Index
What’s The Plan For After The Win?
23 December 2025
Peter Coffee
When there’s a clear need to make a transformational change, fixing the problems that are right in front of us can seem like the crucial concern. That’s especially true when every day’s new data, or new insight into mechanisms and interactions, seems more likely to say “it’s worse than we realized” than it is to surface offsetting adaptations.
What hit my news feed this morning, for example, was the NOAA Arctic Report Card for 2025, which leads off with bullet lists of “Headlines” grouped by categories of “In the air,” “In the ocean” and “On land”: the ones that jumped out at me, combining from all three groups, were
Surface air temperatures across the Arctic from October 2024 through September 2025 were the warmest recorded since 1900. Since 2006, Arctic annual temperature has increased at more than double the global rate of temperature changes.
In March 2025, Arctic winter sea ice reached the lowest annual maximum extent in the 47-year satellite record. The oldest, thickest Arctic sea ice (> 4 years) has declined by more than 95% since the 1980s.
Atlantification—an influx of water properties from lower latitudes—has reached the central Arctic Ocean, hundreds of miles from the former edge of the Atlantic Ocean. This weakens the Arctic Ocean’s layering of waters of different densities, therefore enhancing heat transfer, melting sea ice, and threatening ocean circulation patterns that exert a long-term influence on the weather.
In over 200 Arctic Alaska watersheds, iron, and other elements released by thawing permafrost have turned pristine rivers and streams orange over the past decade. In “rusting rivers”, the increased acidity and elevated levels of toxic metals degrade water quality, compromising aquatic habitat and eroding biodiversity.
Adding to this kind of primary payload of Bad News, though, is a kind of collateral damage. Under a constant barrage of attention-grabbing data, we may give too little attention to challenges that lack immediate urgency, but have long lead times for solution. That’s especially the case when complex, multi-stakeholder interactions make for discomfort and discouragement.
For example, it’s clear that solar power is an important contribution to reducing carbon emissions from electrical power production: this morning, the U.S. Energy Information Administration shared its latest “Monthly Electric Generator Inventory” indicating continued growth of non-fossil-fuel capacity, having previously projected this August that “solar would account for more than half of the 64 GW that developers plan to bring online this year.”
Well and good, but solar panels are manufactured artifacts with finite lifetimes. This is not a new observation. It was fifty years ago that a professor’s comment in a materials science lecture led to me to write this in 2017:
“A solar panel does not produce energy,” noted my freshman-year professor in solid-state chemistry, and he was not just talking about a panel’s need to see sunlight joules from which to liberate volt-ampere-hours. A solar panel takes energy to produce, he pointed out, and it has a finite lifetime (typically losing at least 20% of its effectiveness over 25 years) – so in effect, the energy to mine the materials and manufacture the panel and transport and install it are pre-invested in the object, and must be compared against a reasonable and bounded estimate of its lifetime output. Only in the past few years has that balance shifted toward a net positive number, and large-scale facilities’ life-cycle economics are still a moving target.
In 2022, this question received a “Supply Chain Deep Dive Assessment” from the U.S. Department of Energy, which warned that critical materials for solar panel production pose challenges both technical and geopolitical. Excerpting key points from that report,
Decarbonizing the electricity sector in the United States would require significant acceleration of annual PV [photovoltaic] deployment. Compared with 19 gigawatts (GWdc) of PV deployed in the United States in 2020, annual PV deployment would need to double in the early 2020s and to quintuple by the end of the decade in the most aggressive grid decarbonization scenario. [Note that this is consistent with the current projection for 2025 that was mentioned just above.]
Periodic repairs can extend solar system lifetimes beyond the conventional useful life of 20–30 years and degraded solar panels can be transferred and reused in applications compatible with lower system output. By extending useful lifetime, repair and reuse can delay the need for new resource extraction and manufacturing and delay end-of-life disposal. Further, certain solar system components and materials can be recycled…
…but…
The global PV supply chain is almost entirely dependent on ingot and wafers from China. Additionally, many of the other pieces of the module supply chain, such as the manufacturing of production-facility equipment and balance-of-module components (e.g., glass, aluminum frames), are predominantly located in China.
Forced labor in the mining and processing of raw materials in China’s Xinjiang province adds a new dimension of uncertainty to the solar supply chain’s reliance on Chinese production. Metallurgical-grade silicon (MGS) and the coal used to produce electricity have been highlighted by the U.S. government as direct beneficiaries of government-sponsored forced-labor programs.
…and as of this July, as estimated in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
By the early 2030s, the global cumulative amount of PV waste is expected to reach 8 million tons, and by the 2050s, the PV waste level could reach a staggering 78 million tons.
While the environmental impact of [PV panel] construction has received much attention, what happens at the end of their life cycle has garnered less scrutiny. At present, only about 10% of PV panels are recycled, with the majority being dumped, burned, or buried.
At least two entire books could be written about
the process, and the pace, of Arctic indicators of urgency
the complexity, and the long-lead process development and project management, of treating solar panels as a major contributor to global energy portfolios for decades to come
For now, these are merely offered as examples (one each) of the news-of-the-day demands to keep up with what’s being discovered and understood, while also thinking ahead about what would be a good problem to have: how will we prepare for a time when this can be less about alarming headlines, and more about being ready to manage a different (and better) world?
