Last fall, the UK Independent reported that the number of fires involving solar panels soared after a boom in their use driven by energy bill increases.
Data obtained under freedom of information rules show that there were six times the number of fires involving solar panels last year compared with 10 years ago.The rate has increased sharply with 66 fires already recorded up until July this year compared with 63 for the whole of 2019, prompting concern from safety experts who are worried about a lack of regulation on who can install them.
Proponents of green energy have minimized and downplayed the concerns about relying so heavily on new technologies that are not fully developed with hazards that have not completely been assessed or addressed.
As of yesterday, these worries can no longer be ignored. In Australia, the Sydney Olympic Park Aquatic Center held a massive swim meet for high schools, and the venue was packed with teens and their families.
The center had to be evacuated as the solar panels on the roof caught on fire.
NSW Fire and Rescue spokesperson Guy Lightfoot told Lismore City News that crews arriving on the scene found fire and “black smoke issuing from the roof of the aquatic centre”.“Crews got to work on the roof with the hose line and breathing apparatus, we also deployed an aerial appliance,” he said.“On the roof they found solar panels alight, which they then switched off. The damage was confined to some roof panels and solar panels.” (Lismore City News)The Centre’s ‘X’ account revealed, “The Aquatic Centre will be closed for the remainder of the afternoon due to an unforeseen issue with a solar panel on the roof causing a fire evacuation. We thank all of our patrons and staff for their patience and cooperation during this time.”
Although only one person was injured in the incident, a fire in a filled arena could be a massive tragedy.
However, solar panels aren’t the only green technology with significant environmental or safety issues. Last fall, Beege Welborne of Hot Air reported that a Texas Monthly-featured town had essentially become a graveyard for discarded wind turbine blades.
Nine months later, the publication reports that despite complaints to the local environmental authorities, the blades are still there….despite promises otherwise.
It opened in 2017 and has become a long-term home for thousands of discarded wind turbine blades. Each has been cut into thirds that remain as long as modest ranch houses. They are not buried in the earth but stacked haphazardly in rows of undulating off-white fiberglass.This blade boneyard was built by Global Fiberglass Solutions, a Washington State company that promised the State of Texas, the county, the city, investors, wind-energy companies, and its Sweetwater neighbors that its business plan was to temporarily store the blades there before grinding them up and recycling them into pallets or railroad ties. That never happened, but after I first visited the site, last August, the company’s CEO, Don Lilly, promised: “If you come back nine months from now, you will not see the material.”I returned last week to find nothing of the sort. Sweetwater officials have tired of the years of unkept promises and little help from state authorities to address the situation. The blades remain as they were, and nearly every local I spoke with said they hadn’t seen any recent activity in the yard.
The funny thing is that when you research wind turbine blade recycling, you find that it is “tricky”, energy-intensive, and produces oil-based by products.
The company shreds each turbine blade and runs the pieces through an oxygen-free reactor to separate the polymer from the glass fibers….hardly the “green energy” utopia promised.Those fibers can then be recovered and reused.Morgan: “We take that material, recover it, and have the capability to put it into a brand-new blade.”The process also recovers oil and a gas that can be used for energy.
Finally, to round out my review of the life safety and environmental hazards that are now being discovered through the actual use of green energy sources, President Donald Trump has vowed to immediately halt offshore wind energy projects “on day one” of a new term as US president to protect the whales.
“We are going to make sure that that ends on day one,” Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for November’s presidential election, said of the offshore wind farms. “I’m going to write it out in an executive order. It’s going to end on day one.”…“They destroy everything, they’re horrible, the most expensive energy there is,” Trump said of the wind turbines. “They ruin the environment, they kill the birds, they kill the whales.”
It appears the bill for ignoring reasonable concerns about the massive expansion of solar and wind energy that critics, based on real science and technological experience, have expressed is now coming due.
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