An excerpt from a long article about the collapse of the solar power industry. Interesting piece with some equally interesting comments.

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If you keep an eye on the financial world, which I do, and especially the green sectors, which I also do, it’s been an interesting time of late. Within the last few weeks, Solar Trust of America (STA), owner of the world’s largest solar plant, filed for bankruptcy protection under Chapter 11, and nobody expects much of it, if anything, to emerge from it. STA joins a long list of companies in the solar energy sector, who’ve gone bankrupt, ducked into protection from their creditors, suspended production indefinitely or are simply circling the plughole.

Across the world, a few of the more prominent and expensive casualties are Solyndra, Solar Millennium AG, Energy Conversion Devices Inc, Q-Cells, Solon, Solar Millenium, Solarhybrid, Ener1, Range Fuels, Beacon Power Corp and there’s a whole lot of others. In case you haven’t noticed, it’s probably not a good idea to invest your hard-earned pennies in any company with “solar” in its name. It’s almost as bad a mistake as thinking you had some sort of long-term future employment with one of them.

Nearly all of these companies were the beneficiaries of huge government startup grants or loan guarantees. The products they made were effectively sold to consumers with a subsidy, to make them more attractive. The customers also had the benefit of some generous feed-in tariff schemes. All that money that was sunk into them has now gone and the specific green industry sector it was expected to create, is pretty much moribund.

In Germany, which gets the same amount of sunshine as the US state of Alaska and where inexplicably nearly half the solar power output of the world was installed, investment experts expect not a single solar cell company to be in business in five years time, since not one of them is currently showing an operating profit, nor is expected to do so in the foreseeable future. In Germany alone, the government have to date handed out about €100 billion in subsidies to renewable energy and even there, the most fervently green country in Europe, they’ve begun to have some serious doubts. It’s a money pit. The promised green jobs haven’t appeared and unemployment in the developed nations continues to rise. On a world-wide basis, the money wasted runs into the billions of dollars.

Billions and billions and we’ve ended up with pretty much nothing. Actually, that’s not quite correct. What we will have, within a decade or two, is a clear up job that’ll make Chernobyl look like a training day. As the vast arrays of panels age, they’ll crack and contaminate the topsoil with poisonous chemical particles. Take a careful look at the picture below, because that’s what we’ll have to pay to detoxify, and make no mistake, we’ll be the ones paying, despite a few of the companies installing these panels having given undertakings to dispose of the panels at the end of their service life. The hard-nosed investor in me reckons they’ll be safely bankrupt by the time any such expensive undertakings have to be honoured.

I wonder where we will store all that contaminated topsoil? Perhaps wherever we’d planned to store nuclear waste, before we decided not to build any more nuclear plants.

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https://thepointman.wordpress.com/2012/0...-any-questions/

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I always wondered about the eventual disposal problems.

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Maybe they will explain how they did it when they send you the bill.