After Grid Crash, Houston Solar Firm Nearly Triples New Orders; From "Nice To Have" To "Must Have"

[hatrack]

After the Great Texas Freeze-Out of 2021, several state politicians ham-handedly attempted to blame renewables for the power outages that left more than 200 people dead and cost as much as $130 billion in property damage and lost economic activity. Now, renewables are getting their revenge. No longer able to trust the power grid, and no longer confident that state leaders can keep the lights on, many Texans are taking matters into their own hands, adding on-site generation, solar panels and batteries.

John Berger, the founder and chief executive of Sunnova Energy International, a Houston-based residential solar provider, said his company’s installed customer base jumped 30 percent in the second quarter compared with a year earlier. That corresponds with a 165 percent increase in new orders during the same period. (The company doesn’t break out origination data by state.) “What we saw increasingly is people have changed from ‘it’s nice to have’ to ‘it’s a need to have,’” Berger said.

Several trends were already driving the demand. Across the country, people are growing weary of extreme weather being characterized as “unprecedented.” As hurricanes, floods and wildfires routinely knock out power, residents are looking for peace of mind, regardless of costs. That mindset, combined with an increase in people working from home because of the pandemic, was already driving demand for on-site residential power across the country, said Berger, whose company has about 162,000 customers in 35 states and U.S. territories.

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Not surprisingly, Texas leaders haven’t updated the state’s energy efficiency programs in a decade, either, and it spends less on efficiency measures that most other states. Few consumers, for example, take advantage of energy audits that can identify wasteful appliances or leaky air conditioning systems, even though they often are paid for by electricity providers or tax credits. And despite all the blather about how deregulation, adopted 20 years ago, would lead to innovation, it largely hasn’t. The simplest and easiest demand-reduction innovation, programs such as rebates or cash back programs or credits for smart thermostats and appliances, have largely been ignored by the state’s grid operator and utility commissioners.

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https://climatecrocks.com/2021/09/26/texans-burned-by-freeze-seeking-solar-batteries/#more-68450

[mountain grammy]

1. Don't mess with Texas..proud of being stupid.

Innovation and incentives are for suckers..

[NNadir]

2. A great scheme for rich people to isolate themselves from the poor.

When the time comes to clean up the resultant electronic waste, in ten years for the batteries and twenty to twenty-five for the cells, guess which economic class will face the health associated health risks.

People living hand to mouth in crowded studio apartments don't get to install solar panels on their McMansion roof.

China recently announced it is no longer accepting imports of electronic waste. The reason? They're rich now.

The African countries which already dig our cobalt should watch out.

[Finishline42]

3. Community Solar should be a given

It minimizes the labor component of solar and maximizes the orientation of the panels (the angles on a typical house are off in both directions). It's also negates the possibility of shade.

In addition to people that live in apartments, you have to include people that live in cities in a lot of situations. Also a lot of people don't live in their house long enough to break even with solar.

I wonder why Tesla hasn't started a community solar program that would give credit when you use their supercharger network? They have a factory in Buffalo that needs to get panels in the field, this would do just that.

BTW, the angle of electronic waste is non-sensical. If there are enough panels that need recycling the solution will be there. Just like junk yards for old cars.

Also, instead of recycling the panels the most logical next step is to repurpose. Current warranties on panels are typically 80% of rated output after 25 years. That's a straight line degradation of less than 0.5% per year. There will be more than 50% output after 50 years. So there will still be life left in those panels that an operator of a solar farm replaces for higher output current tech. If sold or given away, they will still be in use, not in a landfill.

[NNadir]

4. QED. Like I said, the solar fantasy relies on contempt for the poor.

If one were to read my post rather than react with handwaving dogma and oblivious wishful thinking, I did not claim that it was impossible to recycle solar cells. If one has energy one can recycle anything.

What I said is that solar cells are and will be, in ever more vast amounts, recycled by poor people who will suffer the health risks, just as poor people, including living in conditions of near or total slavery, now dig cobalt for Elon's Musk's fucking batteries that he sells to rich people to make them feel "green."

Even the fucking anti-nuke idiot Benjamin Sovacool, who wants to tear the shit out of the ocean floor to mine metals to pursue the dangerous and failed "renewable energy will save us" scam to the end, gets it, even if most oblivious rich people worshipping Musk don't.

When subterranean slavery supports sustainability transitions? power, patriarchy, and child labor in artisanal Congolese cobalt mining (Sovacool, The Extractive Industries and Society Volume 8, Issue 1, March 2021, Pages 271-293)

In little Benny's world - not mine - slavery and sustainability are intertwined. Since Benny apparently has very little exposure to serious engineering, he can say anything is sustainable, even tearing the shit out of the ocean floor for the last atom of cobalt.

