SOLAR DEVICES INDUSTRIAL INFRASTRUCTURE

In my posts and blogs, I have constantly spoken about the global industrial infrastructure that underwrites most manufactured things in our environment.  Several passages in a novel brought an epiphany of how pervasive, how insinuated, how utterly complex these installations are.  I have added those passages at the end of this essay.

Solar energy collecting devices have been challenged from several points of view.  The Energy Return on Energy Invested has been noted in extensive research as being low.  The dependence on fossil fuel has been noted.  Solar enthusiasts act as if the industry stands apart from the fossil fuel supply system.  It is not separate from the present undulating supply plateau nor the scraping of the bottom of the fossil fuel barrel.  We will never truly run out of fossil fuels, but the monetary cost and the environmental assaults defined by geology, geography as well as politics will certainly constrain our energy future. 

My position has been that the underwriting by the global industrial infrastructure is a necessary consideration. All the things in our world have an industrial history.  Behind the computer, the T-shirt, the vacuum cleaner is an industrial infrastructure fired by energy (fossil fuels mainly).  Each component of our car or refrigerator has an industrial history.  Mainly unseen and out of mind, this global industrial infrastructure touches every aspect of our lives.   It pervades our daily living from the articles it produces, to its effect on the economy and employment, as well as its effects on the environment.

Solar energy collecting devices also have an industrial history.  It is important to understand the industrial infrastructure and the environmental results for the components of the solar energy collecting devices so we don’t designate them with false labels such as green, renewable or sustainable. 

This is an essay challenging ‘business as usual’.  If we teach people that these solar devices are the future of energy without teaching the whole system, we mislead, misinform and create false hopes and beliefs.

I have provided both charts and videos 

for each of the components considered.

Please note each piece of machinery you see 

in each of the videos has its own 

industrial interconnection and history.

To look at all the video takes approximately 40 minutes.

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THE SOLAR CELL AND MODULE FACTORY

When you look at the solar video, a beautiful, 

sophisticated, highly technical dance emerges.

Suntech Power: How Suntech Photovoltaic Cells

and Modules are Made (English Version)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAufbqbUS6k&spfreload=10

https://youtu.be/IAufbqbUS6k

5.41 minutes

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GLASS

An essay with diagrams and a wonderful video has already been posted.  I refer the reader to that blog entry.  http://sunweber.blogspot.com/2015/03/making-glass_8.html

Solar energy collecting devices use low iron plate glass for a covering.  All modern plate glass has a global face.  Glass is a wonderful product.  Float glass for windows improves homes and other buildings enormously.  Think about what your home would be without glass. 

Solar energy collecting devices whether they are for heating hot air, hot water or making electricity are part of a huge global system.  The blog entry noted above shows the process in making glass from the mining to the heating the sand to 2800° F to rolling it out, cutting and transporting.  It also shows a huge factory and the global economies of scale required to make it affordable.

Float Glass Manufacturing Process .flv  4 minutes  clear,best

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJcHMmkjlA4

https://youtu.be/JJcHMmkjlA4

4.08

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The frame for the solar energy collecting devices is made from aluminum.

The aluminum can come from raw ore or it can be recycled.  

The frame is then extruded into the shape needed.

ALUMINUM FROM BAUXITE OR RECYCLED AND THEN EXTRUDED

FROM BAUXITE

How It's Made Aluminum

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fa6KEwWY9HU

https://youtu.be/fa6KEwWY9HU

4.53 Minutes

RECYCLED

Aluminum is lauded for its recyclability. Recycled aluminum saves some 95% of the energy over mined bauxite.  In the background it still has a huge industrial infrastructure that collects, transports, crushes, compacts, transports, heats, makes ingots and then refabricates. 

          

Focus on the machinery in this short video:

The story of Aluminium Recycling

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Plp7HYXCpZA

https://youtu.be/Plp7HYXCpZA

2.05 Minutes

Aluminum Extrusion

When I was 14 years old, I worked in an aluminum extrusion plant in south Florida.  We would roll the carts that were on a rail that were filled with extrusions into a large heating room.  The heating room went to 375° F (if I remember correctly- almost 50 years ago) and would age the aluminum.  We would then go in and roll the cart out, wrap the extrusions and load them in trucks.  Because it was summer, we all were wet with perspiration when we went into the room to get the cart.  Our T-shirts would dry immediately.  When we went home after work, our T-shirts were caked with our own salt.

Aluminum Extrusion

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiGlq7408ME

https://youtu.be/iiGlq7408ME

3.01 minutes

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INVERTER

An inverter is a piece of equipment that changes the incoming Direct Current electricity from the panels to the Alternating Current used in our homes.  Our vacuum cleaners, TVs, water pumps, etc. use AC supplied by the power company.  

