On a cool but sunny December 13, 2022, scientists made the thrilling—if unexpected—announcement that true nuclear fusion, identical to that which produces the sun’s energy, had been reproduced for the first time in California’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. It fulfilled the promise of absolute clean-energy production.

Despite this astonishing achievement, a practical application of fusion energy is decades away.

But in the meantime, rather than mimic the sun’s energy production, we harness that energy for clean, green, environmentally friendly, climate-change-attacking, inexpensive electricity.

With solar power, we address global warming by eliminating the C02 emissions produced from burning fossil fuels.

A near-perfect solution to a planet in crisis.

Solar power potential peril

Or is it?

Solar power (the generation of energy by converting sunlight into electricity through a process called photovoltaics) accounts for 3.4 percent of total U.S. electricity production, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) in February 2023. It tracks closely to solar’s global contribution of 3.6 percent.

Though a small contributor to total U.S. electricity production (renewable energy sources collectively account for 21 percent of U.S. production, with wind at 10 percent and hydropower accounting for six percent), solar has grown quickly, up from 1.8 percent worldwide in 2019 and 2.6 percent in 2020, according to the Independent Energy Agency. 

In 2021, the U.S. generated 19 gigawatts of solar power, or enough energy to power 14.25 million homes, according to CNET technology contributor AJ Dellinger in March 2021. In eight years, the U.S. will generate four times as much, at 76 gigawatts, and power 57 million homes—or 46 percent of all U.S. households, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Economics beyond simple state and federal subsidies is fueling the growth in solar, which requires $44 to produce a megawatt of electricity. Onshore wind production is more economical at $39 per megawatt, but offshore wind costs $66. 

Natural gas is very close to the cost of solar at $45 per megawatt, a disincentive in moving away from this fossil fuel. Nuclear ($77) and coal ($110) are considerably more expensive, all according to the EIA. 

(The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 offers substantial subsidies for both large- and home-scale solar projects, as do New York and Pennsylvania state programs.)

So, it looks like sunny days ahead for clean, green solar power.

The burn

Except for one thing. 

The battery. (Also, the panel.)

Because solar power isn’t just upending electricity generation, it’s also upending electricity distribution. And that is a problem.

Traditionally, electricity is collected from a small assortment of large electricity-generation sources such as hydroelectric plants (those at Niagara Falls produce nearly five gigawatts) or nuclear plants (New York’s Indian Point produced two gigawatts before closing in 2021) and are fed into a network we know as “the grid.” 

These sources are few, their electrical output is controlled, and they are predictable. 

Their contribution to the electricity flow within the grid is uncomplicated—simple.

Not so with solar and wind, both of which produce far smaller quantities of electricity and do so at unpredictable intervals. Integrating these (many) sources of electricity into the grid is exponentially more burdensome—and is thus a disincentive for their use as a source of energy for a grid system. 

(The exception to this is community solar, the arrays of which are large enough to neutralize the deficiencies of smaller generation systems and the energy of which is, in fact, fed directly into grid systems without a need for temporary storage.)

So, if solar and wind power isn’t fed to the grid, then this power must be stored. And it is—in lithium-ion batteries.

Which, when they were commercially developed in 1991 (under the direction of Yoshio Nishi) and enhanced during the 2010s (by BASF, Tesla and in academia), made large-scale electricity storage possible. 

But this storage comes at a cost—an environmental cost.

Lithium batteries require large amounts of lithium, graphite, cobalt, nickel and other minerals. World demand for lithium has skyrocketed—up 41 percent globally from 2021 to 2022, according to the U.S. National Geological Survey.

And lithium mining is a dirty business. Ivan Penn and Eric Lipton in the New York Times report on efforts to extract lithium from briny water under California lakes and aquifers, efforts that advocates hope will lessen the environmental impact of lithium mining. 

But the rush by the U.S., China, the European Union and others to dominate the nascent lithium market of the last decade has led to environmentally devastating, old-school smash-and-slash mining that consumes billions of gallons of water and leaves mounds of waste and contaminated water tables.

“Blowing up a mountain isn’t green, no matter how much marketing spin people put on it,” environmental activist Max Wilbert told Penn and Lipton.

But to be fair, the solar power sector uses only 22 percent of the world’s lithium batteries, with consumer electronics grabbing 24 percent and electrical vehicles gorging on 40 percent according to the International Energy Agency.

So even if solar power went away today, lithium mining with its negative environmental impact, its destabilization of peoples and environments in developed and developing countries (think Democratic Republic of the Congo), remains.

And another thing

And then there are the panels. With only trace amounts of heavy metals (including cadmium and lead), solar panels are primarily made of glass, which sounds easily recyclable. 

Not so fast.

In fact, solar panel recycling “remains woefully inadequate,” according to Atalay Atasu et al. in a 2021 article in the Harvard Business Review. 

And for several reasons. 

First, solar panels have a life expectancy of 30 years. And they do. Almost. 

As solar panel technology advances, increasing efficiency and lowering costs, panel owners are incentivized to upgrade much sooner than at the 30-year expiration. And according to Atasu et al., the average life of a solar panel is now just 15 years. 

They predict 315,000 metric tons of panel waste between 2021 and 2025, 50 times more waste than has been predicted by the International Renewable Energy Agency.

Second is the basic economics of panel disposal. For solar panel manufacturer First Solar, a firm that has its own panel recycling program for the disposal of its product, recycling a single solar panel costs between $20 and $30. Sending the same panel to a landfill?  $2. Max.

(Recycling is a problem across the renewable energy sector. Currently only five percent of lithium batteries are recycled. Even disposing of massive wind turbine blades is problematic and will contribute 720,000 tons of debris to U.S. landfills over 20 years.)

So where is solar?

That depends on whom you ask.

According to Danish author and activist Bjørn Lomborg in his provocative 2001 book “The Skeptical Environmentalist,” “Solar power is not as environmentally friendly as it is made out to be. The manufacturing of solar panels requires the use of toxic chemicals, and the panels themselves can end up in landfills, where they can release harmful pollutants.”

Diverse social commentators, from Elon Musk to Bill Gates to Barack Obama, all like solar’s positive contribution to fighting climate change.

Stanford University professor of civil and environmental engineering Amory Lovins tells the Guardian’s John Vidal “In 2020 the world added 0.4 gigawatts more nuclear capacity than it retired, whilst the world added 278 gigawatts of renewables—that’s a 782-fold greater capacity. 

“Renewables swelled supply and displaced carbon as much every 38 hours as nuclear did all year. Where nuclear is cheap, renewables are cheaper still, and efficiency is cheaper than that. 

“There is no new type or size or fuel cycle of reactor that will change this. Do the maths. 

“It is game over.”

In 1969 George Harrison suggested, “Here comes the sun/here comes the sun/and I say it’s alright.”

Is it?

Mark McLaren is a marketing consultant for Delaware River Solar.