Femtosecond Lasers Solve Solar Panels' Recycling Issue | Hacker News Reader

Femtosecond Lasers Solve Solar Panels' Recycling Issue

spectrum.ieee.org

22 pointswesturner10 comments

> Manufacturers globally are deploying enough solar panels to produce an additional 240 gigawatts each year. That rate is projected to increase to 3 terawatts by 2030, Ovaitt says. By 2050, anywhere from 54 to 160 million tonnes of PV panels will have reached the end of their life-spans, she says.

"Towards Polymer-Free, Femto-Second Laser-Welded Glass/Glass Solar Modules" (2024) https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10443029 :

> [...] Key to this finding is that the module must be framed and braced, and the glass must be ribbed to allow pockets for the cells and welds inside the border of the module. The result is a module design that is completely polymer free, hermetically sealed, has improved thermal properties, and is easily recycled

Recycling isn't nearly the issue people think it is, because the "lifetime" of a panel - 20, 30 years - is not when the panel becomes useless, but when its output has dropped 20%.

Some percentage of solar panels will become dysfunctional because of extreme weather events.

There is no item, person, or place on Earth for which this is not true. Few things could make something less special than saying "sometimes, this thing is destroyed by extreme weather".

The point, which I should have stated explicitly, is that the solar panels that break should/can be recycled. And so recycling is also needed for this percentage.

If people recycle PV and TPV panels at 20% from peak/new, the effective average product lifetime is shorter given a higher rate of failure.

And that even depends on the location! panels in Arizona vs in Vancouver island are going wear at different rates!

You've got to be kidding me. Solar panels are nonrenewable??

Nothing in this world is black and white. Nothing is 100% renewable.

Renewables are a classification that generally only implies that there’s no material that is spent/burned/fully degraded during normal daily operation. And of course you can recycle some of the materials at end of life.

How much depends on our technology. We don’t really know how recyclable the solar panels we produce today are because they will be recycled with the technology we have in 20-30 years. I suspect we will be able to recycle almost 100% by then. There are already companies that have processes that can get very high recycling rates at a decent cost today. And I think all the technology around processing/reprocessing materials will improve exponentially in the coming decades, because most of the capital that went to oil/gas will go in that direction instead going forward. The success of countries will not be based on how much oil they can get their hands on, but on how much useful materials they have and how well they can recycle them.

I think countries that don’t transition EVs now are making a huge mistake simply because the wealth of countries in a couple of decades will be measured in no small part by how much copper is within the country, since that will determine how much the country can do in terms of transportation and industry.

At a very technical viewpoint, everything is recyclable.

However, for many materials, the cost and wastes attached to recycling them may be so much greater than the costs of disposing of them and using raw materials to recreate them that it is not worth it to recycle them.

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