As an aside, when I first used solar and wind energy collecting devices in the early 1980s, I wired my house with heavy gauge wire and used DC with lights, pump, refrigerator and TV.  I had a small inverter to run my vacuum cleaner and computer.

When the fan went out on our inverter (which it has done twice) we had to pull the heavy inverter off the wall and replace the small fan.  The local solar people wanted to charge $400 to change it.

See my essay: http://sunweber.blogspot.com/2013/10/a-small-fan.html

Conergy Inverter manufacture process

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pk_CB8K1lTQ

https://youtu.be/pk_CB8K1lTQ

5.11 minutes

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BATTERY

Deep Cycle Battery Manufacturing - by U.S. Battery

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9WsEVEOWfU

https://youtu.be/k9WsEVEOWfU

5.54 minutes

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COPPER

Copper Mining and Refining (Redox)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2hjv6FS67g

https://youtu.be/M2hjv6FS67g

4.43 minutes

The Mining Process at Copper Mountain Mine

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOrISAmMtZM

https://youtu.be/eOrISAmMtZM

7.32 minutes

How Electric Motors are made

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCwu5KPVv54

https://youtu.be/bCwu5KPVv54

4.50 minutes

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We have looked at charts and videos of making solar energy collecting devices, at the glass process and at the various aluminum processes.  We viewed the manufacturing of an inverter that changes the DC energy to AC and the batteries for storing the electricity. And lastly, we viewed two videos on copper; one on production and the other on one of the many tools for which we use electricity.

Solar energy collecting devices have an industrial history.  It arises part and parcel out of the global industrial infrastructure, the complexes that brings the many products of our age to our use. 

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Here are the pages from Stone’s Fall by Iain Pears [Spiegel & Grau ; Reprint edition (June 1, 2010)]. I looked for an email or address for him but was unable to find one.  I wanted to thank him.  Not only were these several pages eye openers, but the book was a joy to read and enjoyable.

This for me was a powerful statement about nature –

the environment – global industrial complexes. 

A ‘YES’.

“Many hundreds of men, machines ranging from

the huge cranes to the smallest screwdrivers,

all working together, all apparently knowing what

they were to do and when they were to do it.”

A screwdriver, yes, a screwdriver of course it has an industrial history.

These paragraphs hit me with a resounding

‘YES’ and ‘OF COURSE”.  It was wonderful.

This paragraph seem to sum in addition the dilemma

we face as the nature of some of the “beasts”.

The Competitive Exclusion Principle

Thanks to Ron Patterson who has provided invaluable information for years.

The Competitive Exclusion Principle

by RON PATTERSON posted on APRIL 3, 2015

http://peakoilbarrel.com/the-competitive-exclusion-principle/

http://peakoilbarrel.com

Evolution is all about a struggle for survival and reproduction. For predators it becomes an arms race. For hundreds of millions of years predatory animals have honed their offensive weapons while prey animals have evolved ever more effective defensive adaptations. Each animal, predator or prey, carved out their particular niche and occupied that niche until they were driven out, to another niche, or went extinct, or still occupy it today.

And that’s the way it went for hundreds of millions of years. Every species multiplying its numbers to the limit its niche or habit would support. Species waxed and waned, predator and prey maintaining a balance. When the prey numbers would expand the predator numbers would expand and when too many predators reduced prey numbers, then the predator numbers would also wane.

For millions of years nature kept every species in check. Population explosions of any species was soon met by either an corresponding explosion of predatory animals, or in cases were there were not enough predator animals, like rat or mice plagues, starvation would ultimately reduce their numbers to what the territory would support.

Sometimes of course there would be conflicts between different species of either predatory animals of prey animals. They can of course develop a symbiotic relationship like zebras and wildebeests, zebras eat the tall tough grass and wildebeests eat the shorter tender grass. But if this doesn’t happen, one species must adapt to another niche or go extinct.

This is not a fast process, sometimes taking many thousands of years to play out, depending on the size of the territory and the lifespan of the animals involved. And over many millions of years the balance was always maintained. Every species lived in and defended its niche and life went on. Only a universal disaster, like massive volcanism poisoning the air and seas could really disrupt this balance.

Every animal had adaptations that allowed it to survive in the wild. But no animal had a “super adaptation”, that is no animal evolved an adaptation that gave it ultimate control over other animals. There was no colossus in the animal world. No matter what the adaption, no animal could be that strong.

But the first hint of such an adaptation evolved about 5 million years ago. Somewhere in Africa a species of great ape evolved that had all the other survival adaptations of other great apes plus one more, that ape was just a wee bit smarter than other apes. And among these smarter apes, some were smarter than others. These smarter apes had a slightly higher survival and reproductive rate than the ones in their own group who were not so smart. But even these “smarter” apes were not really all that smart.