I don't wave my hands about materials cycles, and happily report how cars are recycled so solar cells will be recycled "some day" by "someone else," thus being so ethically withered so as to dump responsibility for my ignorance and indifference on future generations. No, I open scientific papers and get into the details, because I give a shit about humanity.

Just recently in fact, over in the Science forum, where DUers discuss Science generally, as opposed to repeating wishful thinking dogma, I discussed a Scientific paper on the approach to "recycling" the PVA co-polymer (plastic) used in this solar trash:

Pyrolysis Kinetic Modeling of a Polyethylene/Vinyl Acetate Encapsulant Found in Waste Photovoltaics.

I noted that the paper reported that waste solar cells are accumulating - even though they have done zero, nothing, nada, zilch, to address climate change, which is accelerating - at a rate that will result in tens of millions of tons of electronic solar waste in the immediate future. I also noted that the temperature for the pyrolysis of the EVA polymer is between 300-900°C and that the heat do this is going to come, just as the fuel for the ships that will transport solar junk to the third world is going to come, from combustion. The air pollution from that combustion isn't going to affect people living in gated communities with future electronic waste on their rooves. It's going affect poor people.

This PVA is only one constituent of solar waste: The rest is far more problematic.

I do recognize that the bourgeois "solar is green" set is not going to give a shit, any more than they - with the possible exception of "let's mine the ocean" Sovacool - give a shit about "artisanal" cobalt mining. (There really isn't much that's "artisanal" about human slavery, but Sovacool is not a particularly perceptive guy in my opinion.)

Very little electronic waste is "recycled" now by rich people who tool around in Elon Musk's obscene cars. Rather, it is exported where poor people grind it up, and burn some constituents and vaporize others.

Don't worry, be happy though. The Chinese are done with it. Their scientists are aware of what's happened; they have very modern mass specs:

Distribution of PCDD/Fs, PCBs, PBDEs and organochlorine residues in children’s blood from Zhejiang, China (Haitao Shen, Gangqiang Ding, Guangen Han, Xiaofeng Wang, Xiaomin Xu, Jianlong Han, Xiaoming Lou, Caiju Xu, Delei Cai, Yanhua Song, Wei Lu, Chemosphere, Volume 80, Issue 2, 2010, Pages 170-175)

It's moving to Africa, where the cobalt slaves live: Effects of E-Waste on Respiratory Function Among E-Waste Workers Engaged In Burning At Agbogbloshie, Accra.Ntti, A.A.A.

I always get a chuckle when the assholes supporting this human tragedy carry on about "Jobs! Jobs! Jobs!" Personally, I wish these people in Accra could get jobs! jobs! jobs! that didn't kill them.

I think that a man, woman, or child working in Africa is every bit as human as I am, although I sometimes think that the bourgeois who wave their hands mindlessly causing these kinds of things through indifference could be a little bit more human than they apparently are.

The scientific literature is very rich with closed material cycles, all of which involve energy (and not just from transport) and risk. These are not limited to closed carbon cycles - to which I devote much of my attention, being careful to include thermodynamic considerations - but includes many other materials, everything from indium, to platinum, to stuff as simple as glass: Tracking the Environmental Consequences of Circular Economy over Space and Time: The Case of Close- and Open-Loop Recovery of Postconsumer Glass (Jean-Martin Lessard, Guillaume Habert, Arezki Tagnit-Hamou, and Ben Amor (Environmental Science & Technology 2021 55 (17), 11521-11532).

If one gives a shit, this literature is available. If one doesn't give a shit, one can just mutter mindlessly about something being "non-sensical" (sic) and mindlessly repeat wishful thinking dogma so as to try to excuse moral indifference.

[Finishline42]

5. Why destroy a solar panel to recycle when it is still producing electricity?

Typical solar panel warranties guarantees 80% of rated output after 25 years. It's a straight line degradation of less than 0.5%/year. No moving parts so it seems that a well made panel will still be producing over 50% of rated output after 50 years. If space is limited you might replace an older panel with a better performing one, but there is still value in the old panel.

I am so moved by your concern for the poor people of the world and the theoretical harm solar panels will produce in the future. Now do life cycle benefit/costs for the closest coal fired power plant. Or maybe the closest petrochemical plant. Or uranium processing plant.

The placement of pollution creating industrial facilities have always been in the areas without political clout. That hasn't changed.

People got rich in Eastern KY selling broad form deeds to people that didn't understand that what they sold was the right for coal companies to strip mine their property for the minerals beneath their house.

One question though - how much more natural gas and coal would we be using if we hadn't built the wind and solar farms during the last 20 years? How much worse would the CO2 numbers be?