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by Joe Hillshoist » Mon Jun 06, 2022 1:31 am
by Belligerent Savant » Mon Jun 13, 2022 1:19 pm
by Iamwhomiam » Mon Jun 13, 2022 1:32 pm
by Belligerent Savant » Mon Jun 13, 2022 2:32 pm
Belligerent Savant » Wed Apr 27, 2022 12:19 pm wrote:.
These last few posts may be better served in a "climate change" thread, but will place it here for now. It's related, in any event.
https://cheddar.com/media/evs-gobble-up ... to-keep-upEVs Gobble Up Rare Earth Minerals as Miners Struggle to Keep Up
Jan 25, 2022 04:08 pm
By Alex Vuocolo
...
Industry projections back up what looks like a major leap forward for EV adoption. Global sales in the space were on track to hit 5.6 million in 2021, according to a report from BloombergNEF prepared for COP26. That's up from 2.1 million in 2019, with EVs now making up 7 percent of the auto market. Bloomberg NEF projects that annual sales will double again in 2022 to 10.5 million.
For those tracking EVs' decades-long rise from pipe dream to cars in the pipeline, this is the moment many have been waiting for: a mass market for battery-powered cars. Success comes with tradeoffs, however, and one that is emerging as arguably the biggest challenge to the rise of electric vehicles is their outsized demand for rare earth minerals.
Electric vehicles require six times the amount of minerals of conventional cars. That includes minerals commonly used in all cars, such as copper and manganese, but also some that are specific to lithium-ion battery production, such as lithium, cobalt, nickel, and graphite. As production ramps up, the supply of these minerals has to keep pace with demand for automakers to meet their EV targets, and increasingly suppliers are feeling the strain.
“Today, the data shows a looming mismatch between the world’s strengthened climate ambitions and the availability of critical minerals that are essential to realizing those ambitions,” said Fatih Birol, executive director of the International Energy Agency (IEA), in a report highlighting the critical role of minerals in making the transition to electric vehicles possible.
The agency predicts that the EV market could require anywhere from six to 30 times the current supply of key minerals, such as cobalt and lithium, to meet industry needs. Based on current levels of investment worldwide, the output isn't likely to match that demand, according to IEA.
Making matters worse, mining operations for rare earth minerals are highly concentrated in a handful of countries. The lack of diversity introduces a number of geopolitical concerns, as countries and corporations vie for resources to meet their respective climate agendas.
"One of the common characteristics of these rare metal supply chains is that a lot of them are extremely vertically integrated and dominated by one entity, usually China," Everett Millman, a precious metal specialist at Gainesville Coins, LLC, told Cheddar.
Already, the prices of key minerals are skyrocketing. Lithium was up as high as 500 percent year-over-year this week, and cobalt and nickel were up as high as 80 percent and 33 percent respectively. While battery costs have been dropping for years due to economies of scale, minerals now make up a larger chunk — about 30 percent — and battery prices are rising with them.
"Battery pack costs have increased and battery makers have made public announcements that prices will increase," said Scott Yarham, metals expert at S&P Global Platts. "This is very unusual for battery costs which have consistently been moving down for years."
He added the market is likely to move into deficit unless major investments are made.
This leaves electric car companies at the mercy of a global supply chain that could be unprepared to meet their long-term needs, and given that EVs are at the center of global efforts to tackle climate change, tight supply could hurt more than automakers' bottom lines.
It could also throw into doubt one of the pillars of the green transition.
...
...there is just one lithium mine in the U.S., and efforts to develop other deposits have come up against resistance from local communities.
THACKER PASS, NEVADA, June 5, 2021. Max Wilbert, of the group Protect Thacker Pass, started a protest camp on the proposed site of the lithium mine and plans to fight the mining company. (Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)
Vecchio said the situation highlights how the broader push for electrification — whether you're talking about automobiles or energy generation — comes with some serious costs, which may be difficult to swallow for environmentalists and others wary of the mining business.
"This is one of those trade-offs that environmentalists need to wrap their heads around," he said. "If the long-term goal for switching to EVs is to decrease pollution and ward off the most devastating effects of climate change, then there's going to be a short-term cost that's incurred, and that paradoxically might be more environmental degradation."
