The World is Facing a Solar Panel Waste Problem

[Dan Clemmensen + 1,011]

1 hour ago, ronwagn said:

No problems, that I know of, with waste from an old natural gas plant. 

NG is a great deal cleaner than coal, but still not perfect: nothing is. Most of the waste associated with NG (measured in, say, tons per GWh produced times cost per ton of disposal) will be in the NG production, especially when the NG is fracked, or when you apportion the frackking waste of the well if the NG comes from an oil well. I'm not sure how many tons of waste per GWh come from decomissioning an NG plant, but I suspect the plant lifetime is longer than the solar or wind plant, so it produces a lot of GWh.  The materials are also currently easier per ton to handle, mostly steel and concrete, but there is a lot of it. Therefore to do a proper analysis, we need a whole lot of information that I do not know how to get. My earlier post was about coal fly ash because I knew a little about it.

[Sebastian Meana + 278]

10 hours ago, Meredith Poor said:

 

 

70 cents per watt is the unsubsidized price for utility scale PV installations in the US at present.

 

small detail, thats the power output before converting from DC to AC, and i don't know of any house or industrial facility that uses DC power instead of AC power.

"Installed Prices: Average of $1.60/Wac (or $1.20/Wdc) for projects completed in 2018. The lowest 20^th percentile of projects were priced at or below $1.30/Wac (or 97¢/Wdc), with the lowest-priced projects around $1.00/Wac (or ~70¢/Wdc)"

Which is the around the same  prices of Solar Panels at utility scale since 2014 in germany(1200U$D/KWe) ,and more or less the same price at Wac as in india in 2018, 2019, and 2020 (950-1100U$D/KWe), built on and is the same price of solar PV installations currently built without subsidies in portugar or spain
 

"The above chart covers 38 projects in the database, the majority of them not actually built yet. The project are in 11 states totaling 4.3GWac of solar and 2.6GW/9.88GWh of battery capacity."

That's a very interesing part, because for example, the Harlin solar farm in australia will end costing 2300U$D/KWe

Again, if the photovoltaic industry in china wasn't highly subsidized the cost of photovoltaic panels would go from 300U$D/KWe to 700U$D/KWe, if that isn't the case we would se other solar manufacturers making panels for 300U$D/KWe while making a profit, in places like South Korea, Japan, or Mexico, on which manufacturing stuff is already cheaper than to do it in China. And will hit a wall and crash likely sooner than later.
 

Edited August 6, 2020 by Sebastian Meana

[KeyboardWarrior + 527]

7 hours ago, 0R0 said:

You might get a kick out of the fact that the new high purity polysilicone plant being built outside Toledo OH is going to be run on frac gas from the Appalachians

Oh that is great... 😂

Not like it was going to happen any other way though. 

[Enthalpic + 1,496]

10 hours ago, ronwagn said:

No problems, that I know of, with waste from an old natural gas plant. 

Nat gas is pretty clean when burned.  Furnaces need filters but that is because the air is so dirty!

Nat gas does make pollution on the production side. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Produced_water

Almost all of the legal files I worked on with Nat gas were because the excessive chloride content in waste water found its way to a fish bearing area. Easy files, anything over 100mg/L Cl was open-and-shut.

 

We did do Ra-226 and Barium testing but that is mostly for metal mines.

 

Edited August 6, 2020 by Enthalpic

[Meredith Poor + 883]

1 hour ago, Sebastian Meana said:

Again, if the photovoltaic industry in china wasn't highly subsidized the cost of photovoltaic panels would go from 300U$D/KWe to 700U$D/KWe, if that isn't the case we would se other solar manufacturers making panels for 300U$D/KWe while making a profit, in places like South Korea, Japan, or Mexico, on which manufacturing stuff is already cheaper than to do it in China. And will hit a wall and crash likely sooner than later.

I've attached a screen shot of Chinese solar at $20USD/Kw, as long as your'e willing to buy 467Mw of cells. I have no idea whether this is a legitimate solicitation and I'm sure they're subsidized.

 

[Ward Smith + 6,615]

Can we talk about the wind turbine waste problem @Dan Clemmensen? You're throwing in natural gas life cycle SWAGS but here's a fact. Those big wind turbines consumed over one ton of rare earth elements. The newest models consume four tons each! Now, would you like to talk about the environmental nightmare producing REE's entails? Makes all the fracking in the world look like child's play. 

 

[NickW + 2,714]

16 hours ago, ronwagn said:

No problems, that I know of, with waste from an old natural gas plant. 

