From the University of Tennessee at Knoxville
Solar industry responsible for lead emissions in developing countries
Solar power is not all sunshine. It has a dark side—particularly in developing countries, according to a new study by a University of Tennessee, Knoxville, engineering professor.
A study by Chris Cherry, assistant professor in civil and environmental engineering, found that solar power heavily reliant on lead batteries has the potential to release more than 2.4 million tons of lead pollution in China and India.
Lead poisoning causes numerous adverse health effects, including damage to the central nervous system, the kidneys, the cardiovascular system, and the reproductive system. In children, blood lead concentration is associated with learning impairments, as well as hyperactive and violent behavior.
His study, co-authored with Perry Gottesfeld of Occupational Knowledge International (OK International), appears in the September issue of the journal Energy Policy.
Lead pollution predicted to result from investments in solar power by 2022 is equivalent to one-third of current global lead production. The researchers, who relied on official government plans for deploying solar power to make these projections, also found that the countries have large amounts of lead leak into the environment from mining, smelting, battery manufacturing, and recycling—33 percent in China and 22 percent in India. Also, a large percentage of new solar power systems continues to be reliant on lead batteries for energy storage due to the inadequate power grid in these countries.
The study’s release comes on the heels of reports of a large number of mass lead poisoning incidents around lead battery recycling and manufacturing plants in China and the announcement that the country recently closed 583 of these facilities.
“Investments in environmental controls in the lead battery industry, along with improvements in battery take-back policies, are needed to complement deployment of solar power in these countries,” said Cherry. “Without improvements, it is increasingly clear that the use of lead batteries will contribute to environmental contamination and lead poisoning among workers and children.”
The battery industry is the largest consumer of lead, using approximately 80 percent of global lead production. Lead battery manufacturing is growing rapidly in much of the world to meet demand for batteries for solar power and other applications. With the authors’ projected emissions, they say this will impact public health and contribute to environmental contamination.
“The solar industry has to step up and take responsibility for ensuring that their lead battery suppliers are operating with adequate controls as long as they are going to be reliant on this technology,” said Gottesfeld. “Without major improvements in the manufacturing and recycling lead batteries in these countries, we expect that lead poisoning will increase as the industry grows.”
The projections outlined in the study, while based on plans articulated by these two countries, are likely to be repeated throughout much of the developing world, such as in Africa.
OK International is a nongovernmental organization dedicated to improving public health in developing countries through innovative strategies to reduce exposures to industrial pollutants. For more information, visit www.okinternational.org.
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Lead in the air or in the food chain diminishes children’s IQ, that fact is all that is needed for control. China has a long way to go, and the fools that embrace green technology have a lot of thinking to do.
My understanding (I never liked ‘history’ and didn’t study it, but) there were are two things, in combination, that brought down the Roman Empire and resulted in The Dark Ages in Europe.
These2 things were, in no particular order:
—Lead (used in their plumbing/drinking water supplies disrupted their thinking)
—Massive bureaucracy (everyone wanted to be a tax collector/spender and to tell everyone else what to do, how and when to do it and then charge or fine them for the privilege, or not as appropriate)
Does that sound familiar to anyone, especially if you change Lead = CO2…….
As usual, it would seem that the problems are arising not so much because of the toxicity of lead and its compounds (which is hardly news) but because of the short-sighted short-termism of present-day economics, which encourages companies to put financial profit above any environmental (or, indeed, any other) consideration. As a tech for many years, I have used lead on numerous occasions, and (by responsibly not dumping “inconvenient” waste materials into the environment) caused no problems with its continuing use wherever it is appropriate.
So much easier, though, for our bureaucratic overlords just to ooze forth another “thou shalt not” ukase to “solve” the problem, as with mercury, CFCs, asbestos … declare it illegal, export the problem to some suffering poor country, and forget it. The problems may be biochemical, but the cause of them, as of so many problems, is our defective world economic system.
Not the place for a debate about lead toxicity because it rapidly gets complicated, down to sampling placental blood and following the IQ of little babies to see if they were impaired. Needleman is the main Establishment name. Since ingestion by mouth was the most likely intake for children, Pam da Silva reviewed estimates of the weight of solids ingested daily by children. Average estimates varied, according to different authors, over 2 orders of magnitude. It’s from here that we learned of the confusion that can be generated through concepts like Climate Sensitivity to GHG.
BTW, re the levelled battery recycling cite, we were prepared to dedicate it for public use. Our corporate solicitor suggested a logical use – a graveyard that allowed lead-lined coffins.
Brian H says:
September 1, 2011 at 12:28 am
James S;
——————————————————-
lol, Thanks Brian……….. I’ll blame the beer.
