Solar Panels Could Be Three Times More Carbon-Intensive Than IPCC Claims
Last August, in an amalgamation of “The Green New Deal” meets “Build Back Better,” President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act gifted the renewables industry with billions of dollars worth of taxpayer-funded subsidies.
However, Information unearthed by Environmental Progress points to a gaping oversight in how the figures influencing government net zero policy and investments in solar worldwide are compiled and collated due to the difficulty of collecting accurate information out of China, especially for the purification processes used to create silicon wafers. The key to this blind spot is that a small number of data compilers provide the source material for most of the assessments. And many, if not all, of them work in collaboration with the International Energy Agency (IEA). The industry voluntarily submits the data in response to academic surveys, and the nature and profile of the respondents are never publicly revealed.
This data also feeds into an organization called Ecoinvent, a Swiss-based non-profit founded in 1998 that dubs itself “the world’s most consistent and transparent life cycle inventory database.” This data is relied on by institutions worldwide, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and IEA itself, to calculate their carbon footprint projections, including the sixth assessment report published as recently as March 2023. However, Ecoinvent has no data from China relating to its photovoltaic industry.
Based on such data, the IPCC claims solar PV is 48 gCO2/kWh. But an investigation started by Italian researcher Enrico Mariutti suggests that the number is closer to between 170 and 250 gCO2/kWh, depending on the energy mix used to power PV production. If this new estimate is accurate, solar would not compare favorably with natural gas, which is around 50 gCO2/kWh with carbon capture and 400 to 500 gCO2/kWh without.
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