Nobody takes into account that most solar panels come from China and much of the manufacturing is power by coal. From C. P. Colum and Lea Booth at public.substack.com:
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
Transport trucks transfer raw coal in pits as deep as 200 meters at the East Junggar Basin on July 4, 2018, in Changji Hui Autonomous Prefecture, Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous of China. The East Junggar Basin, as one of the largest coalfields in Xinjiang has predicted coal reserves of 390 billion tons. (Photo by Liu Xin/China News Service/Visual China Group via Getty Images)
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 with 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.
Solar panels are a construct of the white male patriarchy.
Still love the People’s Cube snark of the sky is closed no viewing during one of the government shutdown Kabuki theater episodes.
All your sunlight are belong to us and will be redistributed.