They produce a fair quantity of low level radioactive waste

[Yoshiro Kamamura + 274]

On 7/31/2020 at 5:52 AM, ronwagn said:

https://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Solar-Energy/The-World-Is-Facing-A-Solar-Panel-Waste-Problem.html#comment_added

Disposing of waste from solar panels and wind turbines is a very unpopular with greenies. 

What do we think? I think that it could not be you, if you did not start a completely legitimate topic (i. e. decomposition and recycling challenges of new technologies and materials used by them, for example solar panels), with needlessly silly attack against some imaginary "greenies" inhabiting probably only the inside of your head. 

FYI  true "greenies" of course care about how the materials they propose for general use decay and impact the environment, otherwise they would not be truly "greenies", but some capitalist moguls looking to get rich quick on some new energy schemes, leaving wreckage and poisoned nature behind. Like Elon Musk, who carelessly polluted the orbit with dozens of satellites that seriously diminished the astronomers' abilities to observe the outer space, and whose wreckage in the future may prevent ships from safely leaving the orbit. But don't worry, true "greenies" are not inconsiderate, selfish slobs. 

There is even a "greenie" term called circular economy that expresses the principle that if all your outputs (excrements, derelict structure, wrecked machinery, corpses, household and industrial waste) cannot be somehow used as inputs (for example as fertilizers, feedstock from chemical industry, building materials, fuel, etc.), i.e. if you produce any waste at all, that your economy is not sustainable out of principle. 

In other words, that your economy is always destined to arrive to a point where you consume all your resources and end up dying on a heap of unusable trash. Your economy was not circular, it was linear, a machine that turned resources to waste, hence it was not sustainable. Coincidentally, most circular economies that existed were mocked as "inefficient", "primitive" and "obsolete". 

So if used solar panels are here to stay for decades, decaying only slowly, occupying space and interfering with the ecosystem, then the whole technology has a great problem - similar to plastics. 

[Dan Clemmensen + 1,011]

3 hours ago, Ward Smith said:

Can we talk about the wind turbine waste problem @Dan Clemmensen? You're throwing in natural gas life cycle SWAGS but here's a fact. Those big wind turbines consumed over one ton of rare earth elements. The newest models consume four tons each! Now, would you like to talk about the environmental nightmare producing REE's entails? Makes all the fracking in the world look like child's play.

The original post was about solar panels, and my original comparison was with coal before Ron brought in gas, but I'm happy for you to add wind to the mix. I'm happy to have you introduce the REEs to the discussion, but I doubt their waste "makes all the fracking in the world look like child's play". You need a SWAG to convert this into tons of waste per GWh. For the wind turbines, I would guess cobalt is at least as big an issue as REEs.

A big gas turbine is also a major piece of engineering using lots of high-temperature alloys. I have not attempted SWAGs for these because I have even less knowledge of them than I do of the fracking waste.  I'm also not trying to push any of the technologies. I'm trying to get a feel for the amount of waste per GWh.

The tech that originally got screwed in the waste propaganda wars was nuclear. All the greenies of that era panicked over "nuclear waste disposal", while mostly ignoring coal waste, and especially ignoring any comparisons between them. Leaving aside all the megatons of coal waste, a coal plant emits quite a bit more radioactivity per GWh than does a nuclear plant.

[Meredith Poor + 883]

17 hours ago, 0R0 said:

Landfill along with broken wind turbine blades. Both are complex materials, hopefully it isn't more expensive to blast the semiconductor surface and retrieve the rare elements than to mine them. The Silicone substrate, once blasted clean of its top layer would be valuable high quality silicone that might be recyclable into new wafers.

You might get a kick out of the fact that the new high purity polysilicone plant being built outside Toledo OH is going to be run on frac gas from the Appalachians.

Silicone (with the ending E) is different from silicon. Silicone is a silicon oxide - alternating silicon and oxygen atoms in a polymer.

[Enthalpic + 1,496]

5 hours ago, Ward Smith said:

Can we talk about the wind turbine waste problem?

We could if you understood chemistry or opened your eyes to reality.

 

 

[Enthalpic + 1,496]

3 hours ago, NickW said:

They produce a fair quantity of low level radioactive waste

"NORMs" makes them sound fine.

 

Really it depends if the well had to drill through precambrian rock.

[KeyboardWarrior + 527]

42 minutes ago, Enthalpic said:

We could if you understood chemistry or opened your eyes to reality.

