Renewables waste
The significant waste-disposal challenges of batteries, wind turbines and solar panels are being ignored. By Nick Cater.
It is about to become illegal to supply a customer with a plastic straw in NSW. From November, stiff penalties apply to anyone who traffics these and other stigmatised plastic objects under legislation pitched at preventing harm to human and environmental health and avoiding unnecessary landfill.
Similar laws apply in other states where plastic cutlery, plastic stirrers and polystyrene containers have been declared threats to the circular economy.
The exaggerated panic about single-use plastic, to which state governments have dutifully responded, comes at a cost. Businesses will have to wade their way through tens of pages of new regulation and wrestle with over-complicated compliance obligations.
Meanwhile, far greater waste-disposal challenges of batteries, wind turbines and solar panels are being ignored. Just because the green lobby says they are sustainable doesn’t mean they last forever. Nor does it mask the evidence that the waste from renewables contains many more toxic substances than a humble plastic cotton bud.
The disposal cost of solar rooftop panels is ignored by state governments who offer households thousands of dollars of incentives to install even more. Australians have already installed more roof-top solar panels per person than any other country, but the Australian Energy Market Operator says the number must more than double by the end of the decade if we’re to reach the governments heroic 2030 emissions reduction target.
Meanwhile, hectare after hectare of farmland is being turned over to industrial scale solar energy generators. In NSW alone, 18 mega solar plants have been installed and 83 more have either been approved or are being processed.
As we know, this won’t solve the energy crisis we face with the removal of baseload power. Most solar farms produce electricity we can use less than a quarter of the time and destabilise the grid, creating engineering problems that are expensive to fix.
We know too that the tens of millions of solar panels we will need by 2030 will be imported from Communist China, the Saudi Arabia of photovoltaic cells. After Russia’s action in Ukraine, the hazards of relying on a tyrannical regime for energy supplies do not need to be spelt out.
Solar panels have a life of 20 years at best and there is no practical way to recycle them. Last year, NSW Legislative Councillor Rod Roberts asked Energy Minster Matt Kean how many used solar panels had been recycled in the last two years.
The written response read from Kean’s department read: “The Department of Planning, Industry and Environment does not have data on the number of waste solar panels recycled in NSW since 1 January 2019.”
Roberts went on to ask: “What is happening to decommissioned solar panels that are not being recycled?”
The response came back: “Decommissioned solar panels that are not being recycled are currently going to landfill.”
Mr Roberts asked: “How many solar panels are expected to be decommissioned in the next 12 months?”
The department replied with an estimate that there would be 2,700 tonnes of decommissioned solar panels in NSW in 2021. That is only the start.
Professor Rodney Stewart from Griffith University has estimated that by 2050, in Australia, there will be 1.5 million tonnes of solar photovoltaic waste in need of disposal. And the way things stand, they’ll all finish up in landfill because the cost of recycling doesn’t make economic sense. Nor does it make environmental sense, for that matter, given the energy needed to transport them to a recycling centre and then strip them into their components parts is not inconsiderable.
The cost of recycling a panel in Australia is currently $30, according to the website solarquotes.com.au. A recycler can recover, with not inconsiderable difficulty, a few cents worth each of glass, plastic, silicon, copper and aluminium and $6.40 in silver delivering a less-than-handsome bounty of $8.15. In other words, it’s greener to put them in landfill. Which makes the fuss about plastic forks look foolish, like much of the current policy conversation about the environment.
If we want to reduce the planet’s net greenhouse gas emissions to zero by the middle of the century, we’re going to have to do much better than this. The many drawbacks with industrial wind, solar and batteries cannot be ignored forever. We cannot keep pretending that weather-dependent renewables are no-regrets alternatives to coal.