James
I keep wondering what happened to that free lunch that I was promised. 🙁
To join a couple of posts together: instead of burning coal, and instead of vast arrays of solar panels, why not lay out vast arrays of lumps of coal in the desert and find a way of converting the absorbed /reradiated heat into electricity?
/sarc
But at least we can feel better about ourselves because we don’t have to look out the window and see the “carbon” coming out of all those smokestacks.
Look on the bright side, if the Chinese are using up the lead for the solar batteries, there will be less available for them to put in the paint on the children’s toys that they send us. Plus the neurological damage to their kids from the extra environmental lead might help us catch up to them in math. A double win for us I’d say.
“Credulous” is a perfectly good word; it means believing things without considering evidence, either pro or con. Only the leaders of the watermelon movement are cynical. The vast majority of them are credulous. It’s “incredulous” that’s the defective formation.
::shrug:: This is just another example of “real estate agent environmentalism”. The pollution doesn’t happen on their local turf, therefore it doesn’t happen.
Regards,
Ric
tom T says:
August 31, 2011 at 8:46 pm
“Do greens even think?”
Yes, but they don’t have a knowledge base. Lead? Poison. Lithium? Rare. Nickel? Main ore is a sulphide…acid rain. All extraction methods require huge amounts of energy and leave toxic tailings. But that doesn’t matter, because they don’t KNOW that. The concept of baseload eludes the idealist. They figure that you can use a paint-on solar cell to smelt Spodumene.
Consequences don’t matter. Only intentions. And we can gauge intentions by parsing speech for adherence to approved politically correct and environmentally correct principals.
This isn’t about solar energy or a specific technology but about lacking environmental regulation in developing countries. Ever heard of Bhopal? Whatever industrial process gets transplanted to a third world nation will be more polluting and dangerous there than in the West. The answer to this is not abandoning this or promoting that technology but to enforce the same environmental standards everywhere.
Lead – what lead?
SANYO HIT Technology
■All HIT Modules are lead and emissions free.
…
The new NxxxSE modules are the successors to the successful NKHE5 modules. They are based on the same HIT cell technology and have the same electrical characteristics as their predecessors.
To bring up to 25W more on the same Module size (in comparison with our NKHE5 modules), we improved our technology with:
1) An improved cell efficiency up to 21,6%:
Should have said
No batteries – sell it back to the grid
Or use NiFe cells or generate H2
Tetraethyl lead was added to gasoline to boost the octane rating. Premium used to be called “ethyl”. “Unleaded” takes more refining to get the same octane number, thus it costs more. Lead had to be removed not for health issues, but to allow catalytic converters to function.
Lead acid batteries? I thought we all used NiMH or Lithium. Silly me. (/sarc)
We need a better battery.
The sad fact is that solar and wind are safe and clean is a myth.
Solar is intermittent, requires water, needs storage or a new transmission grid because they are in ‘new’ locations. The panel production involves toxic waste with little or no mitigation record.
The wind farms are a menace to birds, are intermittent, require mechanical upkeep, require storage and a new transmission grid because they are in ‘new’ locations.
The EPA, green lobby & NIMBYs say ‘no’ to building these systems almost anywhere they are proposed from Cape Cod to Panoche Valley in rural San Benito County, CA.
It’s a marvel it is, the fallacious logical reasoning of the climate communist hippies. Spend trillions of dollar and trillions of euros and trillions of yuans to maybe save the earth from what could maybe be a potential unproven threat from too much plant food in about 90 years by polluting the earth with the new green products mercury and lead. It’s a rock solid religion that CAGW (pseudo)science.
May I ask you Anthony, as soon as I saw that solar array it appeared to me to be a solar heating array, i.e. water or fluid filled rather than electrical. I completely agree with the contents of the topic, but could you check out that array as it just does not look like an electrical array and therefore not relevant to the topic. You can delete the comment if I am correct or slay me if I am not!
NN;
“politically correct and environmentally correct principals.” Who would they be? Jones, Mann, Hansen? It seems to me to be a very bad principle to rely on PC or EC principals.
😉
(Yes, I know you were being sarc/-astic. )
If that pic is of the Marstal Solar installation, then, yes, it functions as a district heating soource-not a PV installation.
Still a nice picture of a solar cell array.
@cyclodoc Solar can be installed on rooftops in towns and cities, and won’t require new transmission in those cases. Malls, big-box stores, warehouses, factories, etc – all good sites where solar panels can be installed and you can also turn parking areas around them into solar carports, providing both power and shade. While solar may be intermittent, its peak production is well-matched to demand during the summer and for most of the year for the southern states.
have you guys noticed the whole raft of solar cell manufacturers going bankrupt lately?
C