China has engaged in unfair trading practices to gain a massive advantage in the solar market. They have kept prices artificially low for the vital material polysilicon — essential to producing all solar power — which has virtually destroyed the once-vibrant U.S. solar industry.
The Biden administration has approved a massive solar power project in California that will produce enough power to electrify 90,000 homes. That’s the good news. The bad news is that producing the solar panels in China using coal-fired electrical power plants to generate electricity will produce almost as much CO2 as the fossil fuel plants the solar power is supposed to replace.
Manufacturing solar panels is a dirty business. Starting with the raw mineral quartz, the refining process produces a highly toxic substance, silicon tetrachloride, that some manufacturers simply end up dumping. Huge amounts of power and heat must be used to manufacture the photovoltaic cells.
Since most solar cells in the west are manufactured in China, that heat and power are generated by coal-fired electricity. Maybe someone should ask why we’re buying solar cells to save the planet from carbon pollution when the process of making them not only poisons the earth but dumps as much carbon into the atmosphere as energy produced solely by fossil fuels.
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