We have a giant fusion machine in the sky delivering energy in great excess what we use, and we only capture a tiny fraction of it at the moment. We can make each household practically independent. Fission and (hopefully soon) fusion will be good for meeting grid demand when renewables can't, but a distributed grid is simply more resilient to everything, from local events to country and nation-wide disruption of central generation points.
- https://www.nsenergybusiness.com/news/veolia-opens-new-facil...
- https://www.6wresearch.com/market-takeaways-view/top-solar-p...
- https://solarstoragextra.com/five-companies-spearheading-sol...
Apparently it's still mostly about Aluminum and Glass as that's 95% of the weight of panels. The silicon is often recycled for precious-metals recovery and not circular. ROSI does try to do high-purity recovery. It seems volumes are still on the smaller side, probably because most of the volume has been deployed in the last 5-10y and they have 20-30y life expectancy. Still a lot of recycling.
a primer on actual numbers of recyled solar panels [0] [1]
[0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12260433/
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09560...
stop eating startup and journalism headlines good intentions promises
Not to discount your point of renewables having massive issues, they just simply do not compare to the destruction that is caused by getting fossil fuels out of the ground and the damage it does once we start burning it