GM is pulling back on EVs

[sk47]

Hello; Around income tax time and occasionally when bills are being run thru the house and senate there will be lot of talk about the tax codes. Lats time i recall someone saying three over 2000 pages in the tax codes. Actually, have heard that a few times, maybe 2300 pages. Even "experts" will say no one knows and understands the entire thing. Maybe so, I do not know personally.
My take is two folks can run different businesses and have very different experiences. Maybe like the tale of blind people touching different parts of an elephant and coming away with a partial understanding.

Pretty sure all those hundreds of pages are not absolutely needed. Likely lots of special deals worked into the mix.

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[Tinpot]

From the BBC: Recycling solar panels, or rather, the lack of it.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-65602519

 

[Burkey]

From the BBC: Recycling solar panels, or rather, the lack of it.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-65602519

So the answer is to recycle the panels.…

The opening statement from the author is somewhat misleading though.
“While they are being promoted around the world as a crucial weapon in reducing carbon emissions, solar panels only have a lifespan of up to 25 years.”

Solar panels do NOT have a lifespan of up to 25 years. What they have is a 25 year warranty.


“One of the biggest factors that determines how long solar panels last is the quality of the product. Solar panels available on the market are classified in three tiers: Tier One, Tier Two and Tier Three. Among other criteria defined by the industry, Tier One manufacturers have been producing solar panels for five or more years, have stable finances and are highly regarded for service and quality of their products.
Not only do Tier One manufacturers have higher standards, but their solar panels often have a higher output after 25 years in comparison to Tier Two or Tier Three panels. The degradation rate for Tier One solar panels is 0.30% annually compared to 0.50% for Tier Two and 0.80% for Tier Three. The catch is that Tier One panels generally cost 10% to 30% upfront, however, it’s highly likely that cost will be recouped in time.
According to a study from National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), the average degradation rate is 0.50% across all solar panels. That means you could still expect your solar output to be about 89% of its original output after 25 years.”


Reader beware. Not all journalists have done their homework.

 

[Gregs24]

From the BBC: Recycling solar panels, or rather, the lack of it.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-65602519

That is a bizarre report. I know from personal experience that the panels will last a LONG time. Mine have a MINIMUM guaranteed life of 25 years and the invertor 20 years (the latter is easily replaced). My panels are just over 12 years old and have lost about 3% of their original output. I have a friend with panels nearly 20 years old and his are working just fine too.

Complete non-story. Must have been a quiet day!

 

[Burkey]

That is a bizarre report. I know from personal experience that the panels will last a LONG time. Mine have a MINIMUM guaranteed life of 25 years and the invertor 20 years (the latter is easily replaced). My panels are just over 12 years old and have lost about 3% of their original output. I have a friend with panels nearly 20 years old and his are working just fine too.

Complete non-story. Must have been a quiet day!

I was actually going to mention that the inverter typically dies well before the panels. If the journalist wanted a real story, that should’ve been his angle. But alas, he just wanted to create a story on a slow news day.

 

[sk47]

Hello; There is a tactic in use in Burkey's and Greg's latest posts. The link was about the serious lack of recycling for solar panels. Yet they focused on a point unrelated to the gist of the story.

Back in my youth I had a chance to watch my grandfather run a bottle washing machine at the local Coca-Cola bottling plant. In fact, one of my early jobs was as a part time helper on a delivery truck. My job was to collect the empties at the grocery stores. The bottles were hauled back to the plant to be reused.
As I recall the average life of a Coke bottle was around 25 times. Of course, some would be broken the first time out. Others would be refilled many more than 25 times. Some would be used so many times the embossed lettering on the bottle would show lots of wear.

Along with my stance on ZPG back in the 1970's, I was in favor of a bottle bill type deposit law. Back in the day used soda bottles had a 2 cent deposit on them at sale. We kids would find and return empties (adults did also) to get the 2 cents. You did not find bottles littering except for the broken ones. We wanted a deposit type fee added to all products. Some called it a disposal fee. That way an empty bottle or one-use product had some value and would not become litter.
Same sort of idea for appliances as we had lots of illegal dumps back in the day. Every sold item above a certain size could be taken in to get a deposit back at the end of its life and not just become trash. Of course, the idea never got traction.
The soda and beer companies wanted the one-way, one-use bottles. They did not have to collect and clean the returnable bottles. Saved weight on the trucks as aluminum cans and latter plastic bottles were much lighter than the glass bottles.
But I lost that windmill tilt also. We have had one way bottles for decades now. We have a plastic island the size of a state out in the ocean now. The promise of plastic recycling did not happen the way some promises were made along the way. Yet we are to fall for the solar panel and wind turbine parts will be recycled promise again. (guess I could throw in batteries)

So, it may be some solar panels will work more than 25 years. Figure a lot will not. Regardless the old broken panels will wind up someplace. Let's hope the recycling promise is not so empty.

