Solar Energy Creates Toxic Waste
What Is the Trade-off
The prices of oil and coal soaring and countries around the world are considering creating massive solar farms to generate electricity. The world has a shortage of polysilicon, the key component of sunlight-capturing wafers used in solar panels. This shortage drives up the cost of solar energy technology creating added cost to solar power adaptation.
Polysilicon is made from sand, the earth's most abundant substance but, is tricky to manufacture. Production requires massive amounts of energy. One wrong move in the production process can introduce impurities and an entire batch is ruined. The main challenge, however, is disposal of the waste. Each ton of polysilicon produced generates four tons of silicon tetrachloride liquid waste that when exposed to air, can transform into acids and poisonous hydrogen chloride gas. The waste and or the gases produced cannot be released into the air.
With the demand for Polysilicon at an all time high and about to increase 10 fold at least within the next 5–6 years, China may become the worlds leading, if not only, supplier. This could spell disaster for the Chinese ecology and global air pollution. China has a very poor track record of pollution control, they just don't seem to care. Likewise the international corporations who deal with China.
Is this a necessary trade-off? Is it at all possible to slow down the developement of solar energy until a viable waste treatment system is in place? Is the resulting pollution just too high a price to make solar energy a viable option?
If solar energy is creating caustic waste, can it be called a “Green” option?
"Solar Energy Firms Leave Waste Behind in China
By Ariana Eunjung Cha, Washington Post Foreign Service, Sunday, March 9, 2008; Page A01
GAOLONG, China – The first time Li Gengxuan saw the dump trucks from the nearby factory pull into his village, he couldn't believe what happened. Stopping between the cornfields and the primary school playground, the workers dumped buckets of bubbling white liquid onto the ground. Then they turned around and drove right back through the gates of their compound without a word.
This ritual has been going on almost every day for nine months, Li and other villagers said.
In China, a country buckling with the breakneck pace of its industrial growth, such stories of environmental pollution are not uncommon. But the Luoyang Zhonggui High-Technology Co., here in the central plains of Henan Province near the Yellow River, stands out for one reason: It's a green energy company, producing polysilicon destined for solar energy panels sold around the world. But the byproduct of polysilicon production – silicon tetrachloride – is a highly toxic substance that poses environmental hazards.
“The land where you dump or bury it will be infertile. No grass or trees will grow in the place. . . . It is like dynamite – it is poisonous, it is polluting. Human beings can never touch it,” said Ren Bingyan, a professor at the School of Material Sciences at Hebei Industrial University.
The situation in Li's village points to the environmental trade-offs the world is making as it races to head off a dwindling supply of fossil fuels.
Forests are being cleared to grow biofuels like palm oil, but scientists argue that the disappearance of such huge swaths of forests is contributing to climate change. Hydropower dams are being constructed to replace coal-fired power plants, but they are submerging whole ecosystems under water.
Likewise in China, the push to get into the solar energy market is having unexpected consequences.
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