Guest essay by Eric Worrall
h/t ResourceGuy; If you thought Arsenic doped Silicon or Gallium Arsenide on your roof was bad, how about solar cells made of organic Lead compounds, or Cadmium Telluride? Biden’s quest for cheaper solar is exploring some truly terrifying photovoltaic innovations.
U.S. pledges to slash solar energy costs by 60% in a decade
Fri March 26, 2021
March 25 (Reuters) – The Biden administration on Thursday set a goal to cut the cost of solar energy by 60% over the next decade as part of an ambitious plan to decarbonize the United States’ power sector by 2035.
The U.S. Department of Energy said the goal accelerates its previous utility-scale solar cost target by five years. For the U.S. power grid to run entirely on clean energy within 15 years, a key pillar of President Joe Biden’s climate change agenda, solar energy will need to be installed as much as five times faster than it is today, DOE said.
To get there, the agency committed to spending $128 million on technologies including perovskite solar cells, which are regarded as a promising cheap alternative to the silicon cells that dominate the market. Funds will also support research on cadmium telluride and concentrating solar technologies.
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Read more: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/u-pledges-slash-solar-energy-163000668.html
Rechargeable batteries used to contain Cadmium, it was discontinued because Cadmium is horribly toxic. less than half a gram of Cadmium in your system will really mess up your day. Symptoms include cancer, “Cadmium Blues” (persistent flu like symptoms), renal failure, softening of the bones, emphysema and respiratory damage. Can you imagine having several pounds of Cadmium on your roof? What if your neighbour’s solar powered rooftop catches fire?
Tellurium is unpleasant, though it does not seem as toxic as Cadmium. At least people seem to recover from Tellurium poisoning. Clinical features of acute tellurium toxicity include a metallic taste, nausea, vomiting, blackened oral mucosa and skin, and corrosive gastrointestinal tract injury from acidic solvents. … Our patients exhibited many of the characteristic features of tellurium toxicity, namely, vomiting, garlic odor of the breath, blackened oral mucosa, and benign clinical course. – source https://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/116/2/e319
Cadmium Telluride solar cells – double the fun, if a house fire spreads the panel material around your neighbourhood. I’m not eating pie made from that Apple tree.
The Perovskite solar cells are if anything are potentially even worse. From Wikipedia :- A perovskite solar cell (PSC) is a type of solar cell which includes a perovskite-structured compound, most commonly a hybrid organic-inorganic lead or tin halide-based material, as the light-harvesting active layer. Perovskite materials, such as methylammonium lead halides and all-inorganic caesium lead halide, are cheap to produce and simple to manufacture.
Organic lead is probably the worst form of lead exposure, because it is fat soluble. Organic lead is neatly packaged for optimum absorption into your body and brain tissue. You don’t even have to ingest or breath it in – organic lead can pass right through your skin, all it has to do is touch you.
From Wikipedia;
… Lead poisoning can cause a variety of symptoms and signs which vary depending on the individual and the duration of lead exposure. Symptoms are nonspecific and may be subtle, and someone with elevated lead levels may have no symptoms. Symptoms usually develop over weeks to months as lead builds up in the body during a chronic exposure, but acute symptoms from brief, intense exposures also occur. Symptoms from exposure to organic lead, which is probably more toxic than inorganic lead due to its lipid solubility, occur rapidly. Poisoning by organic lead compounds has symptoms predominantly in the central nervous system, such as insomnia, delirium, cognitive deficits, tremor, hallucinations, and convulsions.
Symptoms may be different in adults and children; the main symptoms in adults are headache, abdominal pain, memory loss, kidney failure, male reproductive problems, and weakness, pain, or tingling in the extremities …
Read more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_poisoning
There is a reason governments are moving away from allowing the addition of small amounts of organic lead to gasoline.
The tin based Perovskite is probably the least offensive of the chemicals listed. Metallic tin is commonly used as a plating on food tins, though you can still suffer acute toxicity from ingestion of soluble tin salts, say if there was a problem with processing the food. But even if they go for the tin based Perovskite, after they finish tinkering with the formula, who knows what the final recipe will contain.
