Solar - the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

People Clint Eastwood

Titles The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Photo by Sunset Boulevard/Corbis via Getty Images - Image courtesy gettyimages.com

I couldn’t resist using the title of one of Clint Eastwood’s movies to look at solar from 3 different viewpoints. We start with the good – a few examples of solar applications that almost make sense. Then we have the bad – the many drawbacks and problems of solar. And finally, the ugly – the mining process for backup batteries, the ruination of millions of acres of farmland, forests, and formerly beautiful landscapes, and the end game in millions of tons of worn out or damaged solar panels piling up in landfills.

In my Summary of Offshore Wind Turbine Problems, I couldn’t find anything good to say about offshore wind. But solar is a little different. Solar may have a place for individuals and for businesses, warehouses, and some factories who can take advantage of it - if it can ever pay for itself without subsidies.

The Good – For those who can afford the initial cost, or those who could receive assistance from private nonprofit charities - Rooftop solar in optimum residential and commercial locations with clear southern exposures, and industrial buildings, and solar panels over parking lots, might actually make sense, with a few caveats in the next section on the ‘Bad’.

The panels themselves are much cheaper per watt capacity than they were 10 years ago, so that’s good. Inverters are improved. As electricity prices go up, savings from solar systems should pay for themselves quicker, although paybacks from the utilities for excess juice fed back to the grid are being reduced.

Small off-grid systems for individual homeowners may not need any permits, depending on local laws. For locations so remote that miles of transmission lines would have to brought in by the utility company, solar or gas generators are the only options for electricity, and propane or wood stoves for heat.

When I was spending my summers in the Adirondacks from 1952 to 1963, there was a small hardware store in the little town of Inlet that delivered propane to the camps and cabins in the surrounding woods and lakeside areas. The tanks were about as big as a man could handle; my guess is they held about 50 lbs of propane. Some of the camps had electricity, but no one was crazy enough to use electric heat – sometimes it would get 30 below zero in the winter. They all had wood stoves and in the forest there’s plenty of firewood available. Some of the camps had no electric service at all, and some were only accessible by boat. I suppose now some of them might have rooftop solar for lights and a few other conveniences, but propane still makes the most sense for hot water and for cooking, and wood stoves for heat. As far as I know, none of the camps used gas generators. They just enjoyed roughing it with wood stoves and kerosene lanterns.

I took this pic of Blue Mt Lake in the ADK after climbing to the top of Blue Mt. The outlet on the upper left is the Marion River, which connects with Racquette Lake on the horizon. Sorry for the digression, but the ADK is in my blood, and I get emotional whenever I start thinking about the stamping grounds of my youth and the days when I paddled my canoe from 7th Lake to Saranac Lake and back - a memorable 3 week camping trip in wilderness.

My mom told me that in her childhood, she watched the men cut 3’ thick blocks of ice from the lake with big ice-cutting saws, load it onto sleighs pulled with a team of horses, and deliver it to the camps to be stored in their icehouses. If the ice was stored below grade and covered with a couple feet of sawdust, which was also plentiful, the ice would keep all summer. ‘Refrigerators’ were called “ice boxes”, because that’s what they were.  

Off grid systems, for those who can afford them, are good, but battery backup is expensive. One way to save on the size and the cost is to discipline yourself to get along with less electricity. The obvious advantage of being off grid, besides having no electric bill, is that in many instances, like in the case of blackouts from the aftermath of a storm or a terrorist attack, the grid can be down for several days or more, but your system would still be working.

Emergency small off grid systems are a way to get by in a prolonged blackout, with enough power to at least keep food from spoiling in your refrigerator. I’m expecting more and longer blackouts during the next decade because the grid is fast becoming more unreliable due to being integrated with intermittent wind and solar. But even with a little off grid system for emergency backup, there are limitations, which I’ll cover under the ‘Bad’.

I have a 600 watt system off grid with a 200 amp-hour lithium battery and a 1000 watt inverter. It was a kit that I assembled and mounted by myself. I mounted it on the base of a swivel chair so I could turn it from time to time throughout the day (I’m retired) to follow the sun, and I built a frame that can be lowered or raised with the seasons. The kit cost about $2500. I wrote about it here, along with half a dozen other energy-saving ideas, starting with the simplest - like a clothesline - LOL. The off grid solar system has one disappointing drawback which I didn’t know about until after installation. I’ll tell you about it later.

The Bad –   The limitation of sufficient solar radiation to an average of about 6 hours out of 24 is even further limited by days of clouds and storms. This inconstancy of energy supply is exactly what the grid does not need. Productivity in the economy is dependent on a steady supply of electricity. The shortage of supply at dusk, at night, and during cloudy days has to be made up by power plants that can be cranked up on demand. But that is the most inefficient way to run a power plant. Once you’ve built the coal or gas or nuclear power plant, and put all that money into the construction and maintenance and personnel training , the best and most efficient return on that investment is to keep the plant running around the clock. Needless to say, we’d be better off without the on again - off again interruptions of solar.

It gets worse. When the sun is shining brightly around mid-day, a large solar plantation can put out more energy than is needed. This causes several problems. When there’s more supply being generated around midday hours than grid demand calls for the excess, unneeded energy is “curtailed” by the grid operators, forcing the solar plant producer to either stop exporting electricity to the grid, or export it to another grid - if there’s another grid that can use the energy, which is very unlikely. In effect, the energy is wasted, making the whole system more expensive for everybody. Backup batteries are a possible way to utilize the excess, but the economics are terrible.

