Solar Panels Produce Massive Emissions, Data Says

CV NEWS FEED // Journalist Michael Shellenberger has uncovered new data showing that solar energy is not as “clean” as the politicians pushing “green” policies claim.

“People say solar panels don’t produce carbon emissions, but they do,” Shellenberger at the beginning of a series of tweets. He cited a new study that found Chinese-made panels produce at least three times more emissions than claimed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

In just over a week, Shellenberger’s first tweet alone received 7.5 million views and nearly 20,000 “likes.”

Shellenberger is a longtime environmentalist and the founder of Environmental Progress, which describes its mission as “achieving nature, peace and prosperity for all.” He also founded the popular Substack newsletter “Public.” In 2008, Time Magazine declared him a “Hero of the Environment” under the “leaders and visionaries” category.

The findings about solar energy come amid renewed calls for President Joe Biden to declare a “climate emergency,” which would effectively give the government powers similar to those exercised under the three-year COVID-19 national emergency.

Climate Apocalypse Claims
In the past few months, many political figures have tied recent natural disasters across the country to “climate change.” In June, some Democratic members of Congress called on Biden to declare a climate emergency in response to wildfires in Canada.

The cries for an emergency declaration were even louder during the middle of last year. On July 20, 2022, Politico reported that “declaring a climate emergency could unlock potent tools for Biden.” That same day, the president stated that the climate is “an emergency,” and he “will look at it that way,” despite stopping short of declaring it as such.

In addition, Democrat-controlled state governments are increasingly passing “green” legislation. The manufacturing powerhouse of Michigan is considering a bill that seeks to make the state’s energy “carbon-free” in 12 years. California has already passed a similar law.

While the United States seems to be trending toward so-called “climate action,” many parts of Europe are pushing back, such as Sweden and the United Kingdom.

A key component of the “green,” “net-zero,” and “carbon-free” movements is their embrace of solar energy. “Green” activists bill solar power as a “clean” source of energy that is “carbon neutral.” They allege that compared to so-called “fossil fuels” such as oil and natural gas, solar panels do not produce carbon emissions.

However, as a researcher determined, this is far from the truth – and China may be to blame.

The Truth About Solar
In his bombshell series of tweets, Shellenberger posted an article by C.P. Colum and Lea Booth in collaboration with The Blind Spot, published by Shellenberger’s organization on July 3.

In it, the authors state that the Inflation Reduction Act, which Biden signed into law in August 2022, “gifted the renewables industry with billions of dollars worth of taxpayer-funded subsidies.”

The administration’s stated intention was to make the American energy supply “cleaner.” Colum and Booth pointed out, however, that new data proves solar or photovoltaic (PV) power is “dirtier than appreciated.”

Information unearthed by Environmental Progress points to a gaping oversight in how the figures influencing government net zero policy and investments in solar worldwide are compiled and collated due to the difficulty of collecting accurate information out of China, especially for the purification processes used to create silicon wafers.

The ‘Green’ Data-Industrial Complex
Colum, Booth, and Shellenberger name Ecoinvent as a major driver of this oversight. The little-known Swiss nonprofit database was founded by Dr. Rolf Frischknecht. According to Environmental Progress, Ecoinvent is “funded at least in part by the Swiss government and the photovoltaic industry.”

The authors called Ecoinvent “perhaps the world’s largest database on the environmental impact of renewables.” Its “data is relied on by institutions worldwide” such as the IPCC and the International Energy Agency (IEA) to “calculate their carbon footprint projections.”

These calculations are in turn cited by the Biden administration and other governments around the world as “evidence” to simultaneously push the “net-zero” agenda and investment in so-called “renewables.”

According to Colum and Booth, much information from Ecoinvent and similar databases originates from a “small number of data compilers, many if not all of them working in collaboration with the IEA.” The solar industry voluntarily submits this information “in response to academic surveys,” while “the nature and profile of the respondents is never publicy [sic] revealed, so that there is the potential for conflicts of interest to develop.”