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The scientific and industrially ignorant assume the rule of thumb (Moore’s Law) that estimates cost improvement rates of solid state devices is somehow applicable to all new technology. However, mechanical and chemical innovations do not behave in the same way over time and Mr. Moore’s “law” does not apply.
Ol’ Joe and his ill-informed advisors seem to share the delusion, and also believe that throwing money at a problem is certain to result in the desired outcome.
Is in not true that whatever Biden and the federal govt try to do to make solar panels cheaper, the Chinese still have lower labor costs which cannot be matched in the U.S. labor force?
So even if cheaper materials are found for solar panel manufacturing, the Chinese can still make them cheaper with the new materials, correct?.
And this does not change the fact that a massive land area is required for solar panels to displace coal and natural gas on a large scale. You cannot deal with the poor energy density of solar using cheaper materials with which to make the panels.
This is what happens when we are dealing with clueless ideologues instead of people that operate on facts, logic and reasoning.
You are missing a few things from the armchair.
It is true that China has the labor cost advantage but the industry has moved to highly automated panel factories. China’s other cost competitiveness comes from going large like it did in many other industries, low regulatory cost issues, and a cost of capital this is not high like in other low cost developing countries. Material input costs were also held down by massive investment by silicon ingot and cell producers. The one US-based CdTe producer managed to hang on with a complete product line upgrade cycle and enough volume expansion to stay in the bottom rung of the top 10 super league list globally. Hang on in this case means solid balance sheet and good gross margins, with another tech upgrade coming and a further 30% cost reduction in the 3-year horizon.
Ending the investment tax credit would help in this situation because it would limit some of the market growth for China in the idiotic residential rooftop segment and let the best of breed players focus on utility scale and community scale. But of course the rooftop lobbyists are making the move on Biden.
Here in southern AB they are going to put in a 565mw solar installation that will cover 6 square miles of otherwise useful prairie, and looking at the AESO page for solar sites, this new one will produce maybe 25mw at noon on January 1
A “good” investment?
In Australia rural population collect and store rain water from roofs for domestic use. With the proliferation of roof top solar could this water supply be at risk especially with damaged, cracked panels?
Very good point.
No it is not. These are stable compounds. They have different properties than their constituent elements. It will not contaminate your runoff water. The author needs to review his basic chemistry.
They got rid of lead roof flashing , only to replace it with a veritable cocktail of highly toxic solar panel ingredients.. by choice !!!
SO DUMB is that !!
This is the same government, you might recall, that insisted we stop using tungsten lights and switch over to fluorescent bulbs containing toxic mercury. Then told us we had to dispose of them properly. Then never made arrangements for us to do so.
Remember your high school chemistry, please. You are talking about compounds. By the flawed logic displayed here, since hydrogen is flammable in air, we should get all the water out of our homes immediately! Si doped with tiny amounts of arsenic is stable. Your computer has lots of it. Are you afraid of your computer? GaAs is stable. Pb perovskites are stable. They are effectively just man-made minerals. I made this stuff, and other less pleasant materials for decades. The end product is safe. The manufacturing process can be very hazardous, but there is a long engineering history of solutions and procedures to deal with the hazards. Solar power is impractical and expensive. Stick to those arguments. They are accurate. This worry over solid state devices is nonsense.
Thanks
My laptop does not sit on my roof in sun, rain, cold, heat, getting weather beaten and leaching out materials that then runs off into the soil around the house where is grow food.
So yes, I don’t particularly worry about my laptop
These materials don’t “leech”. The constituent elements are not in solution, they are compounds. They are also crystalline/ceramic. You can weather them, abrade them, smash them with a hammer – you simply get smaller pieces of them. Sunlight or heating in a fire will not change that. You need to take them to temperatures of a thousand degrees Celsius or more to melt them. They are insoluble in water. They will not contaminate drinking water with their constituent elements. The concerns about this are unfounded.
In both solar panels and your computer, greater hazards exist from the lead-free solders, adhesives, plastics and other materials used in the construction of the finished product. The solid state materials are harmless.
“If you thought Arsenic doped Silicon or Gallium Arsenide on your roof was bad” …. you probably know nothing about doping levels in semiconductors and don’t realise that radioactive waste is often stabilised by vitrificaiton before burial.