The only thing worse than wasting the energy is to pay the solar companies to waste it, subsidizing their loss with taxpayer dollars during the times when they’re producing power but not making any money. The temporary wholesale price that the grid operators are willing to pay during excess solar power supply can drop like a rock, sometimes even go negative. In the UK, energy policies handle this the way governments tackle most problems - they throw money at it. They hand out more subsidies to the solar energy producers. They actually pay the producers enough to make up the difference between market rates and their cost. This is covered with “CfDs” (contracts for the difference). Whatever is not covered by subsidies has to be born by the consumers in higher electric rates.

Of course, one other option, mentioned earlier, is to store the excess in batteries. Either way, energy and money are both wasted. Grid-size battery banks are very, very expensive, adding to the total cost of going with solar, and the backup will never be sufficient.

Where does all this leave the fossil fuel or nuclear power producers who are not getting any such subsidy? It makes them unprofitable, because they have to either decrease output to save money, or sell power below cost. It’s not very smart to make our best sources of steady electric power unprofitable.

Another bad thing about solar is the dearth of sunshine in the winter, when the hours of daylight are less if you don’t happen to live on the equator. The extreme case would be at the poles - the land of the midnight sun in summer, which has no sun in winter. Electric heat is out of the question when the temp is way below zero, and even keeping the lights on all day because of darkness means increased demand in the very season when supply is lowest.

I’m still not through with the Bad…

Panels generally are guaranteed for 25 years and degrade 1 or 2% per year. Inverters only have a 15 year lifetime so have to be replaced.

Backup batteries also degrade and need replacing every 10-15 years. It’s economically impossible to have enough backup for grid scale. Besides, batteries are very inefficient in extremely cold weather, below zero. They charge very slowly, or if cold enough, can’t even be recharged at all unless you use energy to warm them up first! EV car owners learned this the hard way last winter.

Compared to the typical 60 -100 year longevity of coal, gas and nuclear power generation, solar panels, inverters, and backup batteries not only have to be replaced every decade or two - they also have to be disposed of - mostly in landfills! More on that later. If solar plants have to be replaced 3 times in 50-60 years, we’re not being realistic about the cost unless we triple it when comparing with fossil fuels, and then don’t forget to add in the cost of waste disposal, for there is very little solar that can be recycled, at least not at all close to economically.  

When solar panels are placed on farmland, which makes me sick, I don’t call them solar farms, which would sound too nice. I call them plantations, because the word ‘plantations’ reminds me of the South and the days of slavery. Recent government policies and mandates are a little like slavery for all of us.

A megawatt rating for a solar project is deceptive. The system will only produce about 25% of the rating in actual watt hours. So a 10 megawatt solar plantation will only produce about 2.5 meagwatts, because solar panels only produce an average of 6 hours of significant power per day – more in summer; less in winter. That’s averaged out over a year and over many locations. But averages are tricky numbers. It doesn’t help to know the average if I’m enduring a week with no sun – or, in the case of far north Alaskans, if there’s no sun at all for a few months every winter.

Even getting too much sun is bad. In extremely hot weather, the photovoltaic panels aren’t as efficient, and batteries charge up faster, but their lifetimes are shortened.

I said I’d tell you about the unexpected drawback to my little off grid solar backup system. Last winter, when the temp got down to about 10F, my system wouldn’t put out any juice. I checked and found the battery wasn’t taking a charge. Come to find out that’s part of the design in the built-in controls in the battery charger. That’s because lithium batteries can be damaged if they’re charged at below freezing temps. One of the reasons I got the system was because I expect our unreliable grid to have blackouts during cold snaps. But my system won’t be any good during a cold snap! Grrrr.  I need to build in a little heat, maybe from a 75 watt light bulb, in the box containing the battery, using a percentage of the solar power to keep the battery warm. Back to the drawing board…

The Ugly – As I wrote in Wind Turbines - A Heartbreaking Story, “The story starts in far off in foreign lands. Those backup batteries need rare earth minerals and nickel and copper and cobalt and lithium and more. These minerals have to mined somewhere. The mining operations are destructive to the environment, usually done with heavy diesel equipment, but sometimes, in poor countries, for some minerals slave labor is used, and sometimes even children are exposed to hard, dirty work in toxic materials.”

open pit mining - I’m not against it, unless it’s being done unnecessarily and for the wrong reasons, like for “renewables”

Then there’s the despoiling of our formerly beautiful landscapes.

Ugly -     “White House Finalizes Solar Expansion Plan. The Biden administration said it had finalized a plan to accelerate the development of solar energy on 31 million acres in federal lands (BLM) in 11 western states, eyeing high solar radiation and low conflicts with wildlife and plant habitats.” Western federal lands are a long way from demand centers – a lot more building of substations and transmission lines needed? What about the deer, elk, antelope, mt sheep, bears, coyotes, etc?

The 60 MW Summit Farms Solar facility in Currituck County NC. (CJ photo by Don Carrington) - 2.5 miles long; 1/2 mile wide section of good land gone - get ready for even higher food costs

replacing good farmland with solar panels is Ugly.

“Concerns about the recently completed 60-megawatt Summit Farms Solar energy facility, made possible by a contract with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was the final straw. In February, the county banned new solar projects. The 650-acre project [contains] 255,000 individual solar panels” The Carolina Journal, 9/15/24

deforestation is ugly and counterproductive if you actually want to reduce CO2

- at least when Weyerhauser logs timber, they do a nice job of replanting - not so with solar plantations - this is another thing I get emotional about - I love our forests

When I wrote about the destruction of the environment by wind turbines (here’s that link again) most of the same arguments also apply to solar.

The lifetimes are just about as short, and the difficulty and expense of recycling all that glass is just about as bad – and the landfills will fill up just about as fast.