Part 1: Resisting Renewables — How Sustainable Mining and Recycling is Transforming Renewable Energy
During a recent discussion with a friend my attention was brought to an article published in the Denton-Record Chronicle back in 2016 about renewable energy. Written by Ed Ireland of the Barnett Shale Energy Education Council, I found this article to be a comprehensive account of renewable scepticism and wanted to write up a properly researched response to his claims. Due to the length of my response, this article will be broken up into five parts and will include the relevant sections of the original text quoted in italics. Although I do not claim to be an expert on renewable energy — I am just a student with enough spare time over the holidays to do some research after all — I hope that this series of articles will serve as an introductory resource for PPE students (including myself) interested in studying renewable energy technology.
“Almost daily, we read headlines that say renewables are on track to replace fossil fuels and move the world toward a low-carbon future. Such platitudes appear to give credibility to the notion that the best days of the oil and gas industry are behind us. But those assertions are unrealistic.
The reality is that wind and solar are dependent on fossil fuels. They cannot exist without oil and natural gas.
Fossil fuels are required to manufacture wind and solar equipment, transport and construct them…”¹
It is undoubtedly true, as the author claims, that current wind and solar industries rely, as all industries do, on fossil fuels for a variety of services. Fossil fuels are present in the mining industry which supplies the renewable industry with the steel, quartz, lithium and various other materials necessary for building wind and solar farms. Producing renewable technology requires factories to refine these raw materials which are largely powered by coal and gas. The transportation necessary for shipping these materials around the country is powered by fossil fuels as well.
The reliance of wind and solar industries on fossil fuels is not, however, a relationship of long-term dependency as the author would have you believe. The solar and wind industries can, and likely will opperate without fossil fuels in future — a claim that no doubt invites a healthy dose of scepticism. To show how environmentally hazardous practices are being replaced by more sustainable ones, let’s look at emerging renewable practices in mining and recycling industries associated with the production of solar panels.
The manufacturing of the photovoltaic (PV or solar) cells which are the main technical component of solar panels first requires the mining of quartz.² Once mined, quartz, or silicon dioxide (SiO2) is typically refined into either polycrystalline or monocrystalline silicon, turned into crystal ingots, and then formed into the silicon wafers used in a PV cell.³ The current refinery process necessary to produce silicon uses large furnaces which, in line with the author’s claims, require significant amounts of energy to run and as such often require fossil fuels as power.⁴ Furthermore, the product of refining quartz produces toxic waste in the form of silicon tetrachloride that can cause health problems if not disposed of correctly.⁵
Sustainable Mining
However, despite these present issues with mining, progress towards more environmentally friendly practices is already being made. Rio Tinto, for example, are currently implementing several carbon-saving initiatives throughout their mines to meet environmental objectives set by the Paris Climate Agreement. In their Kennecott copper mine the mining giant has committed to a 65% reduction to the annual carbon footprint of the mine through the purchasing of renewable energy certificates (RECs) from Rocky Mountain Power.⁶ Although RECs are more complex on a technical level, the certificates effectively mean that the power once generated by a now decommissioned coal-fired plant will instead be generated by renewable energy sources. Other mining companies such as Gold Fields Mining announced mid-last year that they would also be switching to a renewable-based approach to their gold mine in Western Australia as the second part of a $112 million hybrid renewable energy power station comes online later this year.⁷ Contrary to the view of renewable sceptics these projects serve as clear evidence not only of the capacity for solar production to become self-reliant, but also of a changing attitude towards sustainability more generally.
Chemical Waste Management
In a similar way, the waste management of solar production is being improved through safe silicon recycling practices becoming standard around the world.
The problem with the waste management industry in the past has simply been that sustainable recycling was not always practiced due to some country’s relaxed regulatory standards and the high up-front costs of recycling infrastructure.⁸ During 2008 unprecedented supply and demand disparaties pressured Chinese regulators into relaxing their regulatory standards with regards to the pollution output of factories.
