Shocker: Solar panel manufacturing creates potent GHG's

Sorry, it should say “It should be on this list I think”.

The power utilities are trying to keep a low profile on SF6. This wondrous gas is a fantastic dielectric insulating material, as well as an excellent arc quencher in high voltage circuit breakers. It is found in tens of thousands of HV circuit breakers all over the world, as well as HV potential transformers and gas-insulated buswork. Some of the smallest HV substations in the world are completely insulated with SF6. When people started to realize SF6 was a greenhouse gas extraordinaire around 1995, some producers backed out of the business of selling SF6, resulting in a run-up in price by a factor of ten in a few years.

The processes that use these chemicals produce more than just solar cells. I would guess that LCD displays and HDTVs far exceeds the production of solar cells.
Assuming we can double the solar cell capacity in less than 7 years (which would see a doubling of the gases at 11% growth), there will be a net savings in the warming potential. Assuming that solar cells account for no more than half of the total emissions, this could be a significant savings.
Solar cells offer the potential of reduced greenhouse emissions, but the issue of storing the energy produced for use when the sun is not out and the pollution involved in manufacturing that storage capacity is really the bigger issue.

I still have the same T.V. I bought 20 year ago, does that make me NF3 neutral?
I guess we are going to have to set-up an NF3 offset trading scheme.
So we will “feel better”

Yeah, and if this stuff keeps growing at the Present Rate it’ll be up to One Part per TRILLION in 50 Years.

OK… That does it then, we must return to the stone age. Except no fires.

Looks like if we get rid of Finland we can keep using this stuff.

Solar cells are also left off of this July 2008 article from the Guardian. Oh, answered my own question there didn’t I.

The green movement desire us all to sit around candles, but candles are composed of either palm oil, paraffin, or petroleum wax. Can one not see some objections by the greens to using these materials? So when we return to the natural state, what can we use for light and heat that does not use these products. It is no use gathering up brushwood , or cutting peat for a fire, as Nature has a use for this that does not include warming us!

Why the GWP is so high:
Neither water molecules nor CO2 absorb near the maximum of the infrared radiation emitted from ground or from water at ambient temperatures. They leave open the so-called atmospheric window. Methane and other molecules absorb in the ‘atmospheric window’ thus reducing strongly the radiative heat transport into space, at clear skies. (Water droplets do absorb strongly at all relevant infrared wavelengths).
If such molecules have a long life in the atmosphere, they accumulate very much. CO2 has a lifespan of 50 years, methane of 10 years, N2O probably much shorter, some weeks, I guess, but all fluorines are very stable molecules and stay in the atmosphere for a very long time.

This is great news! CO2 is off the hook then. All it needs now is for some “scientists” to find that windpower develops some other kind of CHG that’s x 100 more powerful than CO2 & the circle is complete.
Twice a very small number is a very small number! Perhaps the penny is dropping, everything pollutes, whatever we do, so let’s chose & use the lesser of evils & use fossil fuels while they are still here instead of pursuing silly political ideals that seem to ignore the poor & starving, for some peculiar reason!
I’ll be looking for the share price to plummet on photovoltaic cell manufacture.

Anthony,
I think, the NF3 emissions are much worse.
As NF3 remains in the atmosphere for approx. 700 years, while a solar cell produces electricity for only approx. 30 years, the net greenhouse emission of solar cells in the long run should be approx. 20 times higher than those of replaced fossil fuel.

Rick Sharp (21:15:39) :
“Looks like if we get rid of Finland we can keep using this stuff.”
Two words: Screen Spray
Jim

Probably would have been better to put in some ceiling windows and let those poor students get some natural light.

Why am I thinking of that illustration of animals caught in a tar pit?

I don’t know why you guys are worried about costs all the time. Surely the bailouts have shown that governments have oodles of money under their mattresses ready to fund absolutely anything – even bad debts. Or are they just lying to us again and the money isn’t really there? At any rate though 10 billion for a nuclear fusion project looks like mere small change now. Imagine that 700 billion (seemingly conjured up in the blink of an eye) directed towards energy and infrastructure projects instead of bailing out and rewarding greedy, stupid bankers. Even better, imagine that those middle east wars were really about protecting the oil supply rather than fighting terrorism and then add that total cost to the pile of money that has been flushed down the toilet when it could have been used for something useful.

