There are concerns about solar energy:

The highlights:

1. Solar panels are very hard to recycle and currently most of them go to land fill.

2. Solar panels contain a large range of toxic substances that make them dangerous in land fill as toxins such as cadmium and lead can leak into the water table.

3. Some experts believe that solar panels will last half as long as previously thought making the toxic land fill problem even worse.

4. It is likely that a number of current solar panel manufacturers will go out of business soon and so they will not be held accountable for the panels’ disposal.

5. Key raw materials and panels are being made by slave labour in China.

The need to move away from fossil fuels to protect the environment is generally accepted and we support it completely.  We are concerned that building a solar power plant in the Newbiggin Valley is the wrong way to achieve this.

Recycling

Kronos are claiming that the panels will be in place for 35 years but they have not mentioned what happens after that.  According to the Harvard Business Review (Reference 1) it’s not worth the expense of recycling. “While panels contain small amounts of valuable materials such as silver, they are mostly made of glass, an extremely low-value material,” they note. As a result, it costs 10 to 30 times more to recycle than to send panels to the landfill.  Or to third world countries.

The direct cost of recycling is only part of the cost. Decommissioning of panels requires specialised labour lest the delicate panels smash and release the heavy metals such as cadmium, lead etc that they contain into the environment.

Landfill

According to the Harvard Business Review (HBR) “Summary – Solar Energy is a rapidly growing market, which should be good news, for the environment.  Unfortunately, there's a catch.  The replacement rate of solar is faster than expected and given the current very high recycling costs, there’s a danger that all used panels will go straight to landfill.”   “the volume of discarded panels will soon pose a risk of existentially damaging proportions”.

“The totality of the unforeseen costs could crush industry … volume of waste surpassing that of new installations by 2031 ….this could catapult the LCOE (levelised cost of energy, a measure of the overall cost of an energy producing asset over its lifetime) to 4 times the current projection.  The economics of solar – so bright seeming from the vantage point of 2021 – would darken quickly as the industry sinks under the weight of its own trash.”

Lifetime of Panels

Kronos talked about 35 year life span for the solar plant.  According to Forbes “But new research finds that solar panels in use degrade twice as fast as the industry claimed. And 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. “One in three manufacturers experienced safety failures relating to junction box defects, an increase from one in five last year,” noted an industry reporter. The “majority of failures were prior to testing, straight from the box.”  So all the recycling and landfill issues could be even worse than we thought.

 The volume of solar panel waste will destroy the economics of solar, they say. "By 2035,” write the three economists, “discarded panels would outweigh new units sold by 2.56 times.

Ethical Concerns

According to the Harvard Business Review (HBR) 89% of solar panels are imported from China and Kronos stated their panels are made in China. 

Key raw materials and panels are thought to be being made by forced slave labour in the Xinjiang province of China.  But that’s not the end of the misery solar panels create.   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 where rich countries dump the panels when they are no longer needed.

The alternative

58 acres of solar plant will produce 20MW according to Kronos – this can be equalled by less than 3 coastal wind turbines.