Solar Panel Waste: Opportunity or Reason to Say No?
Connect the two bolded parts of this story; solar grade silicon takes tremendous energy to produce and there no way yet to recapturing it without using an expensive and energy intensive process:
“As we’re ramping up clean energy manufacturing, producing more clean energy tech, thinking about recycling at the end of life becomes even more important,” says Diana Bauer, acting deputy director of the Advanced Manufacturing Office at DOE.
Meng Tao, a solar sustainability researcher at ASU who’s leading the new recycling effort, estimates that the world could face supply shortages of silver long before we’ve built all the solar panels needed to transition off fossil fuels. Solar grade silicon takes tremendous amounts of energy to make, and using it more than once is important for keeping the solar industry’s electricity demands — and its carbon footprint — to a minimum.
When solar panels are recycled today, these materials are rarely recovered. Instead, recyclers typically remove the aluminum frame holding the panel together, strip the copper wiring off the back, and shred the panel itself, creating a solar hash that’s sold as crushed glass. Those three products — aluminum, copper, and crushed glass — might fetch a recycler $3 per panel, Tao says. Companies that Tao has spoken with say it costs up to $25 to recycle a panel, after decommissioning and transit costs.
Tao and his colleagues are proposing a process in which the envelope-sized silicon cells inside solar panels are first separated from the sheets of polymers and glass surrounding them using a hot steel blade. A patent pending chemical concoction developed by Tao’s recycling startup TG Companies is then used to extract silver, tin, copper, and lead from the cells, leaving behind silicon.
While the recycling process uses harsh chemicals, Tao says those chemicals can be “regenerated and used again and again,” reducing the amount of waste that’s created — a feature he believes makes his recycling method unique. He adds that by recovering lead, the process also has the potential to eliminate an environmental hazard that would otherwise wind up as recycling waste or in landfills. He foresees the potential to recover about $15 worth of silver from each panel but there is no way yet of recapturing the silicon without using an expensive and energy intensive process.
The article is intended to promote the idea solar recycling is a great opportunity but proves precisely the opposite (at the end of the article, of course).
Hat Tip: D.S.
ESG Investing Will Be Destroyed By What It Means
ESG is nothing but a con job and will be undone by the fact ESG investing goes counter to what consumers and the citizenry want:
ESG underperformance will be the strategy’s eventual undoing…
With ESG now the rage, the “demand” drives product development. However, there is also an understanding of why large asset managers have embraced the strategy so readily – higher fees…
In the late ’90s, Wall Street moved to limit investing in “sin” stocks such as gambling, tobacco, etc. Just as it was then, investors initially jumped on board, but when returns failed to outperform the benchmark index, that “fad” died.
The same occurs today as investors who want to be “woke” are demanding products that make them feel good to purchase. However…while you may “feel good” about owning “disruptive” companies, that changes quickly when those companies are no longer performing…
Such is inherently the issue facing ESG funds. Investors might be willing to pay higher expense ratios as long as they earn higher returns. However, ultimately they will focus on ESG underperformance, which will likely become more prevalent as funds that previously underperformed and lost assets simply rebranded themselves.
“Epic greenwashing is everywhere: Out of 253 funds that switched to an ESG focus in 2020 in the US, 87 per cent of them rebranded by adding words such as ‘sustainable’ or “ESG” or ‘green’ or ‘climate’ to their names.
None changed their stock or bond holdings at that point.” – Eco-Business
…Not surprisingly, outflows are rising as ESG underperformance continues…
RBC Wealth Management surveyed over 900 US-based clients recently. 49% said that performance and returns were a higher priority than ESG impact, up from 42% last year.
“The story told is you don’t have to give up returns in order to do ESG. But everyone assumed that you would get the same exact return profile as a traditional benchmark. Which is absolutely not true because traditional benchmarks are not looking at ESG factors.” – Kent McClanahan, VP Responsible Investing at RBC.
RBC clients also expressed skepticism about the ESG label. 74% of those surveyed said many companies provide misleading information about their ESG initiatives. As noted, the SEC’s proposal for new restrictions to ensure ESG funds accurately describe their investments could address that problem.
This is something that was learned long ago in agriculture; only a select few are will to pay more for environmentally trendy branded products; not enough to support most farms. Yes, there are niche success stories, but they are few in number, small in size and often of a flash-in-the-pan variety. But, the majority of consumers don’t want them and when government tries to force-feed them only disaster awaits (see our story on the Sri Lanka organic debacle). ESG will fall of its own weight along with governments who try to impose it by edict. Then, there is this, of course.
Biden’s policies are a disaster for Lebanon, which is facing still further ruin as he negotiates with evil Iran, the sponsor of Hezbollah, and tries to frustrate natural gas development by Israel that would, indirectly, help Lebanon by creating markets and outlets for the natural gas:
Less than two years after a catastrophic explosion nearly leveled whole parts of Lebanon’s capital, Beirut, plunging the country into economic disrepair and social despair, the Ukraine war and natural gas gave Lebanon a chance to rebuild. However, as has happened almost continuously for nearly two decades, the Shiite group Hezbollah, closely allied with Iran and considered by many to be a terrorist organization, is threatening Lebanon to lose that opportunity.
In an extraordinary speech to the nation on July 12, Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah admitted that his organization had sent three reconnaissance drones into the Mediterranean Sea to harass and hinder Israeli efforts to develop natural gas finds in the area near the Israeli-Lebanese maritime border. Although the drones were apparently unarmed and were shot down easily by Israeli forces, Nasrallah used this incident to demand that Lebanese negotiators trying to demarcate that border must take an aggressive stand, threatening outright war with Israel if his demands are not met…
Lebanon is now so weak that electricity is on for only a few hours each day.
Indeed, many believe that the lights which economic recovery might ultimately turn back on permanently are entirely dependent on Israeli itself supplying gas to Lebanon through intermediaries – in effect, forcing the two countries to reach a level of cooperation that is contrary to Hezbollah’s longstanding threats and demands…
Such is the warped logic of the Middle East. A resource that portends so much potential promise may, instead, wind up causing so much death and despair. Yet again, the progress and economic security that so rightfully belong to a long-suffering country in the Arab world may not occur – due to jealousy, hatred, revenge, and the sheer desire for power that, ironically, the majority of Lebanon almost certainly do not support. Unfortunately, it is a sad story that has been repeated over and over again for decades, if not centuries. And so it continues with no end in sight.
This reminds me of an article I read several years ago about some amazingly productive greenhouses Israel had built in territory it later gave back to Palestinians, who promptly destroyed the structures and the opportunity that went with them. There will be no peace in the Mid-East while Biden attempts to pacify Iran, the force behind Hezbollah. The incredibly successful Abraham accords created under Trump’s leadership promised to bring together Israel and its neighbors and force the Palestinians into dropping their impossible quest to force Israelis into the sea, but Biden is squandering that progress and has, meanwhile, tried to obstruct Israeli natural gas development.
Tom Shepstone