As solar panels age out, recyclers hope to cash in

https://e360.yale.edu/features/solar-energy-panels-recycling

by thread_id • 2 years ago

79 55 2 years ago

e360.yale.edu

Unless the land is valuable, you might as well leave old solar farms there. Even when they're 50 years old they'll still output some power, even if half the inverters are dead and the panels are down to 50% efficiency.

hef198986• 2 years ago

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.

maxerickson2• 2 years ago

Well, if it's worth putting new panels on it, then the land must be valuable. Illustrates the banality of the GP comment.

KolmogorovComp• 2 years ago

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.).

TylerE2• 2 years ago

Isn’t that an even stronger argument for upgrading an existing plant in situ versus spinning a new one up?

jillesvangurp• 2 years ago

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.

bombcar2• 2 years ago

If the grid connectivity issue is cheap enough and easy enough, it’s much easier to build new ones than knock down and old one and then build a new one.

Similar thing to houses, where there is available land to build new ones.

cesarb• 2 years ago

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...).

KennyBlanken• 2 years ago

The most valuable part is not the land itself

...What?

Here in Brazil

Ah. When your country is destroying 8,000 square km/year in Amazon rain forest (and disappearing the indigenous people who live on it), yeah, I guess you would think land is 'cheap.'

Anyway - you're missing the point. The "cost" is lost opportunity. At a certain point, between increased new panel efficiencies and the currently installed panels losing efficiency, the operator is missing out on enough power generation that they can upgrade and make more money in the long run.

gwern2• 2 years ago

I'm not really following your point. If the land/space is not the bottleneck but the grid, then that makes the idea of leaving old panels in place all the better. As the electrical output falls by the aging panels and underutilizes your grid connection, you could just top them up with new panels, up to the limit of your grid connection (putting them in the spare land you have by stipulation).

The question would seem to be, at what point is the marginal profit from the trickle of electricity from fully-depreciated old panels less than the cost of ripping them out & selling the scrap? Presumably there is such a point, as the old solar panels increasingly approach zero electrical output, if their materials aren't so worthless as to not even be worth the cost of scrapping.

benj111• 2 years ago

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.

infecto• 2 years ago

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.

GaggiX• 2 years ago

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

ahartmetz• 2 years ago

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...

mercutio2• 2 years ago

You’re off by an order of magnitude in the value of wholesale electricity.

Wholesale rates for non-dispatchable electricity are under $.02 / kWh.

iforgotpassword• 2 years ago

I think this is what gp meant by "unless land is valuable"... Just build the new array next to it otherwise. :)

pfdietz• 2 years ago

The oldest PV array on the grid is, what, 38 years old? Or is it 39 now? It's in Europe.

EDIT: more than 40 years. Inverters had to be replaced five times though.

bschne• 2 years ago

Huh, TIL this is in Switzerland

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

dorfsmay2• 2 years ago

This is fascinating:

Chemical analysis performed in recent years confirmed that the three encapsulants are made of the same base polymers but their three respective suppliers used different additives in the encapsulant formulation, explaining the varied performance. “As in many cases with PV installations, the devil is in the details,” Virtuani stated. “By just changing a single element, in this case the supplier of the encapsulant, the entire performance of a PV array can be compromised,”

veunes2• 2 years ago

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

dymk• 2 years ago

Why’d you think that?

g1297743• 2 years ago

solar panels on small mom and pop properties (100 or so acres) were entirely exploitative and people in the comments don't seem to realize the nature and the extent of the exploitation. there was an analysis document from an ivy law professor which at some point was the only such source, but now googling for keywords brings up a lot of relevant material. few years back i was helping a number of farmland owners in a row with their solar installation deals, and every single one of those deals took a scorched earth approach (ianal, but i read contracts in my day job)

cleanup specifically is a huge part, because it's an externalized