As solar panels age out, recyclers hope to cash in

Huh, TIL this is in Switzerland

https://www.pv-magazine.com/2021/07/02/exploring-the-depths-...

I thought they do not have an expiry date but now I see...

In an exploding industry sector First Solar has shrinking revenues. What is the actual market share of thin films?

But why woupd you do that? The whole investment case was calculated on the 20 year life time of the panels. So it is more profitable to just re-power the plant, and generate a lot more electricity, and money, from the same surface. Rinse and repeat.

An old solar farm is invaluable, because it means you have already got all the administrative authorisations to operate (that can take years in Europe), and also already connected to the grid, with the infrastructure around to maintain the farm (clean/fix panels, security, etc.).

That's a big if. If you own the land, and have it connected to the grid, it at least has some value. The question then becomes what the value of the revenue is that you are going to gain replacing the panels. That's a simple economic question, it's probably not going to be nothing.

The most valuable part is not the land itself, it's the grid connection. That is, the towers bringing the power to a nearby substation, the bay in the substation with the circuit breakers and measuring equipment (adding new bays to existing substations is expensive and requires expanding their size), and the budgeting for the amount of instantaneous power the solar farm can generate. Transformers in substations have a limit to how much power they can convert, and the other circuits leaving the substation (and recursively, all these things in the substations they connect to) have a limit to how much power they can carry.

Here in Brazil, we have already gotten to the point where the bottleneck to adding new grid-scale solar and wind is often not the land or the panels/turbines, but the amount of power the grid can carry, especially between the Northeast (which has lots of wind potential and plenty of solar potential) and the Southeast/South (where the power consumption is the highest). A miscalculation in this amount (the solar and wind power plants did not react as specified to a power disturbance, so the calculations were too optimistic) was a major factor in the recent country-wide blackout (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Brazil_blackout but that article seems to be missing the later updates from https://www.ons.org.br/Paginas/Noticias/Ocorr%c3%aancia-no-S...).

In a situation where a land owner has more land than solar, and the land is already hooked up to the grid, and permissions etc are relatively cheap, and the limiting factor is the cash to install new panels, then yes, it makes sense to build a second new farm rather than replace the old.

Most situations aren't like that though.

If you have limited land, it makes sense to make it more productive, if you need to spend significant amounts to set up a new farm over and above the raw panels, it makes sense to reuse what you already have.

I think this mostly plays out for residential or other consumer level generation setups. It is doubtful this makes sense at the commercial level and recyling/reusing does make sense.

Well, if they change them, we can buy used solar panels for dirt cheap. Many already do.

I initially thought the same, but then I did the maths (sloppily).

Reasons for repowering would be that newer modules are more efficient for reasons other than age (in the case of the Swiss array, new modules would be over twice as efficient) and that the modules are a fraction of the cost of the array - modules are very cheap now. In a very naive calculation, a module pays for itself in less than a year https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-pv-prices (assumptions: $0.26 / kWh, more than 1000 full-power hours in a year). A new module (again naively, without installation or capital costs) replacing a 20% degraded one would then pay for itself in about five years.

So, I guess we are now in a situation where solar modules are almost free - there are now other problems to be solved and they seem difficult, storage especially...

And the solar industry is currently repeating this entire mess with low-income homeowners, offering to add the cost of the panels (and whatever else needs to be done to the home to accommodate them) to people's mortgages, oftentimes causing people to lose their homes due to living on fixed/low incomes already.

In so far as most people here believe in capitalist markets, we can agree to disagree. But at the very least I don't think it's too radical pinko commie scum of me to suggest maybe large industries shouldn't be able to just... fuck their customers like this? Over and over? Like I just don't care if people sign on the dotted line, that's not good enough. The layman clearly doesn't understand these contracts well enough to agree and they are blatantly, openly predatory in nature. I don't give a shit if someone has signed a legally binding document that says Solar Inc gets to fuck them, I still don't think it's right to let them do it.

> elsewhere in comments people are saying "well panels still work at 50% capacity, so why even dismount", but that's not how it works. the entire installation is leased and operated by the third party

What is the specific issue with the setup? Is it that the operator will stop maintaining the array after the contract expires? And that land owner will then have to pay to remove the panels? Could they hire someone to take over the maintenance instead? I guess I'm trying to figure out where the exploitation of the impoverished landowner is happening.

This is news to me. Where can I read more about this?

Based on the contents of your comment, I'd be surprised if this wasn't on your radar but it's a very informative and thought provoking read: https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/27/here-comes-the-sun-king/

I work in the industry. While this is theoretically true, in practice it is not.

First, bonds for decommissioning solar sites are required by many programs now. These usually cost 3-5% of total initial investment. Not insurmountable by any means.

In reality, these bonds are unlikely to ever be utilized. Most sites will never be decommissioned unless the owner wants to redevelop the land for something more profitable. The interconnection rights alone are worth way more than the cost of decommissioning.

Recently, repowering solar sites has become a hugely profitable endeavor. Most projects have a 20-30 year power purchase agreement, often at a fixed price per MWh. That initial price was set very high based on the massively more expensive cost of deployment (equipment and install cost about twice as much 10 years ago). Squeezing 20% more capacity out of these projects by repowering these sites with more efficient modules and new inverters, is often a windfall, given the falling costs involved.

That's not to say there are zero issues like the ones described. Like most early stage technology-heavy industries, early solar projects often utilized a lot of "innovative" technological strategies that dead-ended and are therefore much harder to maintain.

But overall this is just not much of an issue in practice.