Najib Saab, July 2023

The multifaceted campaign against renewable energies reminds of the campaign against natural gas, when its use began to expand in the 1960s. Coal producers hired a group of heavy-weight public relations firms to spread news about the health hazards of gas, and the dangers of pipe explosions and fires. The same scenario is being repeated today, through campaigns that began with talk about the scarcity of materials used in the manufacture of wind turbines and photovoltaic cells (PV) for solar panels. According to one PR narrative, this makes them fall short of meeting needs, and in a next step scenario, the waste risk of their wide deployment is exaggerated, as leading to unmanageable mountains of discarded material, resulting from millions of solar collectors and wind turbines at the end of their lifespan.

Warnings about the dangers of the renewable energy industry today are justified, same as with natural gas in the past. Gas leakage affects health, and explosions and fires resulting from accidents may lead to serious damage. However, practice has proven over the years that these risks can be largely limited and contained by applying safety and security measures, and that the benefits of natural gas exceeded its risks many times over. Natural gas does not customarily emit toxins that affect human health, like coal, and its impact on climate change is many times less.

It is also true that the production of solar panels and wind turbines requires the extraction of large quantities of raw materials, some of which are rare minerals. The expansion of renewable energy uses has led a number of resource traders to establish mines in developing countries that do not apply strict environmental standards, depleting their natural resources and destroying their environment. In addition, countries and companies were late in coming up with solutions and facilities to adequately treat the waste of renewable energy hardware at the end of their life span. While some specialists who are really interested in protecting nature, resources and human health have been seriously debating optimal solutions for this challenge, public relations firms exploit these facts and exaggerate them, before presenting them in a selective manner. They only highlight potential risks and ignore possible solutions. For that purpose, they employ armies of paid "experts" and "journalists" to spread and promote fake news. And when their delusions are revealed about a particular issue, they move on to another, and a new attack, based on fake news as ammunition, ensues.

This is exactly what happened with regard to renewable energy. When it became clear that there are huge reserves of raw materials sufficient for decades which can be mined safely and sustainably if laws and guidelines are strictly imposed, and that there are alternatives to some precious metals, such as using salt from seawater for batteries, the PR bosses shifted to waste. In fact, two decades after the beginning of widespread use of PV panels and wind turbines to generate electricity, some of them do need to be replaced. The default life of these devices is 25-30 years, after which they lose a large part of their efficiency and need to be replaced. But while experts focus on solutions, which are within reach, public relations firms continue their selective approach, employing paid "experts" and "media professionals". This time, however, the intimidation campaigns helped accelerate waste solutions instead of stopping renewable energy projects.

In recent weeks, a huge media campaign calling solar panels a "time bomb" and an "environmental disaster waiting to happen" reached its climax. The campaign was based on real facts and figures, which show that there are about 3 billion solar panels in the world today, and the number will increase exponentially every year. The first generation of these PV panels, which entered service 25 years ago, is beginning to reach the end of its lifespan and needs to be replaced. It is expected that by 2030 there will be four million tons of scrap from dismantling old panels, which is a manageable amount. As for the estimated amount of scrap by 2050, it will exceed 200 million tons annually, which puts it out of control and threatens to form a huge mountain of waste from solar devices, in the absence of processing and recycling plants. However, public relations firms neglect the comparison with plastic, for example, of which the world currently produces one hundred million tons annually, most of which goes to waste dumps and pollutes soil, air and oceans; they also neglect to expose the successful solutions that are being applied, though not as fast as needed.

In recent years, timid initiatives have been launched to collect and dismantle old PV panels to reuse their components. The slow pace of these initiatives can be understood because the problem is new and previously there were not enough panels that needed to be replaced. Today, with the start of the end of the lifespan of the earlier panel generations, the amount required to be disposed of will increase every year, reaching hundreds of millions of panels.

A French company has seen an investment opportunity in this, which triggered developing technologies that can completely recycle panels, reusing 99 percent of their components. This is not limited to the aluminum body and glass cover, but also includes the precious metals that go into making the panels, such as copper, silver, silicon and cadmium. The importance of this achievement is not restricted to preventing the emergence of mountains of waste from solar devices, but also to the reuse of precious materials to produce new, more efficient panels, instead of extracting more minerals. In a measure that keeps pace with changes, the Dutch government recently imposed a fee on each old solar panel that is replaced, to contribute to recycling costs. This measure would certainly become the norm in other countries.

The recent violent social turmoil in France may have overshadowed the opening of the worldʼs first huge factory dedicated to extracting solar components from expired PV panels and reusing them to manufacture new ones which are more efficient. But the solar recycling plant, which was lately opened in Grenoble, is the practical response to the public relations mills that are charged, along with their fake experts, with the task of casting doubt on all sorts of renewable energy, in return for contracts worth hundreds of millions. After the panel recycling operation proves to be feasible and solid, one cannot help but wonder what the PR firms' next target would be!