As Figure 1 demonstrates the price of polysilicon peaked dramatically in 2008 at $475/kg before falling quickly back down to a stable price of around $13/kg in the early 2010s. During this regulatory lapse Loyang Zhonggui High-Technology Co., a supplier of silicon for Suntech Power Holdings made headlines for its irresponsible dumping of toxic chemicals near a local primary school which residents described as producing “poison air”.¹⁰ Responding to this incident China has since renewed its focus on reducing industrial pollution as the CCP has since moved to close 40% of China’s factories in late 2017 for breaching emissions limits.¹¹ Disasters like this undoubtedly reflect poorly upon the solar industry, but evidence is showing that with sufficient regulatory oversight these problems can be avoided and the solar production chain can remain environmentally friendly in future.
One step yet to be taken towards making the Chinese solar production chain more environmentally friendly will be tackling the challenge of old solar panel recycling. In a similar sense to the Loyang pollution problem, the absence of a well-regulated solar panel recycling industry in China has some concerned, with recent predictions from IRENA suggesting that China could accumulate up to 20 million tons of PV panel waste by 2050.¹² The evolution of the Chinese solar recycling industry to a more environmentally-conscious model will no doubt be an interesting story to monitor over the next decade, however the issues with solar recycling are evidently an issue of government will at this stage rather than a strictly technological challenge. As companies like Ecoactiv, a solar recycling company based in Melbourne have shown, the technology for recycling solar panels is already well-developed but needs government support to establish itself before another waste management crisis occurs.
If regulators can act now to address these emerging issues whilst maintaining their support for eco-friendly innovation, the renewable energy industry can maintain its environmentally friendly status into the future. As always, enthusiasm must be tempered with data-driven analysis and pragmatic policy making, but as the rest of this article series will show, a world where clean energy powers our ambition is no longer one of distant potential, but is instead one of real possibility.
[1] Ed Ireland, “Renewable Energy Depends on Fossil Fuels,” Denton Record-Chronicle, September 20, 2016, accessed 6 January, 2020, http://www.bseec.org/renewable_energy_depends_on_fossil_fuels?fbclid=IwAR1GiZ9WUIyuOit523hWWTFzA9fljzwADv2j5B_sKugD9195qbhvawISDhw.
[2] Office of Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy, “Solar Photovoltaic Cell Basics,” August 16, 2013. Accessed January 17, 2020. https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/articles/solar-photovoltaic-cell-basics.
[3] Andrew Sendy, “What are the pros and cons of Monocrystalline, Polycrystalline and Thin Film solar panels?” August 23, 2017. Accessed 7 January, 2020. https://www.solarreviews.com/blog/pros-and-cons-of-monocrystalline-vs-polycrystalline-solar-panels.
[4] Dustin Mulvaney, “Solar Energy Isn’t Always as Green as You Think,” November 13, 2014. Accessed 7 January, 2020. https://spectrum.ieee.org/green-tech/solar/solar-energy-isnt-always-as-green-as-you-think.
[5] Ibid,.
[6] Betsy Lillian, “Kennecott Retiring Utah Coal Plant, Moving Toward RECs,” May 2, 2019. Accessed January 18, 2020. https://nawindpower.com/kennecott-retiring-utah-coal-plant-moving-toward-recs.
[7] Vanessa Zhou, “Gold Fields powers up Agnew renewable project,” Australian Mining, November 20, 2019, accessed January 18, 2020, https://www.australianmining.com.au/news/gold-fields-powers-up-agnew-renewable-project/.
[8] Ariana Cha, “Solar Energy Firms Leave Waste Behind in China,” The Washington Post, March 9, 2008, accessed 7 January, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/08/AR2008030802595.html.
[9] Ibid,.
[10] Debra Sandor, Sadie Fulton, Jill Engel-Cox, Corey Peck and Steve Peterson, “System Dynamics of Polysilicon for Solar Photovoltaics: A Framework for Investigating the Energy Security of Renewable Energy Supply Chains,” Sustainability 10 (2018): 1–27, accessed January 8, 2020, doi:10.3390/su10010160.
[11] Ibid,.
[12] Peter Dockrill, “China Has Shut Down Up to 40% of Its Factories in an Unprecedented Stand Against Pollution,” October 24, 2017. Accessed 16 January, 2020. https://www.sciencealert.com/china-shutting-40-factories-massive-effort-cut-pollution-carbon-pm2-5.
[13] IRENA, End-of-life management: Solar Photovoltaic Panels (Berlin: IRENA, 2016), 12.
