@nebulousmenace Money cost is a very poor approximation of the material / energy cost, as it doesn't take into account environmental damage or the time it takes for nature to replenish used resources.

Our industrial civilization depends on continuous destruction of nature and exploitation of limited resources.

That's why it's very hard to come up with the real cost of renewables. Their production depends on a global industrial machinery that for the most part still runs on fossil fuels.

@jackofalltrades Most of the financial cost [in 2011] was paying for energy, and there are clear physical improvements in solar panels since then. [I went WAY over 1000 chars. Details available on request.] And the 2011 energy payback time was less than a year; you could double solar every year based on energy cost THEN.

Most of the raw material is still sand.

There are a lot of things that could be problems for our society- phosphorus for fertilizer, cropland salination, microplastics, whatever- but I'm not expert on those. In 2011 solar, specifically, was at 70 GW worldwide (per wikipedia), and in 2022 we broke the 1000-GW mark. The world looks different when solar is 4% of electricity, today [3], than it did when solar was 0.3% of electricity, 2011.I'm going to check what Prof. Murphy's beliefs look like today.

@nebulousmenace @jackofalltrades

>Most of the raw material is still sand.<

"Manufacturing solar panels’ silicon requires a handful of energy-intensive, toxic waste-emitting processes.2 First, pure quartz gravel, pure carbon (i.e., Tar Sands’ petroleum coke) and wood are transported to a smelter kept at 3000° Fahrenheit (1649° Celsius) for years at a time. Since smelters can explode if delivery of electricity to them is interrupted, neither solar nor wind (which provide only intermittent power) can fuel a smelter.3 Typically, smelters and refineries are powered by natural gas, coal and/or nuclear power. To produce 20,000 tons of polysilicon, one smelter (of several refineries) consumes enough power as 300,000 homes.4"

https://katiesinger.substack.com/p/do-i-report-what-ive-learned-about

references:

2. Troszak, Thomas, "Why Do We Burn Coal and Trees for Solar Panels?" (2019) https://www.researchgate.net/publication/335083312_Why_do_we_burn_coal_and_trees_to_make_solar_panels

3. Troszak, Thomas, “The hidden costs of solar photovoltaic power,” NATO Energy Security Centre of Excellence, No. 16., Nov. 2021. https://www.enseccoe.org/data/public/uploads/2021/11/d1_energy-highlights-no.16.pdf

4. Bruns, Adam, “Wacker Completes Dynamic Trio of Billion-Dollar Projects in Tennessee: ‘Project Bond’ cements the state’s clean energy leadership,” 2009

@RD4Anarchy @jackofalltrades

"... to produce 20,000 tons of silicon." Gee, that sounds like a lot. Is it? Check my math- I often lose three zeros. Roughly 2 grams of silicon per watt [1], 1 ton is roughly 1000 kg or 1 million grams, so 20 billion grams in 20,000 tons of silicon. So, within 50%, 10 GW of solar per year from one smelter. Seven times more solar-per-gram than 2004, which was part of my point.

If we say that 10 GW of solar equals 2 GW of coal[3], and solar lasts 25 years before recycling, how much coal is that solar replacing? Apparently 18000 tons a day [2], 6.5 million tons a year, 164 million tons over 25 years.

Per your source 3: those 20,000 tons of solar require about 30,000 tons of coal and 50,000 tons of wood chips. Putting everything in "kilotons" we're replacing 164,000 kilotons of coal with 30 kilotons of coal and 50 kilotons of wood chips.

I'm comfortable with a bit over 99.9% reduction; are you?

1. https://www.pv-magazine.com/2023/01/11/polysilicon-costs-have-slid-by-96-per-watt-over-past-two-decades/
2.https://energyeducation.ca/encyclopedia/Coal_fired_power_plant
3. V. approximate

@nebulousmenace @jackofalltrades

"If we say that 10 GW of solar equals 2 GW of coal"

You lost me here, can you explain?

@nebulousmenace @jackofalltrades

I see, thanks.

I couldn't quite verify all your calculations, close though, but regardless I don't think the simple comparison you made adequately captures everything involved. To quote from the Troszak sources:

"When estimating the CO2 emissions from the silicon smelting process, several previous authors “by joint agreement”[22] excluded the CO2 emissions from all non-fossil carbon sources (charcoal, wood chips), from power generation, and the transportation of raw material. [22] This illustrates an important issue. The validity of any estimate depends on where the study boundaries are drawn. If the range of inputs is too narrow, the overall environmental impact of a real-world industry may not be adequately documented."

Your numbers as they are (material needed just for smelting of the silicon) don't include fossil fuel use for the many other processes that together make solar tech possible and that is no insignificant factor.

I'm skeptical of a 25 year lifespan. If nothing else, if efficiency continues to improve people will be replacing their panels sooner to take advantage. Anyway, it could take what, 25 years maybe? to swap out most of our infrastructure to solar and then the cycle of extraction starts over.

