• 3 minutes e-car sales collapse
  • 6 minutes America Is Exceptional in Its Political Divide
  • 11 minutes Perovskites, a ‘dirt cheap’ alternative to silicon, just got a lot more efficient
  • 1 hour GREEN NEW DEAL = BLIZZARD OF LIES
  • 4 hours How Far Have We Really Gotten With Alternative Energy
  • 6 hours If hydrogen is the answer, you're asking the wrong question
  • 4 days Oil Stocks, Market Direction, Bitcoin, Minerals, Gold, Silver - Technical Trading <--- Chris Vermeulen & Gareth Soloway weigh in
  • 5 days The European Union is exceptional in its political divide. Examples are apparent in Hungary, Slovakia, Sweden, Netherlands, Belarus, Ireland, etc.
  • 19 hours Biden's $2 trillion Plan for Insfrastructure and Jobs
  • 4 days "What’s In Store For Europe In 2023?" By the CIA (aka RFE/RL as a ruse to deceive readers)
Chris Dalby

Chris Dalby

More Info

Premium Content

The Dirty Truth About Clean Energy

Media coverage of the energy industry often makes the players seem like the cast of a Hollywood Western.

Coal and oil companies are the bad guys, ruining the environment and abusing the villagers for a quick buck. They are winning until wind and solar developers ride into town like the cavalry, their turbines and solar panels providing cheap, clean, and renewable electricity for all. Roll credits.

Well, not quite. But in places like China, Ireland and Mexico, the villagers have become wary of the cavalry for good reason.

The high expense of installing solar technology has made cheap, mass-produced Chinese panels commonplace, with seven of the world’s top 10 panel makers hailing from the country. But new research has shown how the severely polluting processes used to manufacture PV panels in China are outweighing the environmental benefits these panels provide.

Dr. Fengqi You from the Argonne National Laboratory estimated that “the environmental cost of Chinese-made solar panels is about twice that of those made in Europe.” It has become increasingly clear that in order to maintain their competitiveness, certain Chinese suppliers are cutting corners that create risks for their employees, clients, and people who live near their plants.

In a survey of 50 Chinese factories from 2011 to 2013, SolarBuyer found defect rates for solar panels ranging from 5.5 to 22 percent. Many of these stem from the use of cheap, sub-standard coating materials that save money but have been shown to be a fire hazard. An investigation by PV Evolution Labs in California found industry leaders subcontracting production to small Chinese plants where they had no real control.

Given that the manufacturing of PV panels involves the use of the most potent greenhouse gas in existence, sulphur hexafluoride, as well as carcinogenic chemicals like cadmium, lead and cadmium VI, any lapses in standards can have costly results.

In Haining, in China’s Zhejiang Province, a solar module factory belches out pollution from a dozen smokestacks and vomits waste into the river so that Jinko Solar, the seventh biggest solar module manufacturer in the world, can supply global demand.

Starting in 2011, reports of dying fish and children with excessive levels of lead in their blood led hundreds of protesters to storm the factory, only to be violently repulsed by riot police. Protests against industrial pollution are hardly uncommon in China, but the targeting of solar panel makers was new.

Related Article: Ocean Power Rides the Green Wave

Wind energy developers in Ireland and Mexico have also taken a beating in public opinion.

In an effort to draw 40 percent of its energy from wind as well as sell power to the UK, the Irish government is planning to dot the hills of County Laois and beyond with towering turbines. More than 100 opposition groups have sprung up to protest the move. Protest leader Ray Conroy says that locals were given no warning before being told that wind farms would be put up in short order.

Despite this widespread dismay, the Irish planning authority, An Bord Pleanála, gave permission for a wind farm -- including 14 turbines of 131.5 meters high -- to go ahead in County Laois.

Unilateral planning seems to have become standard operating procedure for many wind farms. Swimming in confidence that their projects are environmentally friendly, wind developers seem to be assuming that they will face little if any public resistance.

And yet, though expert reviews have thoroughly debunked earlier notions that wind turbines cause noise pollution or can cause illness, the concerns of local communities are not so easily dismissed.

ADVERTISEMENT

In Mexico, the wind power industry is still growing, but the fate of Mareña Renovables stands as a warning.

The project was once projected to be the largest of its kind in Latin America, located in Oaxaca’s Isthmus of Tehuantepec. But the plans of a powerful consortium that has included Macquarie Bank, Mitsubishi and Dutch pension fund PGGM were derailed when the local Huave people blocked off roads, and forced officials to rip up the contract. They claimed that developers had increased the projected number of turbines from 40 to 132 without warning, similar to the County Laois case. Protests began in 2012 and continued until this January when PGGM announced the project was being written off.

