How did solar power become so cheap? By the 2020s, China was dominating the global solar market. How did they manage that? Solar needs cheap coal because making silicon requires volcano-like heat. In the 2020s, China was building about two new coal plants a week—six times more than the rest of the world combined. Solar needs cheap charcoal. Every year, China was also going to its war-torn and destitute neighbor, Myanmar, and extracting 14,000 football fields’ worth of tropical forest wood to make cheap charcoal to help smelt its silicon.

Solar needs cheap nickel. Indonesia had become the world’s leading producer of nickel, much of it going to China. In Indonesia, by the mid-2020s, 50,000 hectares of tropical forests—home to uncontacted Indigenous people—had been cleared for nickel mining, with reports of constant strife and workers deaths at Chinese-run nickel mines in the country. Nickel needs cheap coal. By the 2020s, Indonesia’s coal industry was booming, partly driven by a surging nickel-smelting industry. Making one ton of Indonesian nickel caused about 45 tons of CO2.

Indonesia has a particularly dirty type of nickel ore. To bring this low quality ore up to the purity levels demanded for solar panels and electric vehicles, requires a tremendous amount of high-pressure acid leaching. Writing for Brookings, Lilly Blumenthal and Caitlin Purdy estimated that Indonesia’s poor quality nickel ore “releases two to six times more the amount of carbon dioxide emissions” than alternative sources.

Carbon dioxide is the Ace of Hearts in a deck of environmental destruction. Biodiversity loss is an entire suit. The acid leaching—along with other chemicals and wastes—are truly devastating for one of the most pristine, biodiverse and—until the mining oligarchs came—largely untouched natural oases left in this hurt environment of ours. Writing for Fair Observer, Muhammad Zulfikar Rakhmat described the area:

“Papua, Indonesia, lies at the heart of the Coral Triangle, home to the richest marine biodiversity on Earth. Over 1,500 fish species, three-quarters of all known coral species, and countless fragile ecosystems thrive here. Indigenous Papuans rely on these waters and forests for food, identity, and survival. But this ecological and cultural sanctuary is now under siege—from the very industry that claims to be building a cleaner, greener future: nickel mining.”

Cheap solar demands slave labor. There was “significant evidence” that China created concentration camps where it forced Uyghurs and other minorities to work as slaves to make its solar panels, “within an environment of unprecedented coercion, undergirded by the constant threat of re-education and internment,” the BBC stated. According to Chloe Cranston from Sheffield Hallam University, “Almost the entire global solar panel industry is implicated in the forced labour of Uyghurs and other Turkic and Muslim-majority peoples.”

During the solar manufacturing process, enslaved Uyghurs were exposed to tetrachloride, arsenic, phosphoryl chloride, hydrofluoric acid and a variety of other acids, all of which would be dumped in the local water and soil. Many of the cheap solar panels manufactured by these poor slaves were of very low quality and were shipped in huge quantities to Africa and other Global South markets, where they ended up becoming e-waste within a few years, if not months. (To even partly justify their ‘green’ labels, such panels should last 20-30 years.)

So, the next time someone tells you that solar is really ‘cheap’, explain to them why. Cheap costs the earth.