Comment Solar Recycling Is Not Happening (Score 1) 338
Solar panel efficiency degrades over time, eventually you need to replace the worn out panels. They end up in a landfill instead of being recycled. The panels contain toxic materials and the costs to recycle them are not worth the investment. Wind turbine blades are similarly difficult and expensive to recycle. A recycling center will go out of business if they tried it. So they keep piling up with no end in sight.
Another interesting factoid... If everyone is driving an EV the existing power grid (even one heavily using green energy) would not be up to the challenge of charging everyone's EV. Not by a long shot. We are talking orders of magnitude of additional power being required. Add in business EV use and it gets far worse. A warehouse with say 100 tractor trailers and fork lifts all EVs could not actually be permitted because the power draw would cause problems to the local grid. The amount of wattage required is mind blowing. The business would need to run their own power plant. Companies that have been doing that for decades would include Pratt & Whitney who run their plants on generators powered by jet engines on the ground. They are a defense contractor and needed to ensure they could keep running even if the grid went down. They push what electricity they don't use back to the grid. But were they to take only from the grid; the grid would be incapable of supplying that much power.
What is the solution? We need to start constructing new nuclear reactors using modern designs which are many times safer than the ones we built 50 years ago. It is impossible for these new designs to experience a core meltdown. They can be far smaller and more efficient. They can use a variety of isotope fuels including nuclear waste. You can still take the holistic approach adding in multiple forms of power including green energy. The two main fusion designs are nowhere near practical. Using either high energy plasma contained in a magnetic torus (donut) or many lasers focused on a isotope target are not practical. I believe they recently reached an ever so slight increase in efficiency above breaking even. A UK design is more promising. They fire an isotope pellet into an isotope target, producing a brief fusion reaction which heats solid lithium that melts and generates the heat to create steam. It stops seconds after each firing. So they just fire another pellet every few seconds. This design is inexpensive and can scale and can be turned off near instantly. It has almost no waste byproducts. The problem? It needs to compete against designs that have spent billions perhaps trillions of dollars and such a simple design makes them obsolete. So they have been trying to suppress this new design from reaching fruition.