The concentration of NF3 in the atmosphere was artificially increased by a factor of 20 during the last two decades.
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There’s a natural source of NF3?

Is the weighted average of the atmoshperic concentration relavent to GWP? CO2 at 385 PPM and a factor of 1 compared to H20 at a 4 GWP and one percent concentration makes H2O over 100 times more potent on a weighted average basis than CO2.
Weighted average
CO2 1 * .000385 = .000385
H20 4 * .01 = .04
.000385 / .04 = 103.9

D. Quist (19:10:40) :
“I have a question, that I have yet to find an answer for. What is the GWP for water vapor? Every time I see a list, it is omitted. I should be on this list I think.”
Does this help? http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/greenhouse_data.html

Someone please tell the UK:
Your shivering in the dark this winter is POINTLESS.
You are not “saving the planet,” preventing sea-level rise, stabilizing the climate or helping polar bears.
You are just shivering in the dark.

D. Quist (@19:10:40): The reason that water vapor is not on a “GWP” list is that an emission of a kg of H2O would mostly condense out in a fairly short time, and that time would be very dependent on conditions (relative humidity, for example). So if you take the integral of radiative forcing over 100 years, the GWP of H2O would be very small, and also poorly defined.
This is different question than what the contribution of water vapor is to total radiative forcing in the atmosphere: there, H2O (including clouds) is about 70% of all radiative forcing, compared to CO2 which is about 20% (plus or minus a bunch depending on how you do the calculations).
Which is a different question still from what the human contribution is: CO2 we can measure fairly easily. Despite massive water budget changes through things like creation of giant lakes (Lake Powell) and huge irrigation programs, we probably don’t have much direct impact on atmospheric water vapor (again, because it condenses out). The indirect impact on water vapor (and clouds) through the change in atmospheric temperature due to increased GHGs is the elephant in the room on this question, and probably where more than half of the legitimate uncertainties in climate change predictions come from.

On the NF3 from solar panel questions: Lubos makes at least two significant errors in trying to say that NF3 from solar cells is the same magnitude greenhouse effect as CO2 reductions from solar cells.
1) As mentioned in an above comment, solar cell manufacture is far from being the only source of NF3.
2) He is equating the total atmospheric stock of NF3 (eg, 20 years worth of emissions) with the solar cell energy production in one year.
Now, it would be useful to do a proper lifecycle analysis: how much CO2 is emitted in solar cell production, maintenance, and disposal, what kind of energy are solar cells displacing and what was the CO2 emissions from that, and what are the NF3 emissions. My gut instinct is that solar cells are still a net-plus for the climate. Obviously the NF3 reduces the size of that net plus compared to the counterfactual with no NF3 emissions, but I’m guessing it will be on the order of a few percent reduction, not 100% reduction.

Mike Monce- I also have worked with SF6 in the lab, and I agree that you can see the refraction of the gas as it vents out of an open port. I have not seen any reports on SF6 concentrations versus altitude in the troposphere or stratosphere, and I would bet that it is inconsequential. My point was that very useful chemicals are being banned or penalized for no good reason.
Werner Weber- CO2 has an atmospheric half-life of 3 to 7 years, demonstrated by ten’s of peer-reviewed studies dating back to the early 1960’s. Any numbers higher than this range (your 50 year number or the IPCC’s 100+ year number, for example) make assumptions about carbon cycles and carbon sequestration, which is nonsensical.
Anthony- Do you have the costs and performance data for that beautiful solar PV installation? It would be interesting to see how the payback is working out, including any maintenance costs associated with the operating system.
Has anyone seen a study on increased UHI effect (and subsequent impacts on NASA GISS ‘data’) due to the reduced albedo caused by a solar panel being installed over a higher-albedo surface such as gravel, crushed shell or a rooftop? This would probably dwarf the effects of 0.16 ppt of NF3.

