JAMES VARNEY: Wasting Away in Wind-and-Solarville.

Greens insist that reductions in carbon emissions will more than compensate for increased levels of potentially toxic garbage; others fret that renewable energy advocates have not been forthright about their lack of eco-friendly plans and the technology to handle the waste.

“Nobody planned on this, nobody had a plan to get rid of them, nobody planned for closure,” said Dwight Clark, whose company, Solar E Waste Solutions, recycles solar panels. “Nobody thought this through.”

The discussion about what to do with worn-out solar and wind equipment is another topic usually elided in Net Zero blueprints, which often focus on the claimed benefits of projects while discounting or ignoring the costs. As RealClearInvestigations previously reported regarding the lack of plans for acquiring the massive amounts of land for solar and wind farms needed to achieve net zero, the math can get fuzzy, and the numbers cited most frequently are those rosiest for renewables.

“They’ve been either silent, or incoherent – or just hand-wave that we should recycle all this stuff without telling us how,” said Mark Mills, executive director of the National Center on Energy Analytics. In the headlong effort to make solar and wind seem as inexpensive as possible, they have not included fees that address the eventual cost of disposal, which could leave taxpayers holding the bag.

Could?