More on Recycling PV Panels

Solar power is inherently clean, and a truly elegant technology.

But nothing is without cost, and photovoltaic electricity is no exception.

Photovoltaic power systems are built on Earth, out of real stuff, just like anything else.  The physical systems need to be fabricated, transported, installed, and maintained in ways that are both economic and environmentally sustainable.

And, when they break or wear out, PV systems need to be recycled. 

With the huge increase in PV installations in the last decade or two, there is now a growing stream of systems reaching their end of life.

Recycling them is a significant challeng.

This summer, Jared Paben discusses the current state of play in the US [1]. 

First of all, PV panels are complicated.  The aluminum frame and copper wiring are no problem, but the cool part that makes electricity is trickier.  For common designs, there is silicon and other materials, but they are on securely bonded to glass and plastic, so they are not trivial to extract.

But newer models have cooler, more efficient technology.  But some of these systems have toxic materials, and all of them have metals and stuff that should be recycled.  As the technology rapidly improves, the details of recycling rapidly change.

There are technical solutions for most of these challenges, but the economics is iffy.  Recycling isn’t cheap, and the recovered materials may not be all that profitable.  Paben notes that reselling used, but functional, panels isn’t booming, not least because of the fast pasce of technological improvement.  Who wants five year old PV panels, if you can get new ones that are ten or 20 times better?  And, by the way, the tax credits only go for new panels

“Having a 15-year-old panel that still produces is a lot like having a Pentium 3 today”

(AJ Orben of We Recycle Solar, quoted in [1])

And, as always, sticking the deinstaller with the cost of recycling is a recipe for landfilling them.

So, what is needed is a mandated end of life requirement, i.e., manufacturers must provide a guaranteed end of life plan.  This means that the cost of new PV will include the cost of ultimately recycling them.

Europe has this kind of mandate, which has created a multimillion Euro recycling industry.  The US is easing toward an industry wide version of this approach, as well as state by state regulation.  It would be nice to have a federal mandate, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.

It would also be nice to get endo of life recycling included in the numerous green energy initiatives around the US.  A combination of carrots and sticks, mandates and subsidies, could go a long way to supporting the recycling industry.

This is doable people.

---

1. Jared Paben, How the recycling industry is preparing to tackle solar panels, in Resource Recycling, June 15, 2021. https://resource-recycling.com/recycling/2021/06/15/how-the-recycling-industry-is-preparing-to-tackle-solar-panels/