About the Renewable Energy category

Industry Discussions Renewable Energy
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A great place to share news on the latest green energy developments and even discuss their merits.

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Indeed. Also a suitable place to discuss competitors or allied industries to renewable energy, for instance nuclear power and energy storage.

And, perhaps some broader discussions that are related to renewable energy, such as climate change and other environmental problems which are a primary driving force behind the policies that promote adoption of renewable energy and related clean energy technologies.

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The only “green” energy sources I would consider would be nuclear, hydro, and thermal.
I can’t think of a reason to utilize wind or solar with battery backup, for large scale power generation. Wind, solar, and batteries have no momentum to integrate to the grid so that every cycle has to be timed to meet the current grid power. Besides, we currently have no way to recycle windmill blades, solar panels, or lithium. We are creating an ecological disaster for future generations.

Solar has very limited niche applications which make sense where portability and resource scarcity are determining factors. We are still stuck with how to prevent the heavy metals from the panels from entering the environment.

Hydro and Thermal have very limited geological factors to be considered economical.

Nuclear is the way to go for compatible energy production if you are concerned about not adding to more CO2 into the atmosphere or the diminishing supplies of fossil fuels. Since CO2 is required for all aerobic life on the planet, I’m not against having more of it and greening the planet.

Having this category would be for niche concerns that will soon be rendered moot.
I guess Motely Fools hasn’t paid attention to what the future administration is going to do with all the subsidies that make most “green” generators profitable.

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I think you are wrong in saying lithium and solar panels cannot be recycled. People are working on lithium and cobalt recovery from batteries. Big problem is lack of supply until batteries wearout and need replacement. Probably another 5 yrs. For now mostly batteries damaged in accidents.

Solar panels are silicon and not hard to recycle. But processing sand might be cheaper. Why is landfill a concern? Mother nature slowly takes them back to sand.

We do know how to burn windturbine blades in a cement kiln. That gets some value from them. Not a real issue. They should last for decades.

Geothermal has much potential and not much development going on.

On hydro we have much undeveloped potential. Mississippi River system largest in the nation has only one hydro plant at Keokuk, IA. Built 1911. Lots of dams. Little hydro. What are we waiting for?

Almost no wave technology developed.

I agree nuclear has much potential once we develop waste disposal technology.

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I don’t know of a safe and economical example of recycling batteries containing lithium. Despite having the most comprehensive safety systems, the recycling plant in Missouri caught fire causing a large release of toxic fumes that endangered local residents.

Solar panels require special coal to manufacture the silicon and are coated with heavy metals that have been known to leach out while in use. They would obviously leach out when in a landfill.
As far as I know, windmill blades only last 20 years at most and the old ones have been put in landfills.

If you know of any examples of safe and economical recycling of lithium batteries, solar panels, and windmill blades, I’d be interested to know.

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Lithium and cobalt are valuable materials that do not go away. They can be recovered safely. Yes, lithium batteries can catch fire. Careful process required. Learning curve moving along. A very long way from saying it cannot be done.

Silicon is purified in the Siemens process. High purity sand or quartz is reduced to metilurgical grade silicon which chlorinated to trichlorosilane and distilled which is then converted back to silicon.

Used solar panels can probably be treated in Siemens process but you still the classical recycling problems of collecting them, removing the various connections, and then processing them. Sand might be cheaper. If you worry about dopants contaminating soil, how do they do in the rain?

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On windmill blades, the main problem is modern ones are much longer than the ones from 20 years ago. So most likely obsolesence. They can be burned in cement kilns. And probably can be chopped up and used as aggregate in cement or asphalt paving.

We seem to have a shortage of creativity here. Not a real problem but something for armchair greens to worry about.

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I already argued with you on the Energy and Utilities board about your misconceptions regarding wind, solar and batteries.

By they way coal, gas and oil are all dirty fossil fuel energy sources. When they are used for power generation, they are called thermal power generation.

Nuclear, biomass and waste power plants are called green thermal plants.

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Hi @pauleckler,

No, probably not.

Aggregate needs to be able to fully bind with the concrete on all surfaces.

The “plastics” in the blades will not do this very well. Also, the core of most blades is mostly Douglas fir. It would need to be removed.

I can tell you that removing the core is not easy since the outer shell is intimately bonded to the core on all surfaces.

The last time I went past the blade yards south of Sweetwater, TX, they had over 2,000 used blades sitting there, each from 150 to 210 feet long.

A company started cutting them into 40 foot pieces and hauling them away. (To what I do not know.) After 3 months, there was no more activity through the time I moved 2 years later, in 2021.