 

[K4fxd]

Looks like we will run out of silver so we will not be able to make solar panels and we will run out of lithium and not be able to make batteries.

Yep, lets double down on batteries and panels.

 

[sk47]

People are absolutely ‘livid’ about this deceptive new Tennessee law: ‘Name it what it is — bribery’ (msn.com)
Hello; Ilive in Tennessee now for 13 years. I am not livid about the idea of methane (natural gas) being used to run gas fired electric power plants. In fact it makes a lot of sense. Natural gas burns very much cleaner than coal or oil. It was the big "green" move just decades ago. Lots of money and effort went in to changing over to partial natural gas use.

Let me be clear another time. I do not mind the idea of modern "green" solar and wind energy where they can be practical and if they can be made to work. However, having a reliable and time-tested alternate in place makes a lot of sense.

Last point. Natural gas is not 100% clean. Methane does leak. But neither solar nor wind is 100% clean. To my thinking there is no free lunch when it comes to having abundant energy. That we humans have come to like an energy rich lifestyle has a price. likely any energy plan will become a six of one-half a dozen of the other sort of trade off no matter which is used.

The popular notion of the moment is fossil fuels are all bad while solar +wind are all good. No so.

 

[sk47]

Looks like we will run out of silver so we will not be able to make solar panels and we will run out of lithium and not be able to make batteries.

Yep, lets double down on batteries and panels.

Hello; Do not throw reality facts into the mix.

 

[sk47]

The ethanol mandate, at best, trades greenhouse gas reductions for massive damage to waterways (msn.com)

“Ethanol burns much cleaner than gasoline, but the process of producing it involves all sorts of inputs that are not environmentally friendly. Most notably, growing the corn involves an immense amount of irrigation, and it requires huge amounts of fertilizer. This depletes water supplies and causes eutrophication (or the poisoning of waters with nitrogen through fertilizer runoff). Producing ethanol and biodiesel also emits some greenhouse gases because tractors and ethanol distilleries use fossil fuels that produce emissions.”

Hello; Not much new here. For the record I have been against the use of corn ethanol as a fuel additive since the practice started decades ago. It is one thing to use artificial fertilizer and lots of water to grow food stocks. Quite another to use food stocks to make fuel.

Biodiesel and fuel ethanol check off boxes on the idealism side of things. I recall back when biodiesel was a notion around using old cooking vegetable oil from restaurants and making it. Guess they still do that ??? Ethanol was supposed to stretch our fuel supplies back when it was thought crude was about the run low. Even back in those days it was known the net gain of our fuel supply was small as it took almost as much diesel to grow, transport the corn and then process as the amount of ethanol produced.

“Crunching all the numbers, here’s what the scientists found: America dedicates 5% of U.S. farmland in order to reduce national greenhouse gas emissions by about 1%. At the same time, biofuels deplete water supplies at 36 times the rate (depletion per energy produced) of fossil fuels, and they poison water with nitrogen runoff at five times the rate.”

Hello; Five percent of farmland which could grow food. That is foolish on its face, but there is an even more dire aspect to the practice. Modern industrial farming uses up topsoil. Largely thru erosion. I could go on a paragraph or four about the why.

“…concluded that ethanol doesn’t actually help mitigate climate change because ethanol use “caused enough domestic land use change emissions such that the carbon intensity of corn ethanol produced under the RFS is no less than gasoline and likely at least 24% higher.””

 

[K4fxd]

…concluded that ethanol doesn’t actually help mitigate climate change

It is reasons like this and increasing air traffic that tells people who can see the forest that climate change is not an emergency.

You can site all your charts and graphs but I don't care how much a molecule vibrates, at a concentration of .04% it cannot have damaging effects on global temperature.

If it could be proved there would be physical models, but there are none. Only computer models programmed by people who have a vested intrest in man made global warming caused by Co2 emissions. Any models with alternate conclusions are thoroughly trashed and the people discredited.

 

[sk47]

Thank the green-energy cult for major blackouts this summer (msn.com)

“That’s the warning from the North American Electric Reliability Corporation.
According to NERC, at least two-thirds of the country is at risk for major power outages this summer. This extends to most everyone west of the Mississippi except for Texas.”

