Europe's first solar panel recycling plant opens in France
reuters.com
reuters.com
80% of original test-conditions rated power is still a lot - if you were to theoretically install a 40kW rated array composed of about 112, 360W panels, that would still be a 32kW array after 25 years.
I’m all for renewable energy but I don’t want huge solar plants everywhere either.
No panels visible here, but they are marching towards sacred ground: https://goo.gl/maps/8kagR6UNXXG2
This doesn’t look like a commercial solar farm also it’s a pretty small installation which looks private.
Solar farms will have fences, battery storage, support structures, access roads and essentially everything any industrial installation needs.
They won’t be pretty and you need to be really up there to advocate for taking even more space away from the public.
IMHO this coal plant in the distance is easier on the eyes: https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Getty...
They've got large coal dumping grounds. They usually have a freight train station that had coal dumped all over it, so everything within 10 meters of it died. They just let all of this sit in open air usually, plus there's the massive amount of smoke, so you can smell them from kilometers away even when there is wind (and let's just not discuss when there isn't, just visit Beijing).
But commercial scale solar farms are fucking ugly they take spaces away from people and advocating for more of them at the expense of green spaces is terribly short sighted.
Put solar everywhere we already have ugly box buildings and roads don’t take up even more shared spaces some of them due to current laws are written can even be nature reserves because we’re green after all.
But solar takes up a huge amount of space, it's worth admitting it.
Obviously every country is different — my country, the UK, much worse annual average light, and higher population density, but the point still applies. Almost every nation can do this without worrying about land use.
The US consumes nearly 29000 TWh of primary energy per year, of which about 3700 TWh ends up as usable electricity:
https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/content/assets/images/charts/Ene...
(1 "quad", quadrillion BTU, is 293 TWh.)
The other is that you're estimating the energy of the sunlight that falls on 77.5e6 m^2 rather than the achievable electrical generation. The most efficient terrestrial solar panels are just a little above 20%.
I suppose if you want to just cover totally barren places like the Sahara with solar panels that would be OK, but there's political and engineering problems with that (transmitting power long-distance incurs losses, and getting power across the Mediterranean wouldn't be easy).
•Used solar panels are off-spec and can't be teamed with other used solar panels properly. They become like two drunks trying to help each other down the street.
•Even used solar panels need mounting/racking hardware.
•Even used solar panels need inverters and wiring (frequently in values that are out of production).
•Used solar panels are a b*@#% to ship.
The glass, if intact, is the most valuable part of the solar panel for recycling purposes. This is followed closely by the aluminum frame.
The EVA (clear rubber) that encases the solar panels is garbage by the time the panel gets recycled. This is the part that turns brown and lets in moisture. I imagine incineration is the best path forward for this stuff, because after 30 years of cross-linking in the sun, it's not going to melt into a liquid.
The solar cells themselves are so enmeshed with the EVA that they turn into inchlong irregular shards attached to tabbing. There's no realistic hope for getting a commercial-grade panel out of them, even if you melt them down.
The tabbing is a valuable mix of tin, copper, and silver, as is the metallization on some cells, though you'd have to be talking tons of crushed cells to get a pound each of the metals. This should be a straightforward matter of crush and dissolve in chemicals, then throwing the stripped silicon into a smelter somewhere.
The "J-box" doesn't count for a lot of weight and is probably too old-fashioned to reuse, even if the plastic hadn't broken down and the contacts hadn't corroded. Best off cooking off the plastic and remelting the copper/tin metal portions.
You might find yourself in a position to say, hey, I'd gladly accept a used 3 ft x 5 ft solar panel that worked 50% as good as new, and was ugly. I doubt you would be in the position to take on 100 more, especially not being able to team them together.
It's not unusual to see brand-spanking-new panels at prices near $0.50/W. Shipping is starting to dominate the cost of panels, used or new.
And yes shipping will be truly a pain in the ass. A brand new pallet of 20 or 22 panels with the special plastic protectors in place, and wrapped up with plastic, is easy to ship. Individual loose panels are difficult to transport loose without damaging them, and labor intensive to move around.
One of the things you can do with used panels is re-use them for off grid applications. There are off grid PV charge controllers now (Schneider, others) which support up to either 600V or 1000VDC on the PV input side, and up to 4800W of panels per charge controller. You can build strings that are basically all of the panels in series together, simplifying the wiring, assuming that the panels are new enough to be also rated for 600V (US) or 1000V (EU) spec, mostly intended for feeding big inverters.
I wouldn't really say that shipping dominates the cost just yet. I recently bought a pallet load of high-efficiency monocrystalline panels (72-cell, 360W) at around $0.62/watt. The shipping for the pallet was about $350. The panels themselves were about $4500 FOB.
Also, keeping the old panels means you can’t reuse whatever those panels are mounted on for the new ones. That can make installing new panels alongside old ones more expensive, sometimes significantly more so.
While the power they produce degrades with time, it's not enough to be worth junking the panel.
Basically no solar panels should be recycled unless they are completely non-functional or faulty.
My guess is this plant will be dealing almost entirely with damaged panels and not end of life panels. Or they hope to trick people into recycling perfectly good but old panels, which is not eco-friendly at all.
To be clear, I'm not saying people junk panels that are still producing.
But just for panels generating a standard "bucketed" wattage, a very small amount of damage can lead to a "defective" panel.
By removing the silicone and/or glass, the still-usable parts can be recycled into what you might call a "remanufactured" panel. Or, if the cells have been in service for a very long time, by taking apart the panel, the cells can be recycled as high-purity stock. (In other words, ground up and used to make new solar cells.)
None of this makes economic sense until it is being done at huge scale. Therefore, I expect this is plant is mostly an experiment, expecting that as the deployment of panels continues to grow exponentially, having a viable (and proven) recycling plant will grow in value proportionally to the panels.
That said, most commercial installations price out the replacement as part of the life cycle management of their solar infrastructure. They will 'recycle' perfectly good solar panels like they recycle perfectly good computers. If you are running operations for a large physical plant this helps you spread the maintenance over time and avoid times where there is more repair work to do than you have staff to do it with.
If you have a PV panel that isn't physically damaged and its encapsulation is still fine - it still has value even at 25 years of life... I'd happily buy a pallet load of used, physically fine condition 360W panels that when put on a STC flasher "only" produce 320W, at a very cheap $/watt price.
What installations do we have data on that have been running since 1970 or so? You say they should last at least 30 years but may keep working decades longer.
> While the power they produce degrades with time, it's not enough to be worth junking the panel.
It's not surprising to me that they will fail, even before 30 years. I mean, they are outside, subjected to weather and thermal cycling. They are going to get hit by lightning, hail, and lots of freeze/thaw cycles. Almost everything degrades in that environment. Even the panel support structures themselves will get crooked on that time scale from soil moisture changes.
Last info I had was that they got founded and are trying to scale their process, opening a small experimental plant.
The only alternative to their technology that I know of is either throwing away the glass or melting everything and then recoup all elements. The former produces lots of waste and the latter needs huge amounts of energy.
I was almost always better to let the rain clean the panels in the field, even in some pretty dusty and arid climates.
The deciding factor was usually the labor cost of the cleaning. (Think very depressed labor prices) Even then the risk of damage from the cleaning ops might sway away from manual cleaning.
Granted, I live in an area where we get rain on a regular basis.