The failure of protests in Ireland and China, and their success in Mexico, point to the same conclusion: If wind and solar energy producers want viable, long-term commercial success, they need to stop relying on their green cachet and begin conducting business with more integrity and transparency, both on the production line and in their dealings with the public.

By Chris Dalby


Download The Free Oilprice App Today

Back to homepage





Leave a comment
  • Robert Shizel BeezleyBub on June 30 2014 said:
    Green Energy Illusions.
    ? Solar Panels.
    Prof. Jian Shuisheng of the Jiatong-University estimates the production of just 6 solar panels requires one ton of coal. This works out to about 660 lbs of coal per square yard of solar panel. This is because the silicon has to be baked at 2,000°F. The manufacture of solar panels lets off some of the deadliest greenhouse gases known to humankind. These include hexafluoroethane (12,000 times stronger than CO2), nitrogen trifluoride (17,000 times stronger than C02), and sulfur hexafluoride (23,000 times stronger than C02). Solar manufacturing plants produce 500 tons of hazardous sludge each per year. This sludge is never included in the solar industry carbon footprint data.

    Five kilograms of hydrogen chloride per square meter of solar panel is used to liquefy the metallic silicon. Silicon carbide is used to cut the silicon into wafers. Cadmium telluride panels or emerging thin film technologies utilize untested nanomaterials that pose a threat to the environment and workers during the manufacturing and recycling stage.

    Dust, humidity, haze, and even heat dramatically affect solar panel output. If you cover just one cell of a solar panel with your hand, the output of the whole panel drops 80%. Solar panels lose up to 1% of their efficiency each year lasting some 20 - 30 years, after which they become toxic waste, containing things like cadmium and other heavy metals. The expensive inverters fail every 5-10 years and must be replaced. While the cost of the silicon wafers are dropping, they only make up 20% of the installed costs.

    ? Wind Turbines.
    The manufacture of 5, one-megawatt, wind turbines produces 1 ton of radioactive residue and 75 tons of hazardous waste water used to extract and process the needed neodymium. Neodymium is a rare earth mineral. Rare earth minerals are not rare, but they are found in very low concentrations. Neodymium is extracted from crushed rocks using sulfuric acid, hydrochloric acid and sodium hydroxide. Then it is processed using solvents, heating and vacuum techniques that require plenty of coal power. Vast unregulated tailings ponds of poisonous water have destroyed whole villages in China.

    There are 16 other rare elements. All with the same story.

    There is no known replacement for neodymium. During its mining, metals such as arsenic, barium, copper, aluminum, lead and beryllium are released into the air and water, and are toxic to human health. Neodymium is only one of many rare-earth metals that our smart phones and green energy systems need.

    Wind turbines only produce 25% of their rated power output over 90% of the time. This means that fossil fuel plants have to burn fuel on standby in case the wind suddenly drops. Since this power is intermittent, we would need at least ten times as much solar-wind power to displace one unit of fossil fuel power. This is so ridiculous as to defy belief. Figures claiming high
  • Robert Wedow on June 30 2014 said:
    There is a right way and a wrong way to manufacture and install renewable energy hardware. Some places are doing it right. In the end, there is only a wrong way to produce non-renewable energy. It always wrecks the environment.

    Also, physics and geology tell us that eventually we will be relying entirely on renewable energy. Rail against renewables all you want, but non-renewable energy is non-renewable. We will have to figure out how to do renewable energy right.
  • David Hrivnak on June 30 2014 said:
    Have you checked the environmental impact on mining the tar sands up in Canada? That is far worse.
  • todd cory on June 30 2014 said:
    once again, on a finite planet with finite resources, job one is decreasing population and consumption.

    solar/wind powering waste is not green.
  • yawn on July 01 2014 said:
    @todd: I say go for it! Sacrifice yourself - who knows, the fate of the whole mankind may just rely on your martyrdom today...

  • Greg on July 06 2014 said:
    this article is very biased. lots of factual errors not to mention omission of the other side of the argument. Harvard Med school study says the deliterious effects of burning coal in the usa is $300-500 billion per year. Have to agree on the basic conclusion though. Clean energy is not going to save this overpopulated world - we are headed for a huge train wreck.

Leave a comment




EXXON Mobil -0.35
Open57.81 Trading Vol.6.96M Previous Vol.241.7B
BUY 57.15
Sell 57.00
Oilprice - The No. 1 Source for Oil & Energy News