“The Wall Street Journal reports the Environmental Protection Agency has made things worse with new nitrogen-oxides rules from its recently finalized “Good Neighbor Plan, which requires fossil-fuel power plants in 22 states to reduce NOx emissions. NERC predicts power plants will comply by limiting hours of operation but warns they may need regulatory waivers in the event of a power crunch.””
“The Journal notes, “The EPA claimed the rule wouldn’t jeopardize grid reliability, but then why would power plants need waivers to prevent blackouts?””

“Why indeed?”

“We had a warm-up (chill-down?) for this crisis last winter, when many places experienced rolling blackouts due to inadequate power supplies in the face of cold temperatures that were not, in fact, unusually cold.”

“My own area in Knoxville, Tenn., saw temperatures in the single digits, which are not that unusual but which power-company hacks called “unprecedented.””

“Knoxville’s lowest temperature was 24 below, back in 1985, and they managed to keep the lights on for that.”

‘But that was before the Tennessee Valley Authority started shutting down coal, nuclear and gas plants.”
“Why is all this happening now?”
“The short answer is the people running things care more about green politics than they care about the quality of life of the people they’re supposed to be serving.”

“A sensible regulatory system would put grid reliability at the top of the priority list.”

“If you cared about both the planet and the people, you wouldn’t take power plants offline until you’d put enough new capacity online to replace them and meet projected additional demand.”

“And you wouldn’t make unreliable technologies like wind and solar, which tend to fail when they’re most needed, the mainstay of your generating scheme.”

Hello; I live about 55 miles north of Knoxville TN currently. In 1985 I lived in Harlan County KY, another 40 miles away. I also lived in Harlan County in the winter of 1977 when we had 22 days of constant temperatures below freezing, many at or below zero F. No blackouts back then.

We are being led down the garden path with promises which will not keep the lights/heat/AC on.

 

[Burkey]

Looks like we will run out of silver so we will not be able to make solar panels and we will run out of lithium and not be able to make batteries.

Yep, lets double down on batteries and panels.

Who told you that? Most respected sources seem to suggest that there’s ample. It depends on how you define “accessible”.
What is “ inaccessible” today won’t necessarily be inaccessible in a few years time. We’ve already seen this happen over the past decade.

We know that lithium is a finite resource. The USGS places the figure at around 88 million tonnes. 1/4 of it being “accessible” currently.

“Nature reports that your average car likely takes up about 8 kilograms of lithium (another number that’ll likely decrease over time). After some number crunching, courtesy of Ritchie, you get 2.8 billion EVs from that 22 million tonnes of lithium. With 1.4 billion cars on the road now, that might seem like a tight margin, but one likely improved with growing innovations in mining and battery technology—not to mention this is only Earth’s reserves of lithium. When extrapolated out to 88 million tonnes, that adds up to around 11 billion EVs.”

Any other BS you‘d like debunked?

 

[RagmopInKona]

N



Nothing does in reality. Oil still receives subsidies and tax breaks in the billions of dollars

You mean they get a rebate on the fees and permits they have to pull and pay for, and all that.
When the cost to do business through permits/fees/regulations are 20x more than those so called subsidies/tax breaks. you're arguement dies .
I'm fine with them removing the biggest subsidies of ethanol. and go back to 100% petro.
As the fake science claims 10% ethanol is cleaner by ppm. but leave out that you lose 2-3 mpg with it, so you burn more to go the same miles as non ethanol fuel in turn put more ppm emissions into the air. Data manipulation should be a crime.
All ethanol mixed fuel does is force owners to buy more fuel and prop up the corn industry.

 

[RagmopInKona]

Who told you that? Most respected sources seem to suggest that there’s ample. It depends on how you define “accessible”.
What is “ inaccessible” today won’t necessarily be inaccessible in a few years time. We’ve already seen this happen over the past decade.

We know that lithium is a finite resource. The USGS places the figure at around 88 million tonnes. 1/4 of it being “accessible” currently.

“Nature reports that your average car likely takes up about 8 kilograms of lithium (another number that’ll likely decrease over time). After some number crunching, courtesy of Ritchie, you get 2.8 billion EVs from that 22 million tonnes of lithium. With 1.4 billion cars on the road now, that might seem like a tight margin, but one likely improved with growing innovations in mining and battery technology—not to mention this is only Earth’s reserves of lithium. When extrapolated out to 88 million tonnes, that adds up to around 11 billion EVs.”

Any other BS you‘d like debunked?

Science that is bought and paid for by those pushing an agenda.
nope, nothing to see here, move along.
be a good little sheep and just trust the science.

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