Environmental Impacts of Solar Energy - Wei Chou Wang

Description

Solar energy systems offer significant environmental benefits in comparison to the conventional energy sources, thus they greatly contribute to the sustainable development of human activities. At times however, the wide scale deployment of such systems has to face potential negative environmental implications. These possible problems may be a strong barrier for further advancement of these systems in some consumers.

1. Land Use and Ecological Impacts In the point of generating electricity at a utility-scale, solar energy facilities necessitate large areas for collection of energy.

2. Impacts to Soil, Water and Air Resources The construction of solar facilities on vast areas of land imposes clearing and grading, resulting in soil compaction, alteration of drainage channels and increased erosion.

3. Heavy Metals Solar panel manufacturing uses dangerous material such as Cadium Telluride, coal and oil also contain the same substsances, which are released with combustion.

4. Recycling Issue of Solar Panels there aren't enough locations to recycle old solar panels, and there aren't enough non-operational solar panels to make recycling them economically attractive.

Enablers

1. Global ESG investment significantly increase

2. The increase of solar panel producer

3. Innovation is not in place to make panel produciton more environmentally frinedly

4. Governments' subsidies on solar panels installation

5. Global warming

Inhibitors

1. Agrivoltaics Maximizing the use of agricultural land by installing solar panels over crops is a small but growing segment of the solar market. Solar power generation can enable farms to become self-sustaining, and the shading from solar panels can increase crop yields and decrease water consumption by reducing evaporation.

2.Floating solar farms Large installations of floating photovoltaic panels generate high volumes of electricity at a lower cost than land-based solar farms. Plus, they have the advantage of not using land or requiring installation on buildings.

Paradigms

The lack of awareness regarding the manufacturing process of solar panels and to the issue of recycling these, as well as the absence of much external pressure are the causes of the insufficiency in driving significant change in the recycling of the materials used in solar panel manufacturing, a business that, from a power-generation standpoint, already has great environmental credibility.

Experts

1. PV panel producers

2. Material scientists

3. Environmentalists

Timing

Happening now

Web Resources

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0048969720370595

https://www.greenmatch.co.uk/blog/2015/01/impact-of-solar-energy-on-the-environment