Brain size, which is correlated with intelligence, increased very slowly over two and one half million years. But the ultimate competitive weapon, the weapon that would give this one great ape a huge survival weapon over all other species had begun to evolve. From this point on the fate of the earth, the fate of all other species, was set. The ultimate weapon had begun to evolve. And about 100,000 years ago modern humans appeared.

Until about 10,000 years ago, give or take, humans depended entirely on the natural world for its substance. Killing animals that they could find and gathering what fruits, roots and tubers than nature provided them. Then slowly the Neolithic Revolution started to happen. People began to plant seeds and domesticate animals. However Homo colossus had not yet appeared.

Homo colossus appeared about 250 years ago. That was when man began to spend nature’s non renewable carbon deposits as if they were income.

William Catton: When the earth’s deposits of fossil fuels and mineral resources were being laid down, Homo sapiens had not yet been prepared by evolution to take advantage of them. As soon as technology made it possible for mankind to do so, people eagerly (and without foreseeing the ultimate consequences) shifted to a high-energy way of life. Man became, in effect, a detritovore, Homo colossus. Our species bloomed, and now we must expect crash (of some sort) as the natural sequel.

However we need to get back to the subject of this post, the competitive exclusion principle.

Wiki: The competitive exclusion principle, sometimes referred to as Gause’s Law, is a proposition that states that two species competing for the same resource cannot coexist at constant population values, if other ecological factors remain constant. When one species has even the slightest advantage or edge over another then the one with the advantage will dominate in the long term. One of the two competitors will always overcome the other, leading to either the extinction of this competitor or an evolutionary or behavioral shift toward a different ecological niche. The principle has been paraphrased into the maxim “complete competitors cannot coexist“.

The competitive exclusion principle usually describes the competition of animals for a particular niche. But humans are animals also. We have been in the competition for territory and resources for thousands of years. And we have been winning that battle for thousands of years. But it is only in the last few hundred years that our complete dominance in this battle has become overwhelming. We are winning big time, we are quite literally wiping them off the face of the globe.

The below chart was created by Paul Chefurka.

Three very important things can be derived from the above graph. One, we are wiping out all the wild species. 10,000 years ago humans were about .1 percent of all the land vertebrate biomass of the planet. In 2000 we and our domesticated animals were about 97 percent of the land vertebrate biomass. Today it is closer to 97.5 percent. And we continue to wipe them out. The Earth has lost half its wildlife in the last 40 years.

The second thing that is revealed in the above graph is the dramatic increase in biomass carrying capacity that has been made possible by fossil energy. Mechanical farming with tractors, combines and other farm equipment has made it possible for one farmer to cultivate hundreds of times the acreage he could just a little over a century or so ago. But that is only half the story. Fully half the people in the world are alive today because of synthetic fertilizer created from fossil fuel by the Haber-Bosch process.

The third thing suggested by the graph is that the carrying capacity of the earth is being degraded by our massive overshoot in population.

What no one ever talks about is the fact that the animal population is declining just as fast as our population is increasing. This means also that species extinctions are increasing as our population is increasing.

And here is the really, really bad news. Gause’s Law was never repealed. The competitive exclusion principle always applies. And instead of slowing down, the destruction of animal habitat is increasing. The wild animal population is declining at an alarming rate. Species extinction continues. And species extinction will continue until every animal that cannot coexist with man will become extinct.

Of course some animals will survive because their numbers are so great and their niche is so diverse. The rabbit and the dingo will survive in Australia and rabbits in other parts of the world will likely survive also. There is no doubt that rats and mice will survive and hopefully animals that feed on them, like the some owls and hawks will survive also.

Every large animal in Africa, the lion, the giraffe, the rhino, every great ape in Africa, will all disappear. Every large species in Asia will go also, the tiger, the elephant the orangutan, the panda and even the bears of northern Europe, Asia and North America will all become extinct. They all occupy territory and take resources that can be taken by Homo colossus and Homo colossus will take that territory because it is simply in his nature to do so.

We will kill them all.

It would eventually have happened even if not one lump of coal, one drop of oil or one whiff of natural gas had ever been discovered… but it would have taken a few thousand years longer. Our weapon, our intelligence, would have given us such a great advantage over other species that eventually the competitive exclusion principle would have prevaled and wiped them all out. Fossil fuels only enabled us to explode our own population and therefore wipe out the rest of the earth’s megafauna a lot sooner.

All this would happen even if we never have economic collapse. But when economic collapse does happen, every creature that is made out of meat will become a source of food. Economic collapse will just greatly accelerate the decline of the all that is wild.