A farm in Bavaria is covering its hops with solar panels, providing electricity to 250 households and shading the plants from the increasingly scorching summer heat in the process.
It’s bs pearl clutching about lead or bismuth solder somehow teleporting through glass. Even if it somehow could, there is more lead in the first foot of top soil than in the PV panel if it is within 100 miles of a highway or flight corridor. If you were to crush it up and blend the solar panel into the soil, it would dilute the heavy metals already present.
You could in principle pollute the ground a little with CdTe solar panels if you went along, cracked them all, and left the non-functioning panels in the rain for years, but CdTe is only used by a small subset of US manufacturers who are especially passionate about using their local market protections to create an inferior product for more money that cannot scale just so it can pollute a small amount rather than a negligible amount. Even then you’d find it difficult to match the amount of heavy metals dispensed by the tractors and other ICE machinery due to contamination in the fuel.
It’s bs pearl clutching about lead or bismuth solder somehow teleporting through glass. Even if it somehow could, there is more lead in the first foot of top soil than in the PV panel if it is within 100 miles of a highway or flight corridor. If you were to crush it up and blend the solar panel into the soil, it would dilute the heavy metals already present.
You could in principle pollute the ground a little with CdTe solar panels if you went along, cracked them all, and left the non-functioning panels in the rain for years, but CdTe is only used by a small subset of US manufacturers who are especially passionate about using their local market protections to create an inferior product for more money that cannot scale just so it can pollute a small amount rather than a negligible amount. Even then you’d find it difficult to match the amount of heavy metals dispensed by the tractors and other ICE machinery due to contamination in the fuel.
thank you. I was always sort of skeptical about it as panels always seemed pretty clean.