A large amount of electronic waste is generated at William Jessup University.

[NNadir]

Here in New Jersey, almost 2 months after Hurricane Sandy struck, I've been wondering what will become of the electronic waste that is represented by the solar cells ripped off of telephone polls here.

Of course, I know what happened to the dangerous fossil fuel waste from the thousands of trucks that drove around installing these exercises in wishful thinking, money sucking and futility: It was dumped into the atmosphere.

PSEG installed First Solar cells, almost all of which are cadmium selenide, and as such, represent some of the more toxic compounds.

Solar energy, world wide, is an expensive - if undeservedly popular - failure. After almost six decades of uncritical and unchallenged cheering, after sucking 100's of billions of dollars and euros and proportionately larger sums of yen and yuan, the entire output of all the solar cells on earth, as recorded in 2010, is merely 31.211 billion kWh. Since there are 3.6 Petajoules in a billion Kilowatt-hours and 31558149.8 seconds in a sideral year, it follows that the average continuous power represented by one billion kwh is about 114 MW.

Thus the entire solar industry on the entire planet produces about 3,560 MW, the equivalent of 3 or 4 average sized oil, gas, or coal power plants except that the oil, gas and coal plants do not require expensive redundancy. The entire solar industry has failed to shut even one oil, gas and coal plants, and in fact, the solar industry's main purpose - besides burning lots of oil, gas, and coal to run servers to tell us how wonderful solar energy is - is to serve as a fig leaf for the oil, gas and coal industries.

I don't come here very much any more, but recently, I noted a case where one of old fellows here was expressing joy about the wonderful demonstration of the resiliency of solar and wind infrastructure in New Jersey, yet another obvious demonstration of the fact that he likes to shoot his mouth off about a subject he knows nothing about.

Solar energy and wind energy are not, in any shape or form, important sources of energy in New Jersey, although these industries have managed to suck money out of the state in a wasteful exercise that is way disproportionate than any benefit they provide.

They also have a toxicology problem, as the destroyed wrecks around here demonstrate.

But of course, not that anyone cares, the issue is not limited to New Jersey. Here's an article about the generation of a huge quantity of electronic waste in California, at William Jessup University.

Strong wind gusts may be to blame for Tuesday’s partial collapse of a 1,700-square-foot hydraulic solar panel array on the campus of William Jessup University. “A lot of the solar panels started falling and then the whole thing just folded right over,” said William Jessup student Julie Hargrave, who witnessed the collapse. As the wind continued to batter the damaged platform around 2:30 p.m., University officials quickly moved students away from the area and closed the adjacent parking lot. Installed earlier this year as a replacement to a smaller prototype constructed in 2010 by Integrated Solar Technologies, the ArrayBot prototype uses hydraulics to move a platform with nearly 200 solar panels toward the sun as it moves across the sky and is “designed to operate in harsh conditions with wind gusts of up to 60 mph,” according to the company’s original press release. Following Tuesday’s collapse, the company issued a statement reporting the array experienced a “major failure during a high wind gust. Workers on site reported a significant wind gust just prior to the failure. While engineering analysis indicates that winds of the speed expected for today should not have been a problem, it appears that at least one key structural item failed.”

Solar Array Collapses (You may need to answer a dumb question to read the full text.)

There's a picture of the huge pile of electronic waste into the solar array was transformed when "it appears that at least one key structural item failed.

Another picture of the pile of toxic electronic waste can be found here:

Collapsed solar array

This year is now on track to be one of the five worst years ever recorded at Mauna Loa for increases in dangerous fossil fuel waste in the atmosphere.

It's a lucky thing that we didn't bet the planetary atmosphere on our wishful thinking that the solar industry would save us.

Oh? What's that you say? We did?

Oh well, so much the worse for us.

Have a nice holiday.

[joshcryer]

1. Wind is worse. It enabled unconventional natural gas exploration.

Now the United States is slated to produce lots of natural gas and oil due to the technology that wind enabled. I'm pro-technology but I can recognize that some technologies are inherently bad, such as fossil fuel technologies. Wind would've been OK if it didn't necessitate having natural gas peaking plants. The greenwashing capitalists used natural gas as a "clean fuel" and it compliments wind quite well. Wind being quite cost effective for the energy it does produce, even if it is intermittent, made unconventional natural gas exploration a lucrative business.

[NNadir]

3. It's not so much that wind is "worse" but that wind is not sustainable.

The dirty little secret of the wind industry is its dependence on lanthanides, in particular neodymium. Right now, at least until mines like the Mountain Pass mine in California reopens, almost all of the lanthanides produced in the world are produced in China, these under unbelievable conditions. One hears things like people running extractions in garbage cans full of nitric acid in their homes.

One of the cute things about all this is that is relatively unusual for lanthanide ores to be found without thorium, which is of course radioactive. Thus lanthanides mined for the wind and hybrid car/battery market leave radioactive tailings.

In fact, viewed properly, these thorium tailings are a huge resource, not that humanity in general is bright enough to figure that out.

Not so long ago, I attended a lecture given by Dr. Arun Majumdar, which basically covered the area that he discussed in a paper written in Nature, which he co-authored with Secretary of Energy Stephen Chu.

Majumdar and Chu

Nature 488, 294–303 (16 August 2012).

The paper was entitled "Opportunities and challenges for a sustainable energy future." Dr. Majumdar, if you don't know, formerly headed up the AARPA effort within the DOE under Dr. Chu, which was designed to fund promising energy research projects. (He is by the way, a brilliant and very affable fellow in person.)

During the Q and A portion after his talk, I raised this point about lanthanides and wind, and he conceded that this was true, that there were not enough lanthanides to power a grand hand-waving "wind revolution" but he then waved his hands and said that there are wonderful iron nitrides that "might" substitute for them "if only" a way "could be found to stabilize them."

In fact, we don't have time to wait around to find a way to stabilize iron nitride magnets. Time's up. We're out of time.

I just read a very, very, very, very, very, very funny monograph in the Princeton engineering library - written with all seriousness in 1978 - about the grand renewable energy future that we'd all be living in by 2010.

Well, it would have been funny, were it not for the fact that our cities are filling up with water and we're still wasting time, money and resources on repeating the same fantasy that we've been speaking about for the last half a century.

[AtheistCrusader]

2. Since when is 60mph a 'harsh condition'?

That was monumentally stupid.

Perhaps the panels can be recovered, reattached or repaired and recycled.