Solar was never green. The lifecycle footprint from manufacture to transportation, installation, and end of life is top-heavy, with materials and processes that produce a lot of pollution. That was true before China captured most of the market.
China made them cheaper.
[T]he majority of experts consulted by Environmental Progress agree that China’s competitive advantage did not lie in an innovative new technological process, but rather in the very same factors the country has always used to outcompete the West: cheap coal-fired energy, mass government subsidies for strategic industries, and human labor operating in poor working conditions.
The IPCC and everyone else, for that matter, had been peddling old data based on manufacturing in places like Europe that use Natural Gas to power their production facilities. But China produces “more than 80 percent of global solar-grade polysilicon, a critical input into solar arrays. It doesn’t stop there; China manufactures 97 percent of the global supply of solar wafers, another essential component.”
IPCC and others “claim solar PV is 48 gCO2/kWh. But, a new investigation started by Italian researcher Enrico Mariotti suggests that the number is closer to between 170 and 250 gCO2/kWh, depending on the energy mix used to power PV production. If this estimate is accurate, solar would not compare favorably with natural gas, which is around 50 gCO2/kWh with carbon capture, and 400 to 500 without.”
According to his findings, the carbon intensity of solar panels manufactured in China and installed in European countries like Italy was off by an order of magnitude. An initial back-of-the-envelope calculation put it at between 170 and 250g of carbon dioxide per kilowatt hour (kWh), as opposed to the official estimate from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) of 20-40g per kWh. Way off.
The scale of the IPCC’s undercount shocks once applied to the EU’s “clean” energy plans. Following Mariutti’s math, the esteemed scientific body underestimates the emissions from the EU’s solar installations built in 2022 alone by 5.4 to 7.6 million metric tons, equivalent to adding 3.4 to 4.8 million cars to the road.
While this makes for an interesting story, there is a bigger one. No one seems to care. They don’t want to invest in finding the truth, which suggests to me it is an inconvenient one, and if word got out, the general public might not be so impressed by billions of tax dollars invested in green technology to buy solar components from Chin made with dirty coal.
That’s not even the biggest act of fraud.
You can’t build any of it without fossil fuels. None of this is possible without large-scale mining operations. The rare earth metals and the not so rare have huge carbon footprints. Things like concrete and steel are impossible without coal, oil, or gas. There is no energy future free from fossil fuels, and the future promised is not cleaner than one without the so-called renewables (that need ot be replaced every decade or two).
Enrico Mariutti’s revelation is unpopular not just because it exposes fraud but because he is one of them. “An environmental obsessive passionate about facilitating the world’s transition from fossil fuels to cleaner forms of energy.” He’s still on board; he’s just asking everyone to be honest about it, which is more than they can promise or deliver because the lie isn’t just about how dirty the new technology is; it is that it has nothing to do with CO2 or saving the planet.