“My gut instinct is that solar cells are still a net-plus for the climate.”
Odd, my gut instinct is that they make no difference whatsoever.

All molecules are not created equal. But for the Global WarmAl Worshipers, they are all greenhouse gases regardless of their origin and concentration.
The Sun of Man doesn’t care which molecule is what and where, it will keep going through its natural cycles of solar activity as it always did.
The NF3 is easy to deal with. Filters could capture it in the process or it could be rapidly replaced with an alternative. Have they ever tried soap and water?

You see, if people would only honour the Precautionary Principle, nasty surprises like this would never, ever, ever occur.

Probably would have been better to put in some ceiling windows and let those poor students get some natural light.

Lol. The High School I went to looked like a fortress, literally. No large windows, only narrow, arrow-slit type windows, and then in only some of the classrooms. Three stories, large and imposing facade.
Here’s the only picture I could find in a quick search:
http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/faculty_archives/principalship/w/images/218wildman-school2.jpg
The interior was large and open, except for science classrooms. I guess in case some chemistry experiment went wrong.

Even green fool-aide drinkers should understand that it is more GHG friendly for me to utilize the power company generated heat from my lightbulbs than for me to use my home furnace which is less thermally efficient and therefore generates more GHGs per thermal unit.
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You are neglecting the losses in electrical conversion and transportation.

“My gut instinct is that solar cells are still a net-plus for the climate.”
Odd, my gut instinct is that they make no difference whatsoever.
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My gut says that they are a net minus.
And since my gut is bigger than either of yours, mine wins.

Fun with SF6:

This non-scientist doubts that NF3 will persist in the atmosphere for 700 years. Is there any experimental research that supports this contention. It seems counter-intuitive. What is the proof?
As I recall experimental research indicates that CO2 lasts in the atmosphere for 5-12 years. Modelers assume that it lasts 100 years. Which is correct? What is the proof?

Regarding the short flying time of water…
It might be true that water has a short life-fly time in the atmosphere but when it “drops” down it is still water, so technically the lifetime of water is very very long!!! Moreover, when liquid water absorbs the heat in the atmosphere it will bring down that heat to the ground & ocean, so in fact, removing that heat from the atmosphere only to be radiated slowly back to the atmosphere. Condensation is another business where the heat is actually returned, in part, to the atmosphere.
The case of CO2 is way different. For CO2 to be removed from the atmosphere, it has to react. There are lots of different paths that CO2 can take to be removed. But contrairely to water condensing, the CO2 will transfer the extra little thermal energy to the reaction, most likely on the ground, vegetation or ocean.

According to the all knowing Wiki, Finland is ranked 48th in CO2 emissions producing 0.2% of the worlds CO2 “pollution”. Rhode Island is the smallest of 50 states with only 0.04% of the the land. I guess it would actually be closer to Connecticut or New Jersey.
Didn’t mean to offend the Fins.
I’m not sure how they affect the UHI, but PV panels typically operate at 30-40 deg C above ambient at full sun. They will keep a dark roof cool, but a white roof will do more for keeping your house (and probably the planet) cool.

Ray
Every raindrop contains CO2. When the water vapor in the atmosphere condenses into water droplets they also dissolve molecules of CO2, (and O2). This is why ice cores can be used as proxies for both CO2 levels and temperatures. (Although there is some controversy as to how accurate they are,)
As the old song has it:
“Every time it rains it rains – carbon sequestration.
“Don’t you know each cloud contains – carbon sequestration.”
My attempt to turn this into pennies from heaven by pointing out that I live in damp, soggy, Southern England, (where as I look out of my window it’s currently falling as sleet), and the rain that falls on my land should be saleable as carbon credits have not so far met with success.

