Essay by Eric Worrall
“… trace toxic metals like lead and cadmium can pollute soil and water if mishandled …”
India’s solar boom faces a hidden waste problem
Nikita Yadav
India’s rapid solar energy expansion is widely hailed as a success. But without a plan to manage the waste it will generate, how clean is the transition?
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Solar growth has cut India’s reliance on coal. Though thermal and other non-renewables still supply over half of installed capacity, solar now contributes more than 20%. Yet the achievement carries a challenge: while clean in use, solar panels can pose environmental risks if not properly managed.
Solar panels are mostly recyclable, made of glass, aluminium, silver, and polymers – but trace toxic metals like lead and cadmium can pollute soil and water if mishandled.
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A new study by the Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW) estimates that India could generate more than 11 million tonnes of solar waste by 2047. Managing this would require almost 300 dedicated recycling facilities and an investment of $478 (£362m) over the next two decades.
…Damaged or discarded panels often end up in landfills or with unauthorised recyclers, where unsafe methods can release toxic materials. The BBC has contacted India’s renewable energy ministry for comment.
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Read more: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd6x75x4j02o
How insane is this? Three decades after lead was banned in gasoline, renewables have re-introduced the risk of lead contamination back into the environment through the challenge of disposing of millions of tons of e-waste.
Given illegal dumping is more likely to occur in rural areas, a disproportionate amount of that solar panel heavy metal contamination could end up in the human food chain.
Of course you don’t have to dump the panels in the countryside. In cities there is another cheap and nasty way to dispose of solar panels. Non-recyclable solar panel silicon, which contains much of the heavy metal contamination, can be burned in an industrial incinerator providing the incinerator temperature is above 750F. The ash from solar panels would look like high quality construction sand – the heavy metal contamination would not be obvious. I can easily imagine such contaminated sand being deviously inserted into the construction industry as cut price building material, ending up in play ground sand pits or being used to build homes and schools.
Surely it is time to review this ghastly new threat to our children’s health, before we end up with 10s of millions of tons of contaminated solar panel waste poisoning our kids.
There’s likely some truth in all this, but since 79% of India’s domestic energy supply is provided by coal a much bigger threat would be from carbon emissions. In fact, it seems to me that New Delhi just last week issued warnings about the health risks associated with poor air quality and urged citizens to take serious precautions.
About 11% of New Delhi’s air pollution comes from coal energy production, or about the same as combined burning in landfills, open burning and agricultural. Well over 50% comes from transportation, both from tailpipes and road/tire dust (about 39% from just the vehicles, so it’s not just carbon emissions). I’m not really convinced that creating a new problem with heavy metal pollution (putting the panels in an uncontrolled recycling environment or just putting them into the currently burning landfills) counterweights the potential ‘carbon emissions’ reduction of switching from coal to solar, especially when including the ‘carbon emissions’ from manufacturing of the panels.
Now think about the problem instead of drinking the cool-aid of the green econuts.
The power generation emissions are the easiest to deal with they happen in very specific locations being the power stations. The car, transport and agriculture emissions not so easy to deal with they happen everywhere.
So removing the coal would do very little other than send the country back into the dark ages. You want to solve a problem you need to come up with real solutions not garbage pushed by econuts
The least harzard from coal combustion is from CO2; soot and heavy metals from untreated and/or incomplete coal combustion are the greater threat by orders of magnitude. A well-designed and maintained modern coal plant emits little of those latter hazardous materials.
A modern coal fired power plant has basically ZERO carbon emissions.
Right- one in MA spent 50 million to fix its emissions to current standards- then the f****** state forced it to shut down- then they blew up the tower to make sure. Idiots.
I didn’t make myself properly understood. What I really meant was that if India were really so concerned about reducing its waste and pollution problems, regardless of source, it would be aggressively transitioning away from fossil fuels in general. The reality is that it’s doing nothing of the sort because, along with other developing nations, especially in Africa and Asia, it regards economic development, exports, raising living standards and poverty alleviation as its top priority and never mind worrying about trying to achieve some vague probably unattainable climate targets.
Wind and solar are highly destructive to the environment, they are the very last pseudo-electricity source they should be using.
Modern Coal is clean with very little real pollution, as is gas.
Hydro is a niche option…
Nuclear is another option…
You cannot raise living standards with erratic unreliable electricity.
You cannot run a successful manufacturing sector with erratic and unreliable electricity.
It is utterly STUPID to think they should “transition” away from fossil fuels.
So Indians should all be buying EVs? I’m sure many Indians can afford them. 🙂
Coal hasn’t been a pollution problem for over 30 years. Oil and natural gas never were.
Ed, when you say “carbon emissions,” are you conflating CO2 with actual black carbon (soot)? SO2 is also a health problem but does not contain carbon.