More regulations and public scrutiny also mean more time to get a project up and running, and with nations setting deadlines for a green transition, the timeline for the EV rollout is crucial.
"To open a mine in a safe jurisdiction takes years — years in the applications, the permits, the design work, the financing, the construction, and the commissioning," Black said. "Soup to nuts, it's eight to 10 years, because regulations are very stringent, as they should be."
...
In the meantime, China continues to dominate the EV industry by working directly with both automakers and battery suppliers to help them secure the materials they need.
"If you want to open a mine in China, and the state wants you to open it, it's open," Black said.
by Joe Hillshoist » Mon Jun 13, 2022 8:09 pm
by Joe Hillshoist » Tue Jun 14, 2022 5:58 am
by Belligerent Savant » Tue Jun 14, 2022 3:16 pm
What happens when millions of electric car batteries get old?
California has no EV-battery recycling plants, and few plans for coming toxic flood.
An advisory group in the state legislature is developing recommendations for reusing or recycling electric vehicle batteries. (Photo by Paul Bersebach, Orange County Register/SCNG)
By MARTIN WISCKOL | Orange County Register
PUBLISHED: January 27, 2022 at 7:00 a.m. | UPDATED: January 28, 2022 at 3:38 p.m.
As California accelerates its push toward 100% zero-emission new car sales by 2035, hundreds of thousands of electric-vehicle batteries will be finishing their freeway lives — and it’s not clear what’s going to happen to them.
Currently, many of the massive used batteries — the Tesla version weighs about 900 pounds — appear to be stockpiled in hopes of greater reuse and recycling markets. But eventually those batteries, along with the toxic chemicals that can leach out of them, could end up in hazardous waste landfills.
There are no EV-battery recycling plants in California, and only five up and running nationwide, according to CalEPA. That’s despite the fact that used lithium-ion batteries contain valuable minerals that otherwise must be mined from the earth, mostly from overseas operations.
“There still aren’t enough people who understand (retired) batteries well enough to responsibly handle them,” said Zora Chung, co-founder of Signal Hill’s ReJoule Inc. “Ultimately, we need more education, and to have a more efficient marketplace to re-deploy these batteries into a second-life application.”
Chung’s EV-battery diagnostic company has launched a state-funded pilot project to adapt the used batteries for solar storage, a repurposing that could extend their lives by a decade or more — and forestall actual dismantling and recycling.
"Batteries do not create electricity – they store electricity produced elsewhere, especially through coal, uranium, natural-powered power plants or diesel-powered generators. "So the claim that an electric car is a zero-emission vehicle is not true at all, since forty percent of the electricity produced in the United States comes from coal power plants, thus forty percent of the electric cars on the road are carbon-based.
But that's not all of it. Those who are excited about electric cars and a green revolution should take a closer look at the batteries, but also wind turbines and solar panels.
A typical electric car battery weighs a thousand pounds, roughly the size of a suitcase. It contains 25 pounds of lithium, sixty pounds of nickel, 44 pounds of manganese, 30 pounds of cobalt, 200 pounds of copper and 400 pounds of aluminum, steel and plastic. There are over 6,000 individual lithium ion cells inside.
To make each BEV battery, you'll need to process 25,000 pounds of salt for lithium, 30,000 pounds of ore for cobalt, 5,000 pounds of resin for nickel, and 25,000 pounds of ore from copper. In total, you have to dig out 500,000 pounds of dirt for a battery. "
The biggest problem with solar systems is the chemicals used to turn silicate into the gravel used for the panels. To produce sufficient clean silicon, it must be treated with hydrochloric acid, sulfuric acid, fluoride, trichlorotane and acetone.
In addition, gallium, arsenide, copper-indium-gallium diselenide and cadmium telluride are needed, which are also highly toxic. Silicone dust poses a danger to the workers and the tiles cannot be recycled.
Wind turbines are non-plusultra in terms of cost and environmental destruction. Each windmill weighs 1,688 tonnes (the equivalent of the weight of 23 houses) and contains 1300 tonnes of concrete, 295 tonnes of steel, 48 tonnes of iron, 24 tonnes of fiberglass and the hard-to-win rare soils Neodym, Praseodym, and Dysprosium. Each of the three blades weighs 81,000 pounds and has a lifespan of 15 to 20 years, after which they must be replaced. We cannot recycle used rotor blades.