RE Paminator up there a ways: on CO2 half life.
I’m with you Paminator on the absurdity of the claimed 200 year “residence time” for man made CO2.
The Mauna Loa CO2 data shows a 6ppm p-p annual cycle, and if you look at that “triangular” waveform, you sill see that it goes down in five months, and up in seven months; and if you look at the raw data closely, you will see that it is not quite triangular, but is a single time constant integrated square wave with a 7:5 duty cycle. Of course the first chap at ML who saw that data, did an immediate reduction to compute the integration time constant of that effect; yeah fat chance trying to find that time constant anywhere on NOAA.
The other thing you can’t find on NOAA any more is that 10 or so year global pole to pole three dimensional plot of the CO2 data.
When you could find it, it shows that at the north pole, that 6 ppm amplitude has grown to 18 ppm (confirmed to me, by Dr Steve Piper at Scripps (CO2 guru)).
So the growth cycle can remove 18 ppm of CO2 from the polar atmosphere (north) in just five months. My eye guesses that the time constant can’t be any more than 3-4 years tops.
A couple of rednecks ata bar were goofing around, and they spied the young black laborer quietly downing his beer at the other end of the bar, and decided to hassle him.
“Hey young fella; what do you think is man’s greatest invention?” The young laborer thinks for a few seconds, and then responds. “Ah reckon it’s the thermos flask in mah lunchbox.”
“What’s so special about a thermos flask?”
“Wahl just think; it keeps the hot coffeee hot, and it keeps the iced tea cold; ain’t that amazing?”
“It keeps the hot hot, and it keeps the cold cold; what’s the big deal?”
“Yeah; But how do it know !?”
So how do the atmosphere know to only hang on to man made CO2 for 200 years ? There’s a bright young black laborer still wondering on that .

Where is that school? I really like the architecture (even “evil” solar cells)!

By definition, an electrical heater is 100% efficient. It is a resistance that transforms all the electricity into heat. The electricity transport and the rest of the house’s thermal insulation is never used in the calculation of the efficiency of the heating device.
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Therein lies the flaw in your thinking.
You made the claim that total CO2 production was less because your lights are 100% efficient at producing heat. (Assuming that all of the photons are eventually absorbed and turned into heat.)
You have to examine to total energy production path if you want to know the over all efficiency of your system. By ignoring much of this path, you may get the answer you want, but you will never get the right answer.

We should not be to worried about the “power” of greenhouse gases.
Most of them are relative heavy and they will not reach the upper levels of our atmosphere.
There will be sufficient measures taken to contain gases released during manufacturing and recycling.
Other manufacturing technologies of solar panels (or units) do not have or will not have these problems.
Have a little trust in the future.
I am convinced that technology and common sense will overcome all the problems.
I am also convinced that solar will have a very big future.
Eventually it will make us completely independent from oil and nuclear.
It will also make us independant from the centrelised energy producers which I ragard as a kind of freedom.
It takes about 16 square meters of solar panels to produce the energy to make a car run 20.000 km/year.
Current panel technology already produces 50 times more energy per square meter compared to bio crops (except for oil produced by algae which we can use for aircraft)
Batteries and ultra capacitors are to become more powerful and light weight every day and prices will become compatible as soon as mass manufacturing takes off.
For heavy transport, trains and ships we can use hydrogen electric.
I am absolutely not a green loony but I am convinced that we eventual need an alternative for oil.
Oil is to precious to burn as a fuel.
Solar will do the job perfectly and as cheap as coal.
I also believe carbon dioxide emissions is a non existing problem and therefore I reject any sales argument of products limiting greenhouse gases.
It’s the biggest scam on earth and we should fight it. We should especially reject the government regulations and the caps & trade schemes that will only harm our economies and our personal liberties.
http://www.coolearthsolar.com/news

How on Earth are they measuring parts per trillion of ANYTHING in air? The testing labs I use as an environmental engineer are hesitant to report and result less than the ppm range. They can go to about 50 ppb for a yes/no answer, but that isn’t even accepted by the EPA because the test method isn’t approved yet. I call their procedure into question.

