Thanks for voicing your concerns Nikos. Firstly I'd say we need to beware of trying to use the pure scientific principle of looking for hard evidence before believing in, thus committing to anything. This is the difference between science, and Engineering (Applied science), In my opinion, Engineering anything means we have to commit to design in essence by a leap of faith. But we do that quite well by techniques including modern formal Systems Engineering, which derisks things to mostly acceptable practical levels, when the techniques are understood.
The proof you might be seeking without that, is obviously impossible to obtain without actually doing the work, so I would direct towards examining the Systems Engineering if you seek greater confidence, it is a kind of Evidence, but Engineering evidence, if not strictly scientific evidence, it has been good enough to get us all the technical applications of science we've seen to date.
On the lifetime of a single panel, this only matters (and only to investors!) in the scenario that a solar farm is being considered as a conventional investment, where an artificial lifespan equivalent to the life of a single panel is put on the lifetime of the farm, so as to compute an expected return on investment.
The farm financial outlay then is traded off against the expected value of the energy yielded in that lifetime, to estimate the financial return to investors which becomes due then.
The cost after that, of disposing of the farm isn't any interest to investors, who will move onto the next project to invest in.
But the farm, if discarded at that point represents an awful lot of scrap, which actually happens because of the practice and nature of investing, not because it had to happen due to the nature of the hardware involved. It all comes back to the initial mistake (at cost to the planet, not the investor), of setting the lifetime of the farm to the lifetime of a single panel.
I wrote a story called the "money-fuel tree" that explained how any solar farm can be maintained and even scaled at zero cost, by directing some of the funds generated on an ongoing basis, back into the farm. This would not be acceptable from the investor point of view, because if done, it would impact the returns due to the investor in the lifetime the investor set on the farm.
But this would obviously be far less damaging to the environment, if all that is discarded by the farm is just the few panels that actually failed in the predicted lifetime, replacing those as they fail one by one, allowing the farm to carry on generating at full capacity.
So the material waste, and actually the material demands of solar are heavily overestimated by the investor community.
On copper availability, copper is very recyclable, probably most copper in modern use actually came from recycled sources, it is so recyclable it is highly desired by thieves, who regularly steal it even from high voltage active facilities, to resell it back to industry, where it will again be repurposed.
The amount of copper in use at any time is set by how much energy is conducted, over what distance. Distance of transmission is obviously really important, so the more we can do to minimise that, the better.
The scheme dictated by these concerns, all taken into account of in the stakeholder analysis, is the one I outlined in the hydrogen ecology community building block. I did a story on that a few days ago, sorry android device in my hand right now hopeless for links.
It meets the concerns of copper availability, by minimising the distance of electrical transmission at all points, by minimising the distance between all points of use, and all points of generation. We should accept this is an implicit integrated outcome of distributed energy generation.
Where it needs to be concentrated like you mention for heavy manufacturing or Engineering, the facility requiring the power should ideally be it's own solar hydrogen community. This gives it the choice of being electrically powered, by converting it's hydrogen to electricity like a domestic community, or by directly burning the hydrogen, if it requires high heat processes.
In all cases, if it runs short of energy, it can just buy more in, because there will be hydrogen fuel stocks everywhere, enen more ubiquitous than fossil fuels ever were.
The key to understanding full-on solar hydrogen implementation is that it will quickly begin to support itself, by panel factories themselves becoming solar hydrogen communities etc.
I'd say it becomes clear the bulk rare materials required for this kind of ecosystem are only a small fraction of what we needed for the extracted energy system we will be replacing.
The thing maybe not well understood, is how much waste the profit driven / extracted energy system actually generates, just because it is driven by profit, this is outside most of our comprehensions right now because we've been conditioned for life to believe there is no other way. We almost became capable of not seeing it at all, until maybe ChatGPT came along, without the formal skills or motivation to pursue it I think, and that would have been the real existential mistake, I think.
It still could be, but I am glad more and more folk seem to be switching on to what we were living for profit, wasn't reality at all but actually a physically unsustainable dream.
Did nature ever set the lifetime of a tree to the lifetime of a single one of its leafs?