Differentiate between carbon emissions (particulate carbon) and CO2.
Coal plants now come with scrubbers and the carbon emissions are minimized.
Coal can be burned cleanly, and it is in most of the west.
Every landfill that exists is filled with toxic materials such as lead.
Is that a reason to add more variety to the mix?
This won’t be in landfills, it will be sprinkled all over the place where the cadmium/glass sandwiches which happen to be photovoltaic happen to be the victims of the very weather they are imagined to eliminate.
I see EPA superfunds in the future to decontaminate vast areas of tillable land and millions of homeowners’ urban dwellings. All for the least dense form of energy available that makes political cronies very rich at the expense of slave labor and gigging up hectares of scenic land.
All the more reason to add a lot more?
20%…that’s HEUUUUGE if true…but is it???
In India, ground mounted and rooftop solar installations have a combined potential capacity of 127-133GW.
On July 29th solar generated 44.5GW towards demand.
Now that 44.5GW was between 10am and 2pm during maximum potential solar capacity.
However, India’s afternoon peak demand is from 2pm-4pm…after solar production begins to plummet.
India’s afternoon peak demand is 240-250GW and solar was actually providing 1/6th or 17% of that at the start of peak.
By the end of Peak Demand solar had dropped to 4-5GW before vanishing and the 4pm peak was only being met by 1.7-2% solar.
Evening peak 6pm-11pm mainly from cooling, pushes the grid demand to over 250GW in summer and solar provides ZERO generation to meet demand then.
So July 27th at Noon Solar may have met 20% of potential demand for an hour or so but by 2pm had fallen to 17% and by 4pm plummeted to 1.7%. July 28th nyeaah not so much.
Solar may be producing at certain times on certain days but canned depended on for every time on every day and almost never produces full installed capacity.
Then there’s that nagging issue of resilience in inclement weather.
It’s nothing of consequence as you indicate. It averts at most a few hundred tonnes, perhaps a couple of thousand tonnes of coal consumption. Which is trivial compared to India’s total annual coal consumption of nearly 1500 million tonnes.
As for inclement weather, welcome to India’s monsoon season June to September every year. In some parts of India, rain is measured in feet, not inches.
Deserts? Welcome to the Thar Desert covering more than 6% of India’s total surface area subject to sand and dust storms.
The stupidity of the BBC is utterly rancid. This trivial amount of energy production from solar comes in return for introducing new lead and cadmium contamination. You can always count on the Beeb to be arithmetically challenged.
When you burn coal with scrubbers, you can manage the heavy metal waste in the ash without spreading it around where people live and crops grow. You produce orders of magnitude more electricity from the same amount of land, which is very seldom interrupted because fossil fuel generation is infinitely more weatherproof and stable on the grid.
Actually Solar uses 9.5 sq mi of land to produce 145MW/h for 4 hours a day (typical summer time production for Topaz Solar Farm. 550MW that generates 140-145MWh from 10am until 2pm in the summer when the sun is uninterrupted. Winter time produces less than half that and between 4pm and 8am produces Zero energy.
Solar needs 9.5 sq mi (6080 acres) to generate 145MW/h for 4 hours a day.
Gas needs 90 acres to produce 900MW/h for 24 hours a day.
Definitely orders of magnitude greater
That same 9.5 sq mi for 145MW/h x 4hr solar could produce 60,800 MW/h x 24hr with gas using the same area
And it’s not as if India has lots of land available for ruinables- with the largest population on the planet and it’s still growing fast.
Nice deconstruction of BS. 🙂
Solar growth has cut India’s reliance on coal.
Really? What does Our World in Data say?
And what type of energy is India consuming and how much is solar?
Ah but that 6100TWh of Coal would have been 6125TWh of Coal without Solar.
I am fairly sure that the weight of metal Lead Pb used in bullets exceeds the weight of Pb used in solar panels. Bullets are typically spread around with little regard for protection of the environment.
if people are keen to write about protection of the environment, they should present data properly and have regard for balance. Geoff S
They use bullets in electricity production in India?
I understand that many shooting clubs ranges now require steel shotgun pellets instead of lead.
Not for environmental purposes, but steel pellets can be retrieved by magnet from the target background berms and re-used.
Very practical.
The use of steel for shotshells is just virtue signaling and causes increased barrel wear.
I belong to a well established sportsmen’s club that had to move. After over 60 years of heavy use, the required lead remediation to sell the old acreage was inconsequential (still very expensive) due to natural lead levels being only slightly lower than 60 years of lead shot deposits.
The push for clubs now is for lead shot to be collected with specialized machinery to recycle the shot for resale. Granted reloaders will get a mix of shot sizes (7.5, 8, and 9) that, in my experience does not generally effect accuracy unless you are competing in a match that has extremely long presentations.
I said “not for environmental purposes” didn’t I?