Admittedly, these technologies can have their place, but you have to look beyond the myth of emission freedom.
“Going Green” may sound like a utopian ideal, but if you look at the hidden and embedded costs in a realistic and impartial way, you’ll find that “Going Green" does more damage to earth’s environment than it seems.
I'm not opposed to mining, electric vehicles, wind or solar energy. But I show the reality of the situation.
#environment #electricvehicles #cars #batteries #electricity #power #solarenergy #mining #renewable #hydrogenstrategy
hr4f.com
by Grizzly » Tue Jun 14, 2022 5:14 pm
by DrEvil » Tue Jun 14, 2022 5:57 pm
forty percent of the electricity produced in the United States comes from coal power plants, thus forty percent of the electric cars on the road are carbon-based.
by Joe Hillshoist » Tue Jun 14, 2022 6:11 pm
DrEvil » 15 Jun 2022 07:57 wrote:
As for this:forty percent of the electricity produced in the United States comes from coal power plants, thus forty percent of the electric cars on the road are carbon-based.
It's just stupid and wrong. First of all, coal is 22%, not 40%, secondly, he's completely ignoring natural gas (38%) and petroleum (0.5%), both of which are also carbon-based, so even if coal was 40% he would still be wrong.
https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3
For almost all of the arguments presented in the above piece, and other similar arguments, if you go digging you will eventually end up at someone with a financial interest in opposing renewables and EVs. I don't know if it has anything to do with the author's views, but as an example of dubious connections, his company received 1.2 million in funding from a UAE investment company in 2019, which to me reads about the same as a climate skeptic receiving funding from the Heritage Foundation - maybe everything he says is above board, but I wouldn't bet on it (his initial coin offering doesn't help either).
by Belligerent Savant » Tue Jun 14, 2022 6:38 pm
DrEvil » Tue Jun 14, 2022 4:57 pm wrote:The claim that we can't recycle used rotors is wrong. It's not being done at any kind of scale right now, and older blades weren't manufactured with recycling in mind, but there's no reason we can't. There's at least one company using them as feedstock for 3D printing for example.
DrEvil » Tue Jun 14, 2022 4:57 pm wrote:And sure, it takes all kinds of shitty practices to manufacture an EV, but lifetime carbon footprint is still less than a gas-guzzler, and again, there's no reason we can't recycle the batteries. It's a policy failure more than anything else, and policies can be changed.
DrEvil » Tue Jun 14, 2022 4:57 pm wrote: On top of that, EVs have the advantage of their fuel getting cleaner and cleaner over time, as more and more electricity is produced by renewable sources.
DrEvil » Tue Jun 14, 2022 4:57 pm wrote:You could plaster your roof with solar panels and, after the initial investment (which should be heavily subsidized, along with the EV itself, for low-income households) have free fuel for your car.
Dark Side To Solar? More Reports Tie Panel Production To Toxic Pollution
Michael Shellenberger
I write about energy and the environment.
Three years ago I published a column at Forbes arguing that solar panels weren’t clean but in fact produced 300 times more toxic waste than high-level nuclear waste. But in contrast to nuclear waste, which is safely stored and never hurts anyone, solar panel waste risks exposing poor trash-pickers in sub-Saharan Africa. The reason was because it was so much cheaper to make new solar panels from raw materials than to recycle them, and would remain that way, given labor and energy costs.
My reporting was near-universally denounced. The most influential financial analyst of the solar industry called my article, “a fine example of 'prove RE [renewable energy] is terrible by linking lots of reports which don't actually support your point but do show that the RE industry in the West considers and documents its limited impacts extremely thoroughly.’” An energy analyst who is both pro-nuclear and pro-solar analyst agreed with her, saying “I looked into this waste issue in the past and concur with [her].”
The Guardian said solar panel waste was a “somewhat ironic concern from [me], a proponent of nuclear power, which has a rather bigger toxic waste problem” adding that “broken panels… are relatively rare except perhaps in the wake of a natural disaster like a hurricane or earthquake.”
