The transition to renewable energy sources – wind, water, and solar – away from coal, oil, and gas is an industry and policy stunt that never really happened, if you ask Alexander A. Dunlap, postdoc at Boston University. The global coal consumption breaks records year after year despite the invention of solar panels. In fact, there has never been a time when companies and states burned as much fossil fuel as they do today. “The idea of renewable energy obscures the persistence of old systems,” says Dunlap, referencing JB Fressoz’s work on the industry of so-called sustainable energy that since the 1970s has been promoted politically. Industrial-scale renewable energy does not offer an alternative to the capitalist order and its exploitative relationships to earth.

It was with this insight that Dunlap embarked on a research trip across the US to map out the life cycle of solar panels. What they found was that not only does coal persist: the material journey of solar panels is completely entangled with historic structures of extraction and labor exploitation. The solar panel supply chain follows the same mining sites, rail roads, factory facilities, and prison institutions that otherwise were core sites of liberation struggles in the 20th century. Low carbon infrastructures exist within the exact same system as high emission energy sources. 

A mine older than Utah 

The journey first took Dunlap to Rio Tinto Kennecott, a mining, smelting, and refining operation in Utah. Already during their very first field visit, it became clear that new technologies of solar panels were intertwined with old systems of exploitation. “The mine has existed for longer than the state of Utah,” Dunlap says. Indeed, the first copper deposits were located in Bingham Canyon in the late 1880s just outside of Salt Lake City. Thus, the life of the solar panel begins with the origins of the US, a country built on land extraction and land expansion. In a way, the act of mining can be said to be part of settler colonialism – the power structure that continues to allow for the project of America to exist. 

Today, the Rio Tinto Kennecott mine is one of the largest open air copper mines in the world. The company also mines gold and silver, and as of 2022, tellurium, which is an essential component in photovoltaic solar panels. The scale of the mine is massive: the conveyer belt that brings material to the crusher and refinery is 7 to 9 miles long. The mine operates all year round 24 hours a day. And it is not only eroding mountains, but it also takes its toll on people: Dunlap recounts that Utah physicians have stressed concerns about the illnesses that follow working and living around the dust and chemicals of the mine despite Rio Tinto’s attempts to clean up its legacy.

Kennecott Mine from the visitor platform. Source: “Mining as environmentalism: green/grey extractivism and the production of extractive subjectivities around the Rio Tinto Kennecott mine in the United States” (March 14th 2025) by Alexander A. Dunlap, Bojana Novaković & Benjamin K. Sovacool

Rust belt glass manufacturing revived

From Utah, Dunlap arrives in Ohio in the old rust belt where the company First Solar produces industrial-scale solar panels. Across the US, railway lines used to transport raw materials to the factories of the Midwest and Northeast until the mid-20th century. Now old techniques of glass have proved helpful in the manufacturing of solar panels. 

As opposed to the automobile factories from the previous century, today’s labor is hyper digitized. In fact, there is hardly anyone on the ground, and workers mostly do monitoring of machines, Dunlap notes during their visits to the facilities. Despite the need for this kind of technical and skilled labor, the pathway to management is blocked. The company sources its workforce via H1-B visas where workers from India and Taiwan are pulled into the country temporarily. Due to visa limits, foreign workers are prevented from upskilling in community colleges and even getting promotions. 

California as a forever frontier of extraction

Dunlap arrives in California to study the use case of the panels. In the deserts of California, solar farms with millions of panels stretch up to 30 kilometers. Like the two previous sites, the historic use of the land continues into the present day: California embodies a frontier of extraction that began with the gold rush of the 19th century and that is currently being pushed by Big Tech in Silicon Valley. 

“The desert landscape might feel less spectacular than the Amazon jungle, but it is like a forest upside down,” explains Dunlap. With large areas covered by panels, biodiversity suffers: ancient trees are cleared; soil is destabilized and birds crash into the panels believing the glass to be water. The solar farms also disturb native burial grounds reinforcing the historic and present-day violence that is settler colonialism. Land is but development potential in the eyes of the investor. “All they see is an opportunity to turn barren unoccupied land into green transition when in fact indigenous peoples have stewarded the desert for generations,” says Dunlap. 

Sign displaying discontent with solar energy at the Desert Bar, California. Alexander A. Dunlap, Benjamin K. Sovacool, & Bojana Novaković. (2024). ‘A Dead Sea of Solar Panels:’ solar enclosure, extractivism and the progressive degradation of the California desert. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 52(3), 539–573. https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2024.2388051

Prison labor to fill landdumps

At the end of the life cycle, Dunlap finds themselves at a prison electronic waste recycling facility in the “sunbelt” of the US that has existed since the mid-1990s. For about a decade, anything from VCRs, TVs, dental chairs, radioactive waste, and now solar panels have been dropped off. Also the Department of Defense deposits their electronic waste at the prison. “The prison enlists prison labor”, says Dunlap and continues: “the private prison is a business and they use incarcerated people to disassemble and strip decommissioned e-waste and re-sell refurbished  computers on e-bay.” Not only the people living in the facility are punished: prison guards are also exposed to the dangerous work of recycling with little possibility to unionize. Testimonies say, Dunlap shares, that 67 staff members died with no number to imprisoned persons. 

While some e-waste is easy to disassemble, the recycling of solar panels looks more like disposal. “Panels are actually not designed to be repurposed,” says Dunlap. Once the aluminum frame is taken out, the panels would have to be shipped to Korea and Japan for a proper smelter to hand and retrieve the lead and silver. While a recycling facility exists for solar panels, it appears landfilling them is a common practice. At the end of the day, the cost of recycling is more than crushing panels up and dumping them in landfills. 

Solar panels are not inherently bad

Dunlap retains that they do not have an inherent resistance towards solar panels and solar energy. “In fact,” Dunlap says, “I have them in my house and they are beneficial technologies.” It is their complicated supply chains, entangled with extractive capitalism, that they take issue with. Structural change is not an easy fix and the so-called green energy transition never tackles the root cause of the current climate crisis. From Dunlap’s research, it becomes clear that historic sites of extraction, exploitation, and high carbon emission are entangled with the so-called renewable industry. And for that reason solar energy does not present an alternative but continues the current structures that created the deeply unjust and violent world of today. 

This article is part of a series published by the Center for Applied Ecological Thinking at the University of Copenhagen. It is a write-up about the event “Exploring the Life of Solar Panels or Why J-B Fressoz is Right” (August 26, 2025) where Alexander A. Dunlap, postdoctoral research fellow at Boston University Institute for Global Sustainability (IGS), USA, presented their research.