 

 

Let's get technical. How is fiberglass recycled? Is it yet profitable to do so? I don't have an opinion on turbine waste yet. 

[Ward Smith + 6,615]

2 hours ago, Dan Clemmensen said:

The original post was about solar panels, and my original comparison was with coal before Ron brought in gas, but I'm happy for you to add wind to the mix. I'm happy to have you introduce the REEs to the discussion, but I doubt their waste "makes all the fracking in the world look like child's play". You need a SWAG to convert this into tons of waste per GWh. For the wind turbines, I would guess cobalt is at least as big an issue as REEs.

A big gas turbine is also a major piece of engineering using lots of high-temperature alloys. I have not attempted SWAGs for these because I have even less knowledge of them than I do of the fracking waste.  I'm also not trying to push any of the technologies. I'm trying to get a feel for the amount of waste per GWh.

The tech that originally got screwed in the waste propaganda wars was nuclear. All the greenies of that era panicked over "nuclear waste disposal", while mostly ignoring coal waste, and especially ignoring any comparisons between them. Leaving aside all the megatons of coal waste, a coal plant emits quite a bit more radioactivity per GWh than does a nuclear plant.

Dan, I suspect you're oblivious to the concrete amount of dross from fracking. From a well 2 miles down plus 2 miles out, the frack job produces a neglible amount of sediment, like could fit in the back of your pickup truck scale. Now look at the millions of acres of open pit mines and rubble piles across the world associated with REE extraction. And when I say REE, I'm including the "neighbors" not in the lanthanide row, like scandium and yttrium. It doesn't just end there, the chemical leaching can involve hundreds of steps, and your SWAG needs to account for all that mess too.  I should point out that REE are used in PV installations also. Point being, when you import those materials for your "green" solution, you've effectively exported gigatons of hazardous waste, all for feel good green washing. 

[ronwagn + 6,290]

5 hours ago, NickW said:

They produce a fair quantity of low level radioactive waste

How does that work. My home and most homes in my area have radon in the soil already. How would that compare. 

[ronwagn + 6,290]

20 hours ago, Dan Clemmensen said:

NG is a great deal cleaner than coal, but still not perfect: nothing is. Most of the waste associated with NG (measured in, say, tons per GWh produced times cost per ton of disposal) will be in the NG production, especially when the NG is fracked, or when you apportion the frackking waste of the well if the NG comes from an oil well. I'm not sure how many tons of waste per GWh come from decomissioning an NG plant, but I suspect the plant lifetime is longer than the solar or wind plant, so it produces a lot of GWh.  The materials are also currently easier per ton to handle, mostly steel and concrete, but there is a lot of it. Therefore to do a proper analysis, we need a whole lot of information that I do not know how to get. My earlier post was about coal fly ash because I knew a little about it.

Coal fly ash is a huge issue related to water pollution of streams, rivers, and groundwater. Apparently the precautions taken to date are inadequate in many cases and some of the companies are history.

[NickW + 2,714]

5 hours ago, ronwagn said:

How does that work. My home and most homes in my area have radon in the soil already. How would that compare. 

Radon decays into a series of isotopes and ends up at Lead 210 for the next 23 years which is radioactive - this is the main component of NORMS /TENORMS scale in gas pipes. There is also some Polonium 210 but this has a much shorter half life. 

Having measured the bq count off the end of numerous pipeline inspection gauges at gas plants they are pretty 'warm' - certainly enough to warrant special disposal. 

Edited August 7, 2020 by NickW

[Meredith Poor + 883]

11 hours ago, KeyboardWarrior said:

Let's get technical. How is fiberglass recycled? Is it yet profitable to do so? I don't have an opinion on turbine waste yet. 

'Fiberglass' is really 'Plastic reinforced fiberglass', so there are two components. The 'plastic' component is most likely epoxy, although research on this topic brings up all kinds of things. The 'fiberglass' may not be glass (silicon), it may be carbon fiber or Kevlar.

Generally epoxy can be separated from fiber by soaking it in hot lye (sodium hydroxide) or a similar alkali. At room temperature epoxies are generally chemically resistant, so they have to be heated. During the soak, the blade would have to be repetitively flexed in order to progressively separate more of the fibers from the filler.

The extracted epoxy would have to either be converted back to it's base chemicals or burned. Depending on the fibers in question, it might be possible to reuse them for other structures, perhaps roofs, boats, or storage tanks.