But when reporters eventually looked into the issue they came to the same conclusions I had. In 2019, The New York Times published a long article about toxic old solar panels and batteries causing “harm to people who scavenge recyclable materials by hand” in poor African communities. In 2020, Discover magazine confirmed that “it is often cheaper to discard them in landfills or send them to developing countries. As solar panels sit in dumps, the toxic metals they contain can leach out into the environment and possibly pose a public health hazard if they get into the groundwater supply.”
Still, each of those articles stressed that some solar panels were already being recycled, and that more of them one day would be, which was what many of my original critics had pointed out. “The European Union requires solar companies to collect and recycle their panels,” noted Discover, “with the cost of recycling built into the selling price.” The solar analyst who accused me of making unsubstantiated claims said the reason “there are few solar panels being recycled to date [is] because most of them are still working fine.”
But a major new study of the economics of solar, published in Harvard Business Review (HBR), finds that the waste produced by solar panels will make electricity from solar panels four times more expensive than the world’s leading energy analysts thought. “The economics of solar,” write Atalay Atasu and Luk N. Van Wassenhove of Institut Européen d'Administration des Affaires, one of Europe’s leading business schools, and Serasu Duranof the University of Calgary, will “darken quickly as the industry sinks under the weight of its own trash."
...
"By 2035,” write the three economists, “discarded panels would outweigh new units sold by 2.56 times. In turn, this would catapult the LCOE (levelized cost of energy, a measure of the overall cost of an energy-producing asset over its lifetime) to four times the current projection.”
The solar industry, and even supposedly neutral energy agencies, grossly underestimated how much waste solar panels would produce. The HBR authors, all of whom are business school professors, looked at the economics from the point of view of the customer, and past trends, and calculated that customers would replace panels far sooner than every 30 years, as the industry assumes.
“If early replacements occur as predicted by our statistical model,” they write, solar panels “can produce 50 times more waste in just four years than [International Renewable Energy Agency] IRENA anticipates.”
DrEvil » Tue Jun 14, 2022 4:57 pm wrote:For almost all of the arguments presented in the above piece, and other similar arguments, if you go digging you will eventually end up at someone with a financial interest in opposing renewables and EVs. I don't know if it has anything to do with the author's views, but as an example of dubious connections, his company received 1.2 million in funding from a UAE investment company in 2019, which to me reads about the same as a climate skeptic receiving funding from the Heritage Foundation - maybe everything he says is above board, but I wouldn't bet on it (his initial coin offering doesn't help either).
by Belligerent Savant » Wed Jun 15, 2022 11:53 am
Belligerent Savant » Tue Jun 14, 2022 5:38 pm wrote:...solar panels definitely have their benefit, especially if attempting to build a self-sustaining home, along with rain catchers, gardens, etc. But at scale, solar panels can arguably be net-negative for the environment when factoring in the considerations mentioned in the above article.
China Made Solar Cheap With Coal, Subsidies, And “Slave” Labor — Not Efficiency
Low power density means high environmental impacts and poor labor practices
Michael Shellenberger
May 19, 2021
Until recently, many renewable energy advocates claimed that China had made solar panels so much cheaper than everybody else because of efficiency, automation in factories, and improved supply chains.
But events over the last few months make clear that the reason China came to dominate the market, producing 71% to 97% of solar panel components, is due to three main factors: cheap coal, heavy Chinese government subsidies allowing for the dumping of solar panels on foreign markets, and the use of forced labor in conditions the U.S. government representatives today describe as “genocide” and “slavery.”
It’s true that solar panels became more energy efficient, that the solar industry has been trying to automate, and that the Chinese make production efficient by successfully locating factories, mines, and power plants near each other. Goldman Sachs recently pointed to “higher module [solar panel] efficiency.” And The Financial Times’ Isabella Kaminska notes that when she visited a solar panel factory in Spain in 2004, it was “gearing up for automating.”
But the best performing models of the most common type of solar cells became just 3 percentage points more efficient during the decade that the cost of solar panels declined by roughly 75 percent, disproving the claim that panel efficiency was of much importance.