My bad.
My contention is that steel is a poor replacement and although some clubs may want steel, they are probably doing it for PR.
“…renewables have re-introduced the risk of lead contamination back into the environment…”
This is a poor argument which will not convince any renewable advocates. If a 100 watt solar panel has 0.5 oz of lead, a 1 mWatt system would be the equivalent to 16 lead acid car batteries with 20 lbs of lead per battery. It is a hard sell to convince someone that 10,000 solar panels are an environmental hazard, but 16 car batteries are not an environmental hazard. There are well over 100 million ICE cars on U.S. roads.
There are 269M registered ICVs on the roads in the US
Cars
Trucks
Vans
Motorhomes
Busses
Semis
Not sure if Motorcycles or ATVs (quads etc.) are counted in this figure
Ships, Boats, Yachts, Airplanes and commercial jets aren’t
As aren’t gasoline powered RC cars and planes
Railroad locomotives are also not included.
Not sure I but I think most of those lead batteries are recycled. I don’t know what they do with them but they must minimize the eco damage.
There is a lead acid battery recycling industry.
Car batteries are easy to collect and recycle, and such recycling has been mandatory for decades.
Solar panels on the other hand are difficult and expensive to recycle.
This is a stretch. Still more lead used in automotive batteries than solar panels. Automotive batteries have largely overcome lead contamination by recycling. In Australia, automotive batteries are essentially on an exchange basis – the retailer will take your old battery for recycling.
Lead in gasoline was a dispersive use with the lead as an oxide in micron size particles – about as bad as you can get for human ingestion directly or indirectly through the food chan..
Lead as a metal as used in solder takes thousands of years to leach in normal soil conditions. Lead metal sheet is still used as a pliable seal on roofing protrusions and transitions. The main reason is its incredibly long life in the open air. Bunnings sells it a number of sizes.
Given India’s penchant for recycling everything, I expect that industries will grow around recycling solar panels and they may even take the scrap from Australia for a small fee.
OTOH- In the US where Draconian EPA regs went into effect 50y/a virtually eliminating detectable Pb in the air, rates of asthma and COPD have risen significantly and kids’ IQ scores have fallen a little…..Thanks for protecting us. EPA.
Got to wonder what is the kWh per kilo of “recycling” solar panel waste? The output of how many solar panels does it take to dispose of a solar panel?
Disposal carbon costs, in addition to manufacture, deployment, and maintenance carbon costs, are never reckoned in the lifecycle carbon costs of renewables. To date these processes are overwhelmingy accomplished through energy generated through combustion of “fossil” fuels.
Got to wonder what is the kWh per kilo of “recycling” solar panel waste? The (real) output of how many solar panels does it take to dispose of a solar panel?
Disposal carbon costs, in addition to manufacture, deployment, and maintenance carbon costs, are never reckoned in the lifecycle carbon costs of renewables. To date these processes are overwhelmingy accomplished through energy generated through combustion of “fossil” fuels.
When a solar industrial estate gets hit by hail and as badly damaged as in the title pic…
.. what happens to all the shards and particles of silicon glass from the surface.
Can’t think they would be too healthy if blown to areas where people live, or where animals graze.
“Solar growth has cut India’s reliance on coal.”
How can they say this? I thought China and India were the leaders in building new coal plants.
It is basically Bovex.. ie propaganda and lies.
The graph posted by sskinner above shows just how little wind and solar is used in India.
How does India find land for large scale ruinable energy?
“e-waste”
Never saw that term before. It should be used more often.
Label just where the new pollution is coming from.
Is anyone checking on what the UK, Canada, US and my country Australia are doing about this issue as well. We have the same problem. Pretending it only belongs to India is nonsense.
Was the notion of the waste endpoint ever brought up and discussed before India started down this path? There are trade-offs in every endeavor. Personally, I favor carbon based fuels. Wind and solar are distractions and sooner or later the ROI will be realized if the waste problem doesn’t. Recalling what happened in TX and NE in the last couple of years when a hail storm came through and obliterated acres of solar panels. The cost surely was quite expensive in labor and disposal costs not to mention the replacement/reinstallation of all these panels. I can just imagine what the insurance company must have thought when these claims came in.
Solar panels are recyclable, technically, but not economically without massive subsidies. China builds their solar arrays in remote deserts. Not to hard to guess what the reclamation plan is (“Dust to dust, ashes to ashes”).
Emission Controls (BACT)India has introduced stringent norms since 2015 for SO₂, NOₓ, particulate matter, and mercury emissions. Compliance requires installing technologies like:
These measures align with BACT principles, but implementation has been slow, and many plants are still retrofitting. India’s mercury limits are less stringent than EU or U.S. standards. [sickconnect.com], [cseindia.org], [modernpowe…ystems.com]
Key Differences