So does anyone out there understand what this means:- “The concept of the global warming potential (GWP) was developed to compare the ability of each greenhouse gas to trap heat in the atmosphere relative to another gas. In this case, CO2 is the reference gas. Methane, for example, has a GWP of 23 over a 100-year period. This means that on a kilogram for kilogram basis, methane is 23 times more potent than CO2 over a 100-year period. ”
For a start, there’s that 100 year period; what on earth does that have to do with anything. Does a CO2 molecule gradually lose its “potency”? Man, there’s an image for you ! One poor little old CO2 molecule just sitting there waiting for photons in the 40 to 240 millielectron Volt energy range to come along; well CO2 really only cares about the 75-90 meV range (no not MeV). Why would the molecule care about having to wait 100 years? Just what does time have to do with GHG molecular spectroscopy ?
Then there’s that Kilogram thing; that old slab of platinum.
Everybody quickly; what are the molecular weights of H2O, CO2, NF3, and SF6; and how many of each do you get for your kilogram; don’t GHG modellers understand about the periodic table and the concept of molecules.
So who out there has a preferred value for the NF3 capture crossection for 40-240 meV photons.
We moved all of our silicon fab foundry stuff out of the building, so I am still trying to find a fab engineer to find out what they used to use NF3 for; my guess is it is used in plasma etching processes. Certainly if it is so stable, it wouldn’t seem to me to be a good wet chemical reagent for anything.
But back to the atmosphere where the July 1 2008 abundance of NF3 was reliably put at 0.454ppt That’s a dry-air mole fraction for those interested. See they have to ignore the water vapor, even though it is typically one percent of the atmosphere. Well I’ll stick with the dry air, but not forget the water.
Now I’ve been involved in some high purity chemicals (by the multikilograms) I used to work in a building containing enough Arsenic to poison every living thing (that doesn’t love the stuff) in the known universe; and that stuff was good stuff; seven nines purity; that’s 99.99999 % pure Arsenic, and we had around the same amount of seven nines pure Gallium; the French quicksilver. It had to be that clean to let us grow good infra red Gallium Arsenide single crystals to make IR photodiodes, or use as substrates to make red GaAsP LED epitaxial material (ancient technology now).
So if NF3 were the ONLY atmospheric GHG, the air would be 99.9999999999546 pure. That air is 200,000 times more pure, than the very best semiconductor raw materials we were ever able to get out hands on. Well maybe you can get eight nines pure stuff these days.
I’m still inshock wondering why the GWPs are not based on per molecule comparisons; so it will take me some time to recover my senses, and figure out what that really is.
So just what does this potency mean; and does anybody know what modes of resonance oscillations are active in the 40-240 meV range in Nitrogen Trifluoride. The molecule looks supsiciously like ammonia which is tetrahedral, and it is well known that ammonia has a resonance where the nitrogen atom, pops up and down through the middle of the plane of hydrogen atoms, to invert the tetrahedron; and it does that at a microwave frequency that was used as the basis of the first practical Atomic clock.
Given that NF3 is 17.000 times more potent per century per kilogram at levels 200,000 times more pure than the best semiconductor high purity chemicals; you would think that the President of The United States would have decreed a National emergency, and instructed every Government or Government funded R&D agency or lab to divert their entire budgets to determining that molecular absorption spectrum of NF3, and determining the capture crossections over the infrared range from 40-240 meV; maybe over the solar spectrum as well.
Sounds like panic time to me.
I have the paper from the chap at Scripps, mentioned in the article, but drew a blank form the chief hoincho there on the spectrum; ho hum, maybe someone will get around to looking at this new devil gas.

Anne (15:22:26),
Care to tell us what materials are used to make Nanosolar’s panels?

John M (16:59:59) :
Care to tell us what materials are used to make Nanosolar’s panels?
I’ll trade that information for the recipe of Coca Cola.

Anne (16:24:47)
What a cute way of saying:
“I have no clue, I just wanna believe…”

John M (05:27:09) :
A stupid question deserves a stupid answer, sorry. Nanosolar is understandably very protective of their intellectual property. So nobody on earth apart from a small group of researchers could answer your question.
Of course have no clue, why should I? I can predict that the next generation of Intel CPU’s will be at least twice as fast as the current one, without having a clue how they pull it off. Does that make me a believer too?
If investors are prepared to put $ 500 million in this company, then as a believer, I am in good company.

solar cells will probably never be cheap enough for the small amout of power they sometimes produce. The real potential is in mass solar-thermal plants which combine higher efficiency energy conversion with energy storage. Still shouldn’t be employed until it’s economically viable…