Goldman Sachs, in its same report, emphasized lower capital costs from “cheaper labour” were a key factor in China’s ability to lower costs, and the Chinese government admits that it operates “surplus labor” programs relocating millions of people from their homes in Xinjiang. It simply denies that it uses coercion in such relocations.
Moreover, there is little evidence the Chinese significantly automated its factories, which is why it has had to rely so much on forced labor. FT’s Kaminska posted photos of workers in solar panel factories creating panels by hand.
Part of the reason for that is because solar panels are so fragile and easy to break, notes Kaminska, citing a solar company report pointing to “the delicate nature of solar cells themselves. Around 0.3mm (0.011 inches) thick, they can be easily broken if not handled properly. As a result, production in the past has largely been dependent on manual handling. This slows down production and just a single misplaced thumbprint is enough to render a cell useless.”
And the Chinese government itself attributes its cheap solar panels to coal. “Over the past decade,” wrote a reporter for the web site, Global Times, which is a mouthpiece for the Chinese government, “Xinjiang has become a major polysilicon production hub in China, as the industry requires extensive amounts of energy, and that makes relatively cheaper electricity and abundant thermal power in Xinjiang appealing.”
In other words, China made solar panels cheap with coal, subsidies, and “slave” labor, not efficiency. Why is that?
Solar’s Dark Side
Solar panel advocates have long described the technology as innovative, but the dominant commercial solar panels today are the same crystalline silicon panels that Bell Labs developed in the 1950s. And patents for solar panels peaked in 2010, right as the Chinese were cornering the global market.
People thought a more innovative kind of solar panel known as “thin film” might be cheaper but it turned out to be even less efficient than the crystalline silicon ones. It requires more scarce and expensive materials and a more difficult manufacturing process. The most famous thin film firm, Solyndra, went bankrupt despite receiving a half-billion in US taxpayer money.
And against the picture of robots doing all the work, a new report finds that, “Manual laborers at Hoshine's Xinjiang facility are paid to crush silicon manually at a rate of 42 Chinese yuan (around $6.50) per ton.”
While some have suggested that the production of iPhones is as brutal as the production of solar panels, it’s simply not the case. Workers in iPhone factories are not choosing to be there as an alternative to being in concentration camps.
Consider Hoshine, the biggest producer of metallurgical-grade silicon in the world. It is the primary material that is sold to the polysilicon makers. Hoshine’s factory, notes CNN, “holds two facilities that have been identified as detention centers for the ‘re-education’ of Uyghur people.”
Beyond creating a captive workforce, the Chinese government subsidies solar panel factories in other ways. In a profile of a solar panel maker in China in 2017, The New York Times documented its precarity and subsidy-dependence. “The suggestion that the government might cut the subsidy, even though the government did not follow through on it, panicked his investors,” reported the Times of one solar panel maker. “So they stopped financing further deals.”
Few deny that China sold solar panels on U.S. and European markets for less than it cost to make and ship them, which is called “dumping.” Both the U.S. and EU governments in 2012 and 2013 confirmed that Chinese government was subsidizing the dumping of solar panels.
“The fact that China’s major PV manufacturers have operated for the better part of a decade without making much money,” wrote a researcher for the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) last year, “suggests that subsidies continue to shape international competition in this industry.”
U.S. solar panel makers were forced to close because, even though solar energy receives significantly larger subsidies than wind, fossil fuels, and nuclear, they still could not compete with subsidized firms in China.
The US gave a 30% investment tax subsidy to US solar makers in 2009, as well as loan guarantees, including to Solyndra. “U.S. states also offered incentives to locate PV manufacturing plants within their borders,” notes ITIF. “But these, too, proved no match for their competition in China.”
Today, private investors shun new solar panel manufacturing because the profit margins are too low and the risks are too high. “Burned by their losses, and unwilling to enter a capital-intensive, low-margin business,” notes ITIF, “U.S. venture capitalists turned their attention elsewhere.”
In other words, the reason China had to make solar panels with coal, heavy subsidies, and forced labor was because cost reductions could not be realized by increasing efficiency. Solar cells are now within a few percentage points of their maximum theoretical efficiency, meaning that the best we can hope for from feasible, next-generation solar would still require 300 - 400 times more land than a nuclear or natural gas plant. And the low labor and land efficiency of solar are both due to the inherently dilute nature of the “fuel” for solar panels, sunlight.