[Dan Clemmensen + 1,011]

9 hours ago, Meredith Poor said:

'Fiberglass' is really 'Plastic reinforced fiberglass', so there are two components. The 'plastic' component is most likely epoxy, although research on this topic brings up all kinds of things. The 'fiberglass' may not be glass (silicon), it may be carbon fiber or Kevlar.

Generally epoxy can be separated from fiber by soaking it in hot lye (sodium hydroxide) or a similar alkali. At room temperature epoxies are generally chemically resistant, so they have to be heated. During the soak, the blade would have to be repetitively flexed in order to progressively separate more of the fibers from the filler.

The extracted epoxy would have to either be converted back to it's base chemicals or burned. Depending on the fibers in question, it might be possible to reuse them for other structures, perhaps roofs, boats, or storage tanks.

Realistically, it looks like landfill will be the most cost-effective. It sounds like a lot of material, but it really is not in absolute terms, and it's negligible in comparison to coal waste. We can make the greenies happy by calling it "carbon sequestration", since epoxy, carbon fiber, and Kevlar are mostly carbon by weight.

[KeyboardWarrior + 527]

10 hours ago, Meredith Poor said:

'Fiberglass' is really 'Plastic reinforced fiberglass', so there are two components. The 'plastic' component is most likely epoxy, although research on this topic brings up all kinds of things. The 'fiberglass' may not be glass (silicon), it may be carbon fiber or Kevlar.

Generally epoxy can be separated from fiber by soaking it in hot lye (sodium hydroxide) or a similar alkali. At room temperature epoxies are generally chemically resistant, so they have to be heated. During the soak, the blade would have to be repetitively flexed in order to progressively separate more of the fibers from the filler.

The extracted epoxy would have to either be converted back to it's base chemicals or burned. Depending on the fibers in question, it might be possible to reuse them for other structures, perhaps roofs, boats, or storage tanks.

Can the caustic be recovered after rinsing the blades? Could the blades be ground up or cut prior to processing? I'm thinking that flexing the blades would be incredibly tedious. As for reversion, are we talking about breaking it back into monomers? 

 

[RichieRich216 + 454]

The greenies never think past the next step! The carbon dioxide lie is been perpetuated by idiots since Al Gore made hundreds of millions off of. If I remember my science class cO2 helps plants and trees, but we don’t teach anything but liberal bullshit any longer!

[Meredith Poor + 883]

1 hour ago, KeyboardWarrior said:

Can the caustic be recovered after rinsing the blades? Could the blades be ground up or cut prior to processing? I'm thinking that flexing the blades would be incredibly tedious. As for reversion, are we talking about breaking it back into monomers? 

 

Presumably, the point of this is that everything is 100% recoverable. Grinding up blades would be energy intensive, although cutting them into small chunks would make sense. In any case, the epoxy would revert to its constituent monomers, if there's any point it in. It might make more sense simply to incinerate them.

[NickW + 2,714]

5 hours ago, Meredith Poor said:

Presumably, the point of this is that everything is 100% recoverable. Grinding up blades would be energy intensive, although cutting them into small chunks would make sense. In any case, the epoxy would revert to its constituent monomers, if there's any point it in. It might make more sense simply to incinerate them.

In Europe blades are being ground up and used as cement kiln / brick oven fuel. Whats left is basically glass - can use that as aggregate for road base. 

[ronwagn + 6,290]

On 8/7/2020 at 4:04 AM, NickW said:

Radon decays into a series of isotopes and ends up at Lead 210 for the next 23 years which is radioactive - this is the main component of NORMS /TENORMS scale in gas pipes. There is also some Polonium 210 but this has a much shorter half life. 

Having measured the bq count off the end of numerous pipeline inspection gauges at gas plants they are pretty 'warm' - certainly enough to warrant special disposal. 

How does that compare to coal ash? The quantity is certainly far less. Could the pipes be cleaned of the radioactivity by smelting or scaling? 

[Ward Smith + 6,615]

On 8/7/2020 at 2:04 AM, NickW said:

Radon decays into a series of isotopes and ends up at Lead 210 for the next 23 years which is radioactive - this is the main component of NORMS /TENORMS scale in gas pipes. There is also some Polonium 210 but this has a much shorter half life. 

Having measured the bq count off the end of numerous pipeline inspection gauges at gas plants they are pretty 'warm' - certainly enough to warrant special disposal. 

I'm curious about this. Becquerel counts measure emission, but not absorbtion. You make it sound like the steel has accumulated a bunch of rads (absorbtion). Or were they just exposed to radon as a trace gas cruising by on the way someplace else?