it's about time! - PV recylcing

what happens to all these solar panels in 30 years? What is happening right now to solar panels that were installed 30 years ago and have reached their end of life?  Will they just be buried in our toxic landfills for thousands of years?  well... here's some of the not so pretty issues behind solar PV Panels.

Ozzie Zehner  wrote a book in 2012  (Green Illusions) that was largely ignored by the pop media and the energy industry because it spoke too much truth to power - renewable power.  Ozzie said 'solar is renewable, solar panels are not', 

wind power is renewable, wind turbines are not'.  Basically he was stating that it took a shit load of fossil fuels to produce solar panels and wind turbines.  ah yes... the ole story-of-stuff:  where does it come from, and how is it disposed of? 


-----------------------------------------------------------------

Solar PV panels are really not very renewable off-the-roof. They are not dripped upon us by some green god fairy from the heavens - they are made in highly toxic manufacturing facilities much like semiconductor ICs.  And there has been scant information over the last thirty years about what heavy metals, toxic effluents etc occur in these factories. 



An LCA (life cycle assessment - ISO14000 series) analyses says that solar PV panels are around 98% effective if they are producing for over 20 years.  But how they are made and disposed of creates a large toxic environmental problem - until now.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

It is with great fanfare and happiness that I just read about the first major industrial recycling process for solar PV (photovoltaic) panels.

First Solar just announced their current and future plans for closing the loop on their PV panel manufacturing. 

https://cleantechnica.com/2018/12/04/first-solar-breaks-down-its-plans-for-solar-module-recycling-spi2018/  


I will be prioritizing 'First solar' next time I buy panels because of their preemtive full-circle business process and their recycling process. I hope to have some independent 3rd party verification on this soon. 


... "First Solar has been working on (recycling) for years. They started out by charging customers a small recycling fee with the purchase price of the module. “With every module sold, we also sold the service that we pick up the modules at end of life and recycle them,” Andreas said. “That was basically 8 years before regulation came in in Europe. We now have the electronic waste directive where PV is part of that.”

---------------------------------------------------------------

My first solar panels were purchased at Real Goods (willits, ca) in 1979.  They were used panels from the DOE1 Barstow demonstration project... at about $50 per watt! (now it's $1 per watt). 






These solar panels lasted until 2001 when they burned up alongside my entire WinSol2 house.  They did not completely 'melt' since the solar cells were still visible in the debris.  I had no clue of what toxic heavy metals and other unknown chemicals were leaching into the ground aquifer with each rain.  

The real key here is DfD:  Design for Dis-assembly.  If that starts happening, then solar PV panels do have a big future beyond our carbon era.  As Ozzie Zehner  said (Green illusions book) solar is renewable, solar PV panels are not.  Well, with First Solar's recycling model and many others following along, and regulations getting stricter (but probably not in China ++) then we truly do have renewable solar panels.