Solar Panels Produce Massive
Emissions, Data Says
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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.
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