Ecoinvent’s founder, Dr. Frischknecht, left the organization in 2021. He attributed his decision to his disagreement with how the database obtained its information.

Speaking with Environmental Progress, Frischknecht stated: “During my career I tried, and try, to be independent of direct, indirect and subtle attempts to influence the modeling or the data.”

China’s Role
Shellenberger highlighted that Ecoinvent’s data on solar panels conspicuously leaves out the country that produces more than 80% of the world’s solar panels: China.

Solar Panels More Carbon-Intensive Than Claimed

Ecoinvent, the world’s largest database on the environmental impact of renewables, has no data from China, even though it makes most of the world's solar panels by

This investigation was done in collaboration with Environmental Progress and The Blind Spot Last August, in an amalgamation of “The Green New Deal” meets “Build Back Better,” President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act gifted the renewables industry billions of dollars worth of taxpayer-funded subsidies. What few backing the bill realized was that the largest beneficiary would likely be China due to its expansive grip on the global solar photovoltaic (PV) industry. Worse than that, it might end up misdirecting the world’s clean energy efforts into dirtier than appreciated energy technologies because of the country’s ongoing dependence on coal-fired energy. Information unearthed by Environmental Progress, a nonprofit research organization, points to a gaping oversight in how the figures influencing government net zero policy and investments in solar worldwide are compiled and collated due to the difficulty of collecting accurate information out of China, especially for the purification processes used to create silicon wafers.

The key to this blind spot is that a small number of data compilers provides the source material for most of the assessments. And many, if not all, of them work in collaboration with the International Energy Agency (IEA). The industry voluntarily submits the data in response to academic surveys. The nature and profile of the respondents are never publicly revealed, so there is the potential for conflicts of interest to develop. A further puzzle is how that data feeds into an organization called Ecoinvent, a Swiss-based non-profit founded in 1998 that dubs itself “the world’s most consistent and transparent life cycle inventory database.” This data is relied on by institutions worldwide, including the IPCC and IEA itself, to calculate their carbon footprint projections, including the sixth assessment report published as recently as March 2023. Based on such data, the IPCC claims solar PV is 48 gCO2/kWh. But, as we’ll see below, a new investigation started by Italian researcher Enrico Mariutti 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 gCO2/kWh without. China’s Dirty Fuel Advantage Over the course of a four-month investigation, Environmental Progress has confirmed that Ecoinvent — perhaps the world’s largest database on the environmental impact of renewables — has no data from China about its photovoltaic industry. Meanwhile, the ultimate source of the IEA’s supposedly public data on PV carbon intensity is confidential, and the data, therefore, is unverifiable.

Much of the cradle-to-grave carbon intensity data that governments depend on to guide photovoltaic arrays are instead based on modeling assumptions that are likely to have grossly under-estimated — if not made up — solar’s carbon emissions because they cannot get insights from Chinese manufacturers. In its most recent report, the IEA predicts that China will continue to dominate solar energy production, delivering over 50 percent of solar PV projects globally by 2024. This trajectory is especially concerning given that China already commands most solar panel production. The IEA noted that in 2022 China’s manufacturing capacity for wafers, cells, and modules rose 40-50 percent and almost doubled for silicon. In fact, according to market intelligence firm Bernreuter Research, in 2021, China produced 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. How China amassed that market concentration remains an inconvenient truth, all too readily swept under the rug by those pushing for net zero policies. What we know for sure is that up until the mid-2000s, the market was dominated by Japanese, US, and German manufacturers, many of whom were in the midst of automating their production lines, when Chinese manufacturers swooped in to take their market share. The disruption happened in under a decade, with China’s global share of PV production surging from 14 percent in 2006 to 60 percent by 2013.

But the 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. Basic reasoning suggests the manufacturing shift must have added to solar’s carbon intensity. But as Environmental Progress has learned, nobody in the carbon counting world has seen fit to research by how much. The modelers are estimating the carbon emissions of solar production as if the panels are still made mostly in the West, grossly underestimating their carbon intensity, even as governments rush to draft and implement net zero policy based on the very same flawed data.