Stored blades are a fire hazard. They release a lot of toxic gases in the smoke. They are basically on the ground so fire crews have to avoid the smoke. We only have the water we carry on trucks. No hydrants.

Air drops of retardant are placed on the exposed brush but it is useless on the blades themselves.

When blades burn on a turbine, they are high and you are normally no closer the 250 feet to the base of the turbine. Too much danger of falling debris. A 150 lb door hatch frame falling 180 to 250 feet can ruin your day. If a blade comes down at an angle, it can reach out quite unpredictably with a spring bounce.

Out of 9 turbine fires I worked, I had only one blade drop. I was 300 feet away and felt it hit in my feet. A 7+ ton blade falling 200 feet, almost flat when it hit. Luckily, the wind was calm that day after the turbine caught fire. The brush near the base was thin with lots of bare ground. I had 2 truck there plus 2 more from a neighboring dept. Four hours into it, I was able to get 2 dozers from another fire our dept was on and had them cut a line around it. Everything burned itself out. No run-away brush fire, which is normally the largest threat. No water sprayed! Best fire I ever had.

Where are they doing this?

Does that help you?

Gene
All holdings and some statistics on my Fool profile page
Profile - gdett2 - Motley Fool Community (Click Expand)

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I should have said geo-thermal such as done in Iceland.

Wind and solar with battery back up are subsidy farming operations. Without government subsidies, they are not economically viable.

They also require fossil fuel back up because battery technology is exceedingly expensive and currently doesn’t have the necessary storage capacity for extended cloudy days or extended periods of windless days.
I think we would be much better off just using the fossil fuel plants without spending billions for intermittent power generation that requires exorbitant acreage, transmission lines, and power inverters.
They complicate grid stability because they are asynchronous and have to follow what is on the grid every cycle - they have no momentum themselves.
Modern fossil fuel power generation plants are not very dirty unless you think of CO2 as a pollutant.
I consider CO2 as plant food.

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As I understand, solar panels leach out while installed in the field contaminating the soil.
I don’t know of any safe and economical process to recycle lithium batteries, solar panels or windmill blades.
The Missouri recycling plant that I referenced in the above comment, was the most modern attempt to reclaim battery material and still burned up.
If you can point to examples of successful recycling facilities of lithium batteries, solar panels, or windmill blades, I’d appreciate it.

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And as that happens, the solar panels stops working. So first thing engineer would try is locking in the doping agent. First use an insoluble dopant if you can. Or cover it with a transparent coating or film to protect it. Quantities involved are probably minuscule. I’d be surprised if a typical solar panel has even half an ounce of dopant.

Anytime you deal with energy devices, there are risks. Usually its the organics in the battery that burns. Not the lithium or cobalt. Solid state batteries should be less likely to burn.

I insist the implication that batteries cannot be recycled safely is simply wrong. Yes, the technology needs to improved. But lets not give up on it. People are working on it.

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Here is one

Seems like a big building if they are aren’t recycling lots of batteries already

image
image693Ă—309 70.8 KB

Redwood Materials: 2024 TIME100 Most Influential Companies | TIME

In January, Redwood broke ground on its second facility, a $3.5 billion plant in South Carolina.

Some of their key customers include:

  • Ford
  • Toyota
  • Volkswagen Group (including Audi)
  • Panasonic
  • Amazon
  • Lyft

Mike

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Does Redwood Materials make a profit or are they dependent upon grants/subsidies?
Have they had any fires or other accidents?
What do they do with the materials they can’t recycle?

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I don’t have any inside info and you should be able to search for all this on line as well as anyone. I’ve just happened to have read about them every so often over the years.
As I understand, they recycle batteries from consumer electronics, cars and industrial waste (where they make batteries). And they sell the materials to battery makers.
And are operationally profitable (i.e. costs to recycle are less than what they get when selling the materials) but not profitable since they are still expanding.

There are several profitable companies that have been recycling the lead-acid batteries for decades. The volume of materials per car for lead-acid is much much smaller than Li-ion batteries for EVs – have you ever questioned this business?

Mike

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I was looking for more info from you since you brought up this company on a site dedicated to financial matters. After a cursory search, I only found info about them getting additional funding from mostly carmakers.

I believe the EV car market is already saturated and growth will slow considerably in the coming years, at least with the current usage of lithium batteries. The infrastructure for charging is still problematic.
Proposed solid state batteries show promise to rid the industry from using a neurotoxin (lithium) as a major component.
If new tech for batteries proves viable, EVs and battery backups would have a boost.
Unfortunately, the green dream of electrifying everything, is not possible by using windmills and solar panels. There is not enough copper let alone the rare minerals needed to implement a grid spread out over miles to collect low intensity, intermittent power.
The green dream of net zero has proven to be an expensive experiment that has failed to provide reliable 24/7 energy, destroyed environments, and killed uncounted numbers of birds and bats. All for the imaginary problem of climate change.