Fleeing A Sinking Ship
Until this week, the Chinese government had hotly denied that it was using slave labor in its solar panel factories, just as it has denied that it is engaging in genocide, despite overwhelming evidence that it has put two million Muslim Uyghurs in concentration camps where they are subjected to forced labor and sterilization.
The Chinese government is now touting a single solar panel maker, Daqo. Wrote the reporter for Global Times, “after visiting the Daqo plant in Xinjiang twice and talking to workers freely in the past month, I found no signs of ‘forced labor’ in the factory at all. Instead, a high level of employee satisfaction and high wages at the company made it a sought-after job in the city, workers and local residents in Shihezi told me.”
Daqo’s CEO claimed not to have ties to Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, or XPCC, the infamous government agency that oversees mass detentions. “We have no association with the XPCC,” Yang said. “We're not owned by them.” The US Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control in 2020 imposed sanctionson XPCC "in connection with serious rights abuses against ethnic minorities.”
But the new report by British researchers I wrote about last week documented “a long-term, mutually beneficial relationship” between Daqo and XPCC and found that Daqo’s biggest suppliers had in fact hired forced labor from XPCC’s programs. "[Daqo's] supply chain is tainted, and nobody's going to look away from that anymore," said one of the researchers.
And, noted Bloomberg, “Daqo has upheld the same secrecy as its peers with ties to the government-run labor program that's under international scrutiny. As recently as March, the company declined interview requests for its executives and turned away foreign observers.”
Even so, Daqo, apparently with the blessing of the Chinese government, is on a PR offensive. The company is transparent about its motives, with Daqo’s chief financial officer telling Bloomberg that there is a “good probability” President Joe Biden will ban polysilicon made in Xinjiang, where the genocide is taking place. “We understand there are these perception risks, especially from the public and media, and some investors.”
“Daqo’s best bet is to try and win an exemption,” noted Bloomberg. “Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi Corp. this month managed to get itself removed from a U.S. blacklist of military-linked companies, suggesting there’s a way for individual companies to avoid penalties even as tensions rise between the world’s two biggest economies.”
But the Chinese government can’t have it both ways. It can’t claim, on the one hand, that there is no slave labor being used in its solar panel factories, and that Daqo is unique in being free of slave labor.
When Bloomberg asked Daqo’s CEO about the concentration camps, he said, “Do they exist or not? Actually, I don’t know. But certainly if they do exist, then I think there are moral standards that this will be judged.”
Daqo thus found himself contradicting the Chinese government’s official position. “[CEO] Yang and his team plan to appoint an agency to conduct a human-rights audit of their operations—and most probably those of key suppliers—to back up the company’s assertion that it has ‘zero tolerance’ for forced labor,” noted Bloomberg. But why would such a thing be necessary if there is no genocide or forced labor at all being used in Xinjiang?
“Daqo’s push for transparency could also end up raising more questions about the other key players in the industry—Xinte Energy Co., GCL-Poly Energy Holdings Ltd. and East Hope Group Co.—and China’s labor practices in the region,” notes Bloomberg
And it is not clear how much permission Daqo got from the Chinese government before announcing its plans. “Conducting independent, third-party inspections at random times would require cooperation from a local government that has for years prevented foreign journalists and diplomats from freely visiting the region. Yang said the authorities have given Daqo ‘preliminary assurances’ that the auditors will be granted access.”
The Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) has urged its members to move out of Xinjiang, but such a move would not be easy, and it’s not clear how sincere SEIA is with its calls. JinkoSolar is on the board of SEIA, operates a factory in Xinjiang, and is the second largest buyer of polysilicon from Daqo.
Members of Congress have proposed Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act that would ban goods from Xinjiang unless the company importing them could prove that they were not made with forced labor, and the House of Representatives is considering a resolution calling the Chinese government’s actions genocide.
While claiming he will monitor and certify his factories, Daqo’s CEO “downplayed the importance of the American market,” said Bloomberg, “saying it only accounted for between 10% to 15% of the global market.
But more than the U.S. is considering a crackdown. Earlier this week, researchers for Germany's Parliament (Bundestag) concluded that China is committing genocide against Muslim Uyghurs. This means German companies will almost certainly have to withdraw from Xinjiang and stop importing solar panels from China.
