This post is a collection of several articles I wrote on social media in the past weeks around the same topic, i.e. the amount of materials we have to deal with at the end of the useful life of renewable plants.

This is a topic that is beloved by oil trolls, who count on the fact that most people do not know the numbers involved.

I may end up writing a whole series of posts about numbers they (who’s they, you say? But oil barons, of course) don’t want us to know, hence the title.

Photovoltaic systems

The world has installed approximately 1.6TW of PV capacity (https://bit.ly/3CRAKZ5); given a single panel produces about 300W and weighs about 22kg (including supporting hardware) that’s a total mass of about 117Mtons.

Wind farms

There is a tad above 1TW of wind power in operations around the world (https://bit.ly/3D5Ymcg) at an average of 2.5MW per turbine (https://bit.ly/3OCsKgY) and 200tons of mass per turbine (https://bit.ly/3ZBzH8c) that’s 80Mtons to dispose of every wind turbine ever installed around the world (about 25% fiberglass, 50% steel and 25% concrete).

Hydraulic dams

The same calculation on the 62,000 dams in operations is much more difficult, as their size varies greatly: for example, the Hoover Dam is about 6.6Mtons and the Three Gorges Dam (largest in the world) about 35. So if we were to assume 3Mtons for each, we would have 180Btons of concrete to get rid of.

Fossil fuels

That’s a lot of stuff to recycle or landfill, but it compares favorably with the waste created by fossil fuels:

• coal ash = 500Mton (https://bit.ly/3AYbr75)
• carbon dioxide = 35Btons (https://bit.ly/49jv6uX)

…PER YEAR !

In other words, fossil fuels create every year 300 or 400 times the mass of waste created by all the solar panels and and all the wind turbines ever installed in the world and in only five year will surpass the mass of concrete of all the dams ever built.

How’s that for perspective?