  1. Arctic summer sea ice has not disappeared.
  2. Sea level rise has NOT accelerated.
  3. There is no tropical troposphere hotspot as modeled.
  4. Pacific Islands have not shrunk. Darwin knew why in 1834.
  5. Polar bears and the Great Barrier Reef are thriving.
  6. Renewables are expensive by themselves, intermittent, and provide no grid inertia which leads to blackouts.

You don’t have to be a right-wing conservative to oppose the alarmists. Only sentient.

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Good point, Brad. But i have to quibble with renewables are expensive.

No fuel to purchase should make them less costly than fossil fuels.

Much depends on how the bean counters allocate costs. You suspect heavy financing costs. Plus estimates for construction of grid connections, etc. When fully depreciated renewables should be less costly.

Ultimately it comes down to service life and maintenance costs. Time will tell. At the moment its mostly an estimate based on best available data.

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After a cursory search I found two important facts:

First, going back to your original ask about are there any successful lithium battery recyclers
(from ChatGPT)
Yes, there are several successful lithium battery recycling plants around the world. Here are a few notable examples:

  1. Ecobat has opened its first lithium-ion battery recycling facility in North America, located in Casa Grande, Arizona. This facility is part of Ecobat’s global network, which includes similar plants in Germany and the United Kingdom

  2. Green Li-ion has launched a commercial-scale plant in Atoka, Oklahoma. This plant processes unsorted battery waste, or “black mass,” from used lithium-ion batteries and produces battery-grade materials

  3. Mercedes-Benz has opened a battery recycling plant in Kuppenheim, Germany. This facility uses an integrated mechanical-hydrometallurgical process to create a circular economy for battery materials

Second. There are several successful recyclers of lead-acid batteries and ~99% of them are recycled…about 130M per year. So there isn’t a serious reason as to why the same can’t happen for lithium batteries, whether the various current chemistries or future solid state batteries. Multiple companies, the above and Redwood materials are already doing it.

Side note: Why do you think solid state batteries won’t have lithium? Every technical description I’ve seen says they do.

Side note 2: You seem extremely worried about the chemicals in solar panels and batteries, which are constructed once and used over and over, but not concerned about energy sources that burn fuel for every unit of energy produced and produce toxic exhaust or waste over and over and over (such as coal, oil and gas) under their intended uses. Nor any concern over things like oil spills, gas leaks and coal mining accidents and diseases. Why is that?

Mike

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I don’t know what you consider a successful recycling company.
Do they make money without government subsidies? These companies might recycle components, which is good, but does the recycling add to the cost of the battery?
There has to be a cost/benefit analysis.

This is my concern with lithium.
Lithium is a potent neurotoxin. Handling it is more problematic than lead. The fire hazards are considerable too because lithium is very reactive and doesn’t need outside oxygen to burn and release toxic gas.

There are solid state batteries being developed that don’t require lithium. If I find a link, I’ll provide it later.

I’m concerned with the heavy metals in solar panels because they have a limited lifetime ~ 20 years or less. Tossing them in a landfill will ruin the soil for any future use. They are not an efficient power generation tool and are only viable for niche applications where available infrastructure isn’t there or desirable such as needing to be moved periodically.
I’ve already listed some concerns about lithium batteries.

Of course I’m concerned with energy sources that release pollution.

CO2 is not pollution.

Modern scrubbers and catalytic converters are efficient for removing the toxic pollutants during combustion. The days of taking a hose from the exhaust of a car into the passenger compartment to commit suicide/homicide are long gone.

Oil spills and gas leaks are a short term ecological and economic concern.

Having a product released without economic benefit is not desirable so companies are naturally opposed to doing this and try to prevent it.

Oil spills are broken down by natural processes due to them being a naturally occurring hydrocarbon that has biologic organisms that feed on it. They cause short term havoc after the spill to creatures not normally exposed to large quantities. Small quantities naturally seep out on the California coast and shallow deposits without any disruption to the environment of any consequence.

Methane releases are not a big concern because they almost instantly broken down when exposed to water vapor. The “greenhouse” effect only occurs in a lab with isolation from humidity.

Coal mining is a hazardous job that has people dedicated to safely removing the resource. The incidences of accidents and diseases has been greatly reduced over the years in modern times of the U.S…

The people that decide to work in dangerous jobs go through their own cost/benefit analysis no matter what the situation.