And if Germany bans solar panels made in China, then it is likely that the entire European Union will follow suit.. Whatever happens, the dream of solar energy as an innovative green industry is rapidly fading.
FT’s Kaminska was earlier than most journalists to see through the solar industry’s public relations. “The huge cost savings in the sector the last few years are as much about China using dirty coal and underpriced labour to produce solar as they are about any actual tech developments,” she wrote in 2018.
In her column today, Kaminska says. “We were quickly shot down by allegedly more informed Twitterati on the basis the industry was clearly highly automated.”
But now that it’s clear that China made solar panels cheap with coal, subsidies, and forced labor, Kaminska’s words proved prophetic. “History teaches us,” she noted back in 2018, “that there is no such thing as a free lunch.”
by DrEvil » Wed Jun 15, 2022 2:28 pm
No. What's silly is to expect the technology to be perfect. That's really what your whole argument here seems to boil down to: it's not perfect so it's bad.Belligerent Savant » Wed Jun 15, 2022 12:38 am wrote:DrEvil » Tue Jun 14, 2022 4:57 pm wrote:The claim that we can't recycle used rotors is wrong. It's not being done at any kind of scale right now, and older blades weren't manufactured with recycling in mind, but there's no reason we can't. There's at least one company using them as feedstock for 3D printing for example.
So right now, we don't. That's the key point. right now, blades made explicitly to "go green" were not made "with recycling in mind". Why not? Isn't that kinda silly as a starting point to NOT explicitly consider and implement this?
Where does this industry stand, right now, on making these blades recyclable? Where is the information on this? I mean, besides what Dr. Evil is claiming here. If I'm reading what you typed correctly, you're essentially saying, "they're not recyclable now but they can be!" I'd like to see some data on current progress along those lines.
Again, you seem to be arguing that since it's not perfect from the start it's somehow bad.DrEvil » Tue Jun 14, 2022 4:57 pm wrote:And sure, it takes all kinds of shitty practices to manufacture an EV, but lifetime carbon footprint is still less than a gas-guzzler, and again, there's no reason we can't recycle the batteries. It's a policy failure more than anything else, and policies can be changed.
Again, how is it this wasn't considered from the ONSET, given the core objectives of "green" energy, production, and sustainability?
That is, indeed, a policy failure.
When is the change to policy coming? Anything lined up, currently?
DrEvil » Tue Jun 14, 2022 4:57 pm wrote: On top of that, EVs have the advantage of their fuel getting cleaner and cleaner over time, as more and more electricity is produced by renewable sources.
Where is the data to back this up, Re: "cleaner and cleaner over time"? And again, how are these batteries charged? Are the power stations sustained by coal plants? How can it be zero emissions if the batteries need to be powered by stations that are powered by coal?
DrEvil » Tue Jun 14, 2022 4:57 pm wrote:You could plaster your roof with solar panels and, after the initial investment (which should be heavily subsidized, along with the EV itself, for low-income households) have free fuel for your car.
What's the annual cost for maintenance and repair of panels for the average home owner?
Also, what about this?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshe ... 52d3735fe5Dark Side To Solar? More Reports Tie Panel Production To Toxic Pollution
Michael Shellenberger
I write about energy and the environment.
Three years ago I published a column at Forbes arguing that solar panels weren’t clean but in fact produced 300 times more toxic waste than high-level nuclear waste. But in contrast to nuclear waste, which is safely stored and never hurts anyone, solar panel waste risks exposing poor trash-pickers in sub-Saharan Africa. The reason was because it was so much cheaper to make new solar panels from raw materials than to recycle them, and would remain that way, given labor and energy costs.
My reporting was near-universally denounced. The most influential financial analyst of the solar industry called my article, “a fine example of 'prove RE [renewable energy] is terrible by linking lots of reports which don't actually support your point but do show that the RE industry in the West considers and documents its limited impacts extremely thoroughly.’” An energy analyst who is both pro-nuclear and pro-solar analyst agreed with her, saying “I looked into this waste issue in the past and concur with [her].”
