What will we do with all those solar panels when their useful life is over?-2018

Recycle them. They are almost entirely recyclable, and facilities are actively operating today that perform this recycling. Veolia’s plant in France has been operating since 2018 [1]. Lotus Energy in Australia went live this year [2], recycling 100 percent of the input without using hazardous chemicals. First Solar is providing recycling services (90% recovery) in the US, Germany, and Malaysia [3].

As long as government requires recycling to create a market for this work to be done (instead of dumping in a landfill), it’s mostly solved (logistically speaking, you’re going to want facilities on every occupied continent so you’re not shipping or dumping panels elsewhere).

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-solar-recycling-idUSKBN1J...

[2] https://interestingengineering.com/australias-first-working-...

[3] https://www.firstsolar.com/en/Modules/Recycling

(Post is from 2018 and is stale)

> In order to make sure they’re ready, though, the solar industry is creating programs to train commercial recycling companies to understand what’s in manufacturers’ products and how to break them down,

It seems to me like recycling should be part of the design process for these products. Instead of hoping that recyclers are able to do something with them, we should require that manufacturers account for the entire lifecycle of the product up-front.

With the exception of truly defective panels, this is a pretty long range issue. Panels just degrade fairly linearly over a very long period of time. In 20 years they may still produce 75 percent of their rated output…. I’m pretty sure they will find homes where space is not at a premium for another 20 to 40 years after that. Then, yes, most will need to be recycled.

Solar panels are still useful after "end of life". They may only output 80% of the power they used to, but that can still be of value to someone. Maybe the time when they actually need to be scrapped is more like 50-75 years, not sure we actually know yet.

Do we have a method of mass producing solor cells that doesn't require coal and is in widespread use?

Just like clothes, sell them to Africa.

is it possible to refurbish them when their life is done?

Lack of focus on recycling is a big sign that government "green" programs are not all they purport to be.

This is a really good question, especially since a substantial fraction of the cheap Chinese solar panels produced in the past decade are not even lasting long enough to fully pay for themselves. Lower-tier Chinese panels are now frequently seen to be delaminating after just 6 or 7 years. At that point, they begin leaching toxic heavy metals into the environment.

Recycling them makes no economic or energy sense, so most will wind up in landfills, poisoning the ground for centuries to come.