, I think the idea of the "anti-renewablist" is misguided. There are sceptics who fear advancements for the sake of advancement alone. Plastics are one perfect example (PFAS, PBA, etc). We are only beginning to understand how horribly these things disrupt organic chemical & hormonal balance. Scepticism is not your enemy.

[henearkr]

No no, there are also people who just don't want to see their industry disrupted.

Example. Almost half of all Japanese people I meet say something along the lines "poor car shops who will be put out of business because of EVs", and will find many critics against renewables (including, most of the time, conspiracy theories, e.g. the West wants to eliminate Japan advance) just because they are sympathetic to the ICE cars industry.

And, last but not least, all the Russian trolls, as well as all the people who are unknowingly repeating them or influenced by them, will disseminate all kind of doubts and skepticism about renewables. Because fossil fuels is something they don't want to see replaced anytime soon.

[renewiltord]

Excellent. Thank you for explaining.

[xbar]

I would amend your conclusion to say "Overall, the technology seems to be safely manageable."

Let to rot after funding is depleted is a recipe for disaster. Consider the original decommissioning plan for San Onofre nuclear power plant: https://sanonofresafety.org/nuclear-waste/

[ClumsyPilot]

That kind of true for every human activity. Anything is dangerous if incompetent / malevolent actors are in charge.

Even pig farms cause runoff of manure and fertiliser into rivers, where they cause Eutrophication - massive algae blooms that consume all oxygen in the water, killing all the local fish and fauna and producing massive swaths of hte ocean where the only living thing is Jellyfish.

[briantakita]

Some tech is easier to manage & has been around longer to understand the implications than other technologies though.