Michael Shellenberger's Mad at Solar Panels. Too Cute Substack Fallacy.

SEE VIDEO: WHY DECOMMISSIONED SOLAR PANELS ARE NOT DEAD YET.  

Like flip phones, CRT monitors, hotel TVs, ex-boyfriends, and used cars, your decision to electively upgrade to a newer solar panel does not mean the ex-panel's life won't go on.

I was coached that people don't have time to read everything, so here's the jist... Shellenberger's thesis is that solar panels are being upgraded far sooner than their 30 year warranty or 40 year estimated lifespan would have buyers assume. That's true, I just gave a presentation on that at NERC.org.  But the reason for the upgrades is not that the used panels are failing or are waste... It's because 

• the price and efficiency are falling, 
• the number of roofs is finite, 
• the cost of siting big solar fields near populated areas is skyrocketing
• early adapters like to upgrade to something new
• AND by 2028, virtually every older working will panel be cost-driven to replace

I have a whole presentation explaining this (Start at 2h 30min, NERC.org recorded session). Like desktop CRTs and Pentium 4 laptops, the solar panels are all going to get electively upgraded.

BUT  like those other items, the secondhand market is gobbling up replaced solar panels. And here's where the circular economy doesn't revolve around you, Michael Shellenberger - a 50% efficient panel replaced by a 100% efficient panel in Vermont GENERATES MORE KW IN AFRICA THAN THE NEW ONE DOES IN VERMONT.

Check out @AdamMinter's Twitter reply string to @ShellenbergerMD (he's not an MD, btw, he uses his first and middle initial).

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Long version... 

Hail - or hammer? - damaged panels on Vermont off-grid solar home

Two friends sent me / tagged me concerning rants by Michael Shellenberger, one at a 45ish minute mark during his interview on the Joe Rogen podcast... the other in a twitter skirmish.

The first pal is a conservative engineer who has been a big supporter of mine in trying to correct the false narratives around e-waste secondhand trade. The second is Author Adam Minter, who sent as well a link to his Twitter response to Shellenberger.

I was not familiar with Shellenberger (and have never listened to Joe Rogen before, he seems like a guppy who accepts anything Shellenberger says with "ditto"). But clearly, Shellenberger is trying to create a narrative about solar panels being exaggerated and subsidized.

DON'T TRY THIS AT HOME 

(video shortened from 35 minutes, which means this may skip important safety procedures... view at your own risk)

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I happen to agree with a few of Shellenberger's points. Few people have died from nuclear power, and shutting down nuclear power plants (something I was passionate about at 17 years old) is not good for the climate.  

But nuclear was, probably, the most government-subsidized industry in human history. It took decades to turn a profit (most bond-funded nukes defaulted at least twice, government issued new bonds to complete nuclear power plant cost overruns... they were like Boston's "Big Dig", too big a sunk investment to let go). 

But there are two big lies in Shellenberger's analysis.  First, that the cost of mining and production cancels out the photovoltaic energy value?  Seriously?  The fact that there's little metal to recover in a solar panel (one of his "ah-hah"s) shows there's little mining - at least, as compared to a nuclear or coal fired power plant. He only talks about upstream "debits" when he talks about solar panels, when those costs can be applied to everything... cars, bikes, gasoline engines... There's no bigger critic of mining subsidies than yours truly, but this is patently ridiculous.

The second big lie will be familiar to blog readers. Several times, Shellenberger makes the unfounded claim that solar panels are not reused in the secondhand market but are "dumped in Africa". On the Joe Rogan broadcast, he shows a photo of an African dump which is visibly full of 30 year old junk reused for years, and calls it e-waste, and says solar panels are e-waste when discarded... and therefore the photo (with no solar panels I can see) are evidence of dumping of solar panels.

Cringeworthy, Shellenberger. Criminally negligent fallacy. I'm all for critical thinking, and I like to hear these arguments, but that's an example of trying to "build facts" out of crap.

As Adam points out, in just one example, "EnergyBin has around 5 million pieces of used and surplus PV eqpt on the site at any given time (it varies), and they're not alone". 372 lots of used panels sold on eBay this month ...

When Shellenberger is talking about "end of life" solar panels, he seems unaware that a 40 year solar panel life is about as long as the time one has to completely re-build a nuclear power plant, which is like a bridge, infrastructure that gets brittle and has to be decommissioned.

Shellenberger is wrong to think that if a solar panel is upgraded, that solar panels DON'T last 40 years, just as his woke anti-business Basel Action Network counterpart was about 4 year old CRT monitors 20 years ago.  Harvard Business Review study is paywalled, but if it comes to the conclusion that the production cost of the panels and payback has been exaggerated, they too neglected the Secondhand market.

Ask the expert in Secondhand...