On Wednesday, April 17, 2019 at 11:49:52 AM UTC-4, Paul wrote:


If they can grind bottles up and mix the glass with pavement,
the solar panel materials can be used up that way.

The framing and other materials can be recycled, as normal.

Have you been taking lessons at the drama society ?

Paul

I live part of the year in the Philippines (right now I'm in DC, USA, as you can probably tell from the header) and our country house is in the typhoon prone east side of PH. I was going to get solar panels for electricity (brownouts are an everyday occurrence, it ruined my chicken business as I was using an incubator and chicken eggs need to be hot almost constantly, 1 to 4 hours of no heat will kill the eggs), as margins are very tight on raising chickens (I broke even but not having to buy hatched chickens would have been the difference between profit and breaking even). So with that background, I thought about putting in Solar EV panels for electricity, until somebody with more experience said: "you realize you have to take these panels off the roof every time a typhoon passes through here, right?" No, I didn't think of that! They don't use heavy steel prefabricated roofs, and I'm not talking about the cheap Quonset huts either, for nothing in eastern PH. That was the deal breaker, since getting a couple of guys to remove solar panels from the roof (which are cheap, they'd do it for $10-$15 total) every time a typhoon comes through (and the PH gets what, more than a dozen major typhoons every year, and they all come through the east side) would be too tedious, and sometimes we're not in town anyway, and to impose that burden on my in-laws would not be fair I concluded. So we got a cross-over switch and set up a diesel generator to power the whole house. The generator tank will only store fuel for enough electricity for 24 hours, sometimes after a typhoon the electricity is unavailable from the power plant for between 1 day (these days) to 2 months (a few years ago), and it's kind of expensive to run a generator, but you only need it on for say four hours a day, to power the fridge and your mobile phones, maybe check TV for a few hours, and after a storm, diesel fuel is usually freely available, so not a big problem to go the non-green generator route.

So that's what I did.

Solar power is overrated. I know some farmers in Greece that got rich back in the 2000s before 2007 with EU grant money to 'go green' and they set up half-acre solar sites with subsidized EU loan money, and I heard that the loans were paid off in four years, and after that, with subsidized, guaranteed power generation rates to sell to the state electric company, they made like $100k Euro a year from their farm(s), not sure how many of them they had but all paid off. After the word got out, everybody wanted to do this (you need a geologist to sign off that your plot gets proper sunlight, but that's not hard to do in sunny Greece) but the EU cut off these 'green loans', lol, since "Green Energy" is largely a PR effort not just in 'socialist' Europe but round the world (including China). Fossil fuels, especially natural gas for electricity (Duke Energy in the eastern USA is going this route, transitioning away from the cheaper coal-fired plants they use in PH and in the Developing World)), is here to stay, sad but true.

RL