Hacker News Reader

Comment by dingnuts | Hacker News Reader

skimming the article it looks like this excludes transmission, construction, and disposal costs

Do you think those are significantly different for solar versus other technologies? Seems they would be right in line with anything else...

Capacity factor for renewables is generally lower than thermal plant, so some transmission costs may be higher. Though batteries firming output mitigates that for example.

Right, and the majority of solar is getting installed with batteries these days because the really profitable hours are in the evening. Something like 60% of new solar in 2024 in the US had batteries on site.

Wind + solar + batteries at one site can be a good combo.

Depending on when the wind blows! (Which in most of the US is more at night, IIRC?)

For the UK there is more wind in the winter, solar in the summer.

Intraday anti-correlation is there, but it's more complicated:

https://bmrs.elexon.co.uk/generation-forecast-for-wind-and-s...

The US picture varies a lot over the contiguous states, I think, but often, again, there is anti-correlation in general.

Let's not forget the cost of carbon emissions which are not normally accounted for in pricing fossil fuels.

This. We're about to find out how expensive those are going to be...

Also, the health impacts on us, by breathing the fumes of fossil fuel power plants, etc. The cost of fossil fuel is much more than a price tag in the electricity bill.

In the UK, wind is primarily in Scotland away from most of the population - people don’t build where it’s windy.

So transmission of solar should be less, as the sun shines everywhere, and people like to build houses where it shines the most.

Hopefully coal is not built close to the population either...

There is no coal-fired electricity generation in the UK now.

But no, neither coal nor nukes would be welcome in cities just to reduce transmission costs!

Not now, certainly. But back in the day... There are a number of disused coal power stations in big cities. The Tate Modern gallery in London is an old coal-fired power station, say.

We wouldn't site coal (or nuke) generation there now because (a) we can do long-distance low-loss transmission (in GB, transmission losses are ~2%, distribution losses ~5%), and because we know about the bad effects of the air pollution etc.

They knew to some extent about (b) when what's now the Tate Modern was built, but regulation was relatively weak until the 1950s, so there was nothing stopping them building it. _Knowing_ there's a problem is insufficient; making rules based on problems is required.

Agreed.

It is. Output of solar panels are proportionate to areas and they contain all sorts of heavy metals.

No, solar panels do not contain "all sorts of heavy metals," they leave the land open to all sorts of use afterwards (unlike fossil fuel infrastructure) and disposal is no more difficult than shipping the panels somewhere.

When a site is repowered with new panels, the old panels are often reused, as well, and there's a robust secondary market for panels.

In short: disposal costs are well in line with other technologies, at least according to this consultant (top hit on a web search):

https://thundersaidenergy.com/downloads/solar-power-decommis...

Solar panels are photodiode arrays. Photodiodes are made by lacing mid-purity Si with ultra toxic metals. More neurotoxic the better is the basic rule of all high-performance opto-electronics semiconductors. The less toxic you make, the worse they get, and less they responsive to longer wavelength lights.

In, Ga, As, P, Si, Zn, Se, Ge, Cd, Te, Pb, etc. The duh materials. Sometimes the whole panel is thin crystals of GaAs. You have to melt that down to recycle.

Key word here being "lacing." Tractors, trucks, and cars with lead acid batteries are far more dangerous to have out in a field than solar panels.

Usually lead used the solder, if there is lead, is the biggest risk!

Those metals are not like Mo additive on greases. The machines that contained those came with warnings long before Prop 65 or EU RoHS simply by toxicity. And deploying PVs is to scale that out into the fields. It's mildly insane thing to do.

Even nukes are more eco friendly, even if you include things Fukushima, maybe Chernobyl too. The elephant foot is going to passivate itself before the collapse of human civilization could occur. I don't know same can be said about panels blown away in rainstorms.

Show me a field deployment of GaAs! That stuff is so expensive AFAIK that it's almost only for space applications, though things may have moved since I last looked!

Most solar is monocrystalline Si with tiny amounts of dopants such as P and B, not especially difficult to deal with. Ag contacts, Al frames, more Si for the glass, and maybe most troublesome the plastic backing sheets and insulants.

We just are not spreading heavy metals on our fields.

P isn't a metal, isn't a heavy element, and isn't toxic except in the form of white phosphorus. It's what holds your DNA together and what your mitochondria use to fuel your cellular respiration. Perhaps coincidentally, it's the only element in your list that is used in practice as dopants for silicon solar cells. The other dopant used in practice, which you omitted, is boron, which also isn't especially toxic, and also isn't a metal or a heavy element.

GaAs photovoltaic cells, InGaAs photovoltaic cells, etc., do exist, but aren't used in utility-scale solar power, because their cost doesn't compensate for their performance. Some of the other elements you list are never used at all for photovoltaic cells to my knowledge.

Wherever you got this information from, you should killfile it and make sure you don't trust any more information from that source.

Actually, gallium has replaced boron as a dopant for Si PV cells, since it avoids an annoying kind of light-induced efficiency degradation that boron is subject to. I don't believe gallium is significantly toxic, and certainly not at the amounts used as a dopant.

The big heavy metal issue for PV has been lead for contact to the backing sheet, but this isn't an issue if you go with bifacial modules (no backing sheet).

I very much appreciate the corrections! Apparently there is one report of gallium poisoning in the medical literature; it was nonfatal but resulted in irreversible cardiomyopathy: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22024274/

https://www.pv-magazine.com/2020/06/13/the-weekend-read-gall... backs you up and also mentions that indium (also nontoxic, as far as anybody knows) has been tried but was not in mass use as of that article. https://www.pv-magazine.com/2022/05/24/gallium-doping-and-so... talks about the potential of "rejuvenating" gallium-doped PV cells.

It doesn't exclude construction. The abstract says they analyzed levelized cost of electricity (LCOE). LCOE includes investments, operations, and fuel, so it includes construction.

Transmission is more of a problem with the centralized forms of power generation? So transmission should be a net positive for solar?

Construction and disposal I'm not sure to be honest, intuitively I don't think those are much more expensive.

Transmission's somewhat more expensive for solar per kWh, because you're not producing at night, and you need to handle the full load during the day. That said, as batteries get cheaper they can alleviate this.

Is there a form of power that doesn't have these? A coal plant has all these plus fuel costs, workers to run the plant, parts for the turbines, and ash disposal to deal with.

Also storage

Reply on news.ycombinator.com