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Well, we hate to say “I told you so,” but we’ll go ahead and do it anyway. Like windmills and electric cars, solar panels are also harming the planet, according to shocking new data. Not only that, but China, who is making a fortune producing these death panels, is by far the worst offender.

All the latest info, and how this shocking data came to light can be found in a riveting Substack article written by C. P. Colum and Lea Booth.

Public Substack:

Last August, in an amalgamation of “The Green New Deal” meets “Build Back Better,” President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act gifted the renewables industry with billions of dollars worth of taxpayer-funded subsidies.

What few backing the bill realized was that the largest beneficiary would likely be China due to its expansive grip on the global solar photovoltaic (PV) industry. Worse than that, it might end up misdirecting the world’s clean energy efforts into dirtier than appreciated energy technologies because of the country’s ongoing dependence on coal-fired energy.

Information unearthed by Environmental Progress, a nonprofit research organization, points to a gaping oversight in how the figures influencing government net zero policy and investments in solar worldwide are compiled and collated due to the difficulty of collecting accurate information out of China, especially for the purification processes used to create silicon wafers.

The key to this blind spot is that a small number of data compilers provides the source material for most of the assessments. And many, if not all, of them work in collaboration with the International Energy Agency (IEA). The industry voluntarily submits the data in response to academic surveys. The nature and profile of the respondents are never publicly revealed, so there is the potential for conflicts of interest to develop.

A further puzzle is how that data feeds into an organization called Ecoinvent, a Swiss-based non-profit founded in 1998 that dubs itself “the world’s most consistent and transparent life cycle inventory database.” This data is relied on by institutions worldwide, including the IPCC and IEA itself, to calculate their carbon footprint projections, including the sixth assessment report published as recently as March 2023.

Based on such data, the IPCC claims solar PV is 48 gCO2/kWh. But, as we’ll see below, a new investigation started by Italian researcher Enrico Mariutti suggests that the number is closer to between 170 and 250 gCO2/kWh, depending on the energy mix used to power PV production. If this estimate is accurate, solar would not compare favorably with natural gas, which is around 50 gCO2/kWh with carbon capture and 400 to 500 without.

As with all “sCiEnCe” these days, everything is manipulated to serve a political agenda, and this case is no different. The Public Substack continues:

Over the course of a four-month investigation, Environmental Progress has confirmed that Ecoinvent — perhaps the world’s largest database on the environmental impact of renewables — has no data from China about its photovoltaic industry. Meanwhile, the ultimate source of the IEA’s supposedly public data on PV carbon intensity is confidential, and the data, therefore, is unverifiable.

Much of the cradle-to-grave carbon intensity data that governments depend on to guide photovoltaic arrays are instead based on modeling assumptions that are likely to have grossly under-estimated — if not made up — solar’s carbon emissions because they cannot get insights from Chinese manufacturers.

In its most recent report, the IEA predicts that China will continue to dominate solar energy production, delivering over 50 percent of solar PV projects globally by 2024. This trajectory is especially concerning given that China already commands most solar panel production.

The IEA noted that in 2022 China’s manufacturing capacity for wafers, cells, and modules rose 40-50 percent and almost doubled for silicon. In fact, according to market intelligence firm Bernreuter Research, in 2021, China produced more than 80 percent of global solar-grade polysilicon, a critical input into solar arrays. It doesn’t stop there; China manufactures 97 percent of the global supply of solar wafers, another essential component.

How China amassed that market concentration remains an inconvenient truth, all too readily swept under the rug by those pushing for net zero policies.

An Italian researcher from Rome didn’t believe the data was “jiving,” so he decided to conduct his own research. In doing so, he got to the bottom of this mystery and published his shocking findings, which, as you can imagine, ruffled many feathers. Here’s more from the Substack:

The China-sized black hole at the heart of the world’s photovoltaic data might, in the context of the industry, seem obvious.

That didn’t make it any easier for Enrico Mariutti, an introspective but compulsive 37-year-old Italian from Rome, to convince others in the field there might be a problem. It was Mariutti who first made substantial efforts to flag the data discrepancies.

Like Greta Thunberg, Mariutti comes to the tale as an environmental obsessive passionate about facilitating the world’s transition from fossil fuels to cleaner forms of energy. Unlike Greta, Mariutti finished school and knows how to crunch through a data set. He holds a degree in geopolitics and global security, which, while unrelated to the field, has equipped him with enough quantitative skills to ensure he can recognize the difference between good and bad data.

Mariutti first noticed something wasn’t quite right with photovoltaic assessments about two years ago. He was preparing for an online renewables debate with Nicola Armaroli, a research director at the Italian Research Council. But being a data junkie, he decided to pour over the source material to try and figure out why. What he discovered unnerved him. The data didn’t reconcile.

“They [the data] showed how much solar photovoltaic systems used in terms of raw materials: silicon, aluminum, copper, glass, steel, and silver. Then I saw the carbon footprint. It just seemed way too small,” he told Environmental Progress.

According to his findings, the carbon intensity of solar panels manufactured in China and installed in European countries like Italy was off by an order of magnitude. An initial back-of-the-envelope calculation put it at between 170 and 250g of carbon dioxide per kilowatt hour (kWh), as opposed to the official estimate from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) of 20-40g per kWh. Way off.

The scale of the IPCC’s undercount shocks once applied to the EU’s “clean” energy plans. Following Mariutti’s math, the esteemed scientific body underestimates the emissions from the EU’s solar installations built in 2022 alone by 5.4 to 7.6 million metric tons, equivalent to adding 3.4 to 4.8 million cars to the road.

Dutch renewables expert and “net-zero” zealot, Mariska de Wild-Scholten, basically brushed off the actual findings and claimed that when determining the electricity consumption of silicon purification used to make wafers, she rarely read scientific papers “because of low data quality, outdated data, and non-transparent data.” She mentioned little about her own preferred sources, other than that they are based on surveys. Well, that’s concerning…

Alarmed by this lack of care for actual data, Mariutti had some serious questions. The Public Substack goes on:

Mariutti asked what she thought about 192 countries deciding their long-term energy strategy based on data that at the time reasonably underestimated the average carbon intensity of photovoltaic energy by one order of magnitude (40 vs. 250 gCO2/kWh). Her reply invited more questions than answers. “My experience is that nobody would like to pay for the data aggregation which is needed to come up with publicly available and free updates,” she said, adding that she was working on updating the public data “but only slowly.” Little to no indication was given for the source of her own data.

But, she said, she was happy to share the data she used to inform the 2020 IEA study — attaching it to the email — because it was now “outdated”. It was based on confidential individual company data, she said but did not specify the regional profile of those companies or any other aspects of their identity. She had kept it private only because she had not managed to get the studies funded.

By February 2023, Mariutti decided to self-publish his findings on his own website in a piece titled, “The dirty secret of the solar industry.” The piece made a bold claim: scientists were disingenuously using European data to model the carbon intensity of Chinese solar manufacturing. Was the goal here, he asked, to measure the carbon footprint of solar energy or merely to convince us that it’s green?

It’s all about appearing “green” and convincing everyone to buy into the scam that we’re “saving the planet,” when in actuality, we’re not. All we’re really doing is allowing the elites to profit from a completely new and lucrative industry. This way, they can line their pockets and buy off more politicians to maintain total control and power.

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