Important Data from an article written By Michael Shellenberger
We pay one-quarter of solar’s costs through taxes and often much more in subsidies at the state and local level.
A major new study, 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 will darken quickly as the industry sinks under the weight of its own trash.
By 2035 discarded panels would outweigh new units sold by 2.56 times. This would catapult the cost of an energy-producing asset to four times the current projection.”
Panels are mostly made of glass, an extremely low-value material. As a result, it costs 10 to 30 times more to recycle than to send panels to the landfill.
Experts expect that more than 720,000 tons worth of wind turbine blades will end up in U.S. landfills over the next 20 years.
According to prevailing estimates, only five percent of electric-vehicle batteries are currently recycled.
Solar panels are delicate and break easily. When they do, they instantly become hazardous, and are classified as such, due to their heavy metal contents.
This classification carries with it a string of expensive restrictions — hazardous waste can only be transported at designated times and via select routes, etc.
For decades, consumers in Germany, California, Japan and other major nations, have been replacing solar panels just 10 or 15 years old.
One in three manufacturers experienced safety failures relating to junction box defects.
Research finds that solar panels in use degrade twice as fast as the industry claimed. That report came on the heels of a separate report which found that solar panels have been suffering a rising failure rate even before entering service.
To read the entire report, please go to: Why everything they said about solar being clean and cheap - was wrong
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