But I think more to the point that some of us are trying to make here: your example disregards a complex web of irreversible material transformations we continue to impose on the world in order to implement solar and other technologies. Especially if we're talking about replacing major percentages of our energy use with solar, there is just so much more to it than calculating how much coal it replaces.

It will never replace the rainforests consumed to fuel its construction (and replanting with monocrops doesn't replace the lost biodiversity); the lands pillaged and corrupted by extraction (it takes a lot more than silicon to make solar systems, grids, storage); indigenous cultures uprooted and destroyed.

It perpetuates colonialist-based inequalities and exploitation.

If we're talking replacing coal with solar panels and wind but continuing on with business as usual otherwise, what good will it be? Business as usual is converting the world into a plastic wasteland. It is consuming more and more minerals that are rarer and rarer in a growing cycle of extraction and pollution.

I'm not saying we shouldn't do solar. Yes, we could benefit from replacing some coal use with solar. But that is not sufficient in itself, our current business as usual is not sustainable and leaning on "renewable" technologies to prop it up only perpetuates its injustices and the destruction it inflicts.

@RD4Anarchy @jackofalltrades
1) The solar industry standard warranty is 80% performance after 25 years, and it looks like actual performance is going to be closer to 90%.
2) I solved the problem I was given. "This is a problem, because look at how much coal and wood is being used!" *looks at how much coal and wood is being used* "Not like that."
3) "To make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe." You're replacing one well defined problem with at least five badly defined problems.

I'm one guy, working on one corner of one problem: Decarbonizing the electricity grid. Seemed like a place I could make things better [I'm personally like zero for three, but other people seem to be picking up the slack.]

What is the problem you're working on, and what's your corner?

@nebulousmenace

I do realize that it was a little unfair of me to run with your example of "sand" (which btw isn't actually valid, as I understand it simple sand cannot be used but instead high purity quartz is needed, deposits of which are "somewhat scarce") and then extend it to other aspects of the technology. Nevertheless, that is the reality: there is much more to PV infrastructure than "sand" and I started with the point that even the simple sand carried a burden of fossil fuel use.

Anyway, I applaud you for trying to improve things.

As for the problem I'm working on, if you read my pinned introduction toot it will explain a lot about me. The problem I'm most interested in is that of human liberation (which necessarily includes protecting the biosphere and our resources). Working on this problem has helped me understand some essential things about how we got to the predicament we're in and why we persist in our destructive activities.

So we're coming at the issue from different directions. I'm not saying your angle is wrong, but it is limited and detached from broader context. You may think I'm guilty of being tainted with ideology, but I see it more as observation of trends and tendencies, and through this perspective I see that technology under #capitalism is always problematic. I do not see the problem as "how do we meet our energy needs?", I see the problem as "why are we using such insane amounts of energy to do so many insane and self-destructive things?"

In other words, my position is this: if we discovered a miraculous new source of *free*, clean and safe energy today and implemented it immediately but nothing else changed, we would still be on a course of self-destruction and destruction of the biosphere due to all those other problems like the ones you mentioned you are not an expert in. Extraction would still be a problem ecologically, politically and socially, and with unlimited energy to use it would be accelerated along with the process of converting everything in our world to shit.

Conversion to solar power clearly has benefits, but only in the way that treating symptoms can be beneficial. It doesn't address the disease that is the root cause.

I invite you to explore this thread I compiled with high quality academic sources from anthropology, archeology, economics, history, sociology and political philosophy for that broader context on how we got where we are, if you're curious:

https://kolektiva.social/@RD4Anarchy/110357255122736031

@jackofalltrades

@RD4Anarchy @jackofalltrades Sand IS quartz. SiO2 . There are certain places that have better sand than others (less impurities) but it's a few tons per megawatt. Last year we [humanity] installed 200 GW, so if my math was correct upthread, that's around 400,000 tons of Si or around 1,000,000 tons (1 megaton) of quartz. Sounds like a lot, but last year we mined 8,000 megatons of coal and 2,500 megatons of iron ore. And the sand is sitting on the surface in drifts; you don't have to flatten mountains or dig mines to harvest it.

I agree that we're coming from different directions and tending to answer different questions; I think we mostly agree on the excesses of capitalism; I suspect we'd have a lot to disagree about when it comes to the desired final state.

@nebulousmenace @RD4Anarchy @jackofalltrades https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirvana_fallacy seems relevant to this thread.

"By creating a false dichotomy that presents one option which is obviously advantageous—while at the same time being completely implausible—a person using the nirvana fallacy can attack any opposing idea because it is imperfect. Under this fallacy, the choice is not between real world solutions; it is, rather, a choice between one realistic achievable possibility and another unrealistic solution that could in some way be 'better'."

I'm no fan of the excesses of capitalism, either. But one side of this thread has a plausible (but still difficult!) path to become a reality. While on the other side ... let's just say that details are lacking.