The Guardian said solar panel waste was a “somewhat ironic concern from [me], a proponent of nuclear power, which has a rather bigger toxic waste problem” adding that “broken panels… are relatively rare except perhaps in the wake of a natural disaster like a hurricane or earthquake.”
But when reporters eventually looked into the issue they came to the same conclusions I had. In 2019, The New York Times published a long article about toxic old solar panels and batteries causing “harm to people who scavenge recyclable materials by hand” in poor African communities. In 2020, Discover magazine confirmed that “it is often cheaper to discard them in landfills or send them to developing countries. As solar panels sit in dumps, the toxic metals they contain can leach out into the environment and possibly pose a public health hazard if they get into the groundwater supply.”
Still, each of those articles stressed that some solar panels were already being recycled, and that more of them one day would be, which was what many of my original critics had pointed out. “The European Union requires solar companies to collect and recycle their panels,” noted Discover, “with the cost of recycling built into the selling price.” The solar analyst who accused me of making unsubstantiated claims said the reason “there are few solar panels being recycled to date [is] because most of them are still working fine.”
But a major new study of the economics of solar, published in Harvard Business Review (HBR), finds that the waste produced by solar panels will make electricity from solar panels four times more expensive than the world’s leading energy analysts thought. “The economics of solar,” write Atalay Atasu and Luk N. Van Wassenhove of Institut Européen d'Administration des Affaires, one of Europe’s leading business schools, and Serasu Duranof the University of Calgary, will “darken quickly as the industry sinks under the weight of its own trash."
...
"By 2035,” write the three economists, “discarded panels would outweigh new units sold by 2.56 times. In turn, this would catapult the LCOE (levelized cost of energy, a measure of the overall cost of an energy-producing asset over its lifetime) to four times the current projection.”
The solar industry, and even supposedly neutral energy agencies, grossly underestimated how much waste solar panels would produce. The HBR authors, all of whom are business school professors, looked at the economics from the point of view of the customer, and past trends, and calculated that customers would replace panels far sooner than every 30 years, as the industry assumes.
“If early replacements occur as predicted by our statistical model,” they write, solar panels “can produce 50 times more waste in just four years than [International Renewable Energy Agency] IRENA anticipates.”
EDIT: solar panels definitely have their benefit, especially if attempting to build a self-sustaining home, along with rain catchers, gardens, etc. But at scale, solar panels can arguably be net-negative for the environment when factoring in the considerations mentioned in the above article.
DrEvil » Tue Jun 14, 2022 4:57 pm wrote:For almost all of the arguments presented in the above piece, and other similar arguments, if you go digging you will eventually end up at someone with a financial interest in opposing renewables and EVs. I don't know if it has anything to do with the author's views, but as an example of dubious connections, his company received 1.2 million in funding from a UAE investment company in 2019, which to me reads about the same as a climate skeptic receiving funding from the Heritage Foundation - maybe everything he says is above board, but I wouldn't bet on it (his initial coin offering doesn't help either).
Oh, is the green movement not for profit? What of ESG? Are there monetary incentives there?
The short version of all this is: the "green" economy being sold to well-intentioned consumers is not nearly as green or well-intentioned as advertised, at least not by many of the enterprising entities promoting it at the moment.
Are there elements of green tech that can work, when augmented for the true benefit of the majority? Sure, and it may well be that continued but managed/resourceful use of coal/carbon-based fuels can also benefit the majority with much less harms to the environment.
There are large-scale scams being perpetrated by both sides of the "energy" industries (and of course, there's also Nuclear power, which has its own benefits and drawbacks).
Blackrock is the key driver of ESG -- that alone should raise alarm bells.
by Belligerent Savant » Thu Jun 16, 2022 10:45 am
by Belligerent Savant » Thu Jun 16, 2022 6:02 pm
@robbystarbuck
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They did not die of extreme heat. I talked to multiple ranchers since I saw this video (one from Kansas) and they all say this needs to be investigated ASAP to get to the bottom of this because there’s no way heat caused 10,000+ cattle to drop dead. This is not normal.Ian Miles Cheong
@stillgray
Extreme heat and humidity killed thousands of cattle in Kansas this week so far. An estimated 10,000 heads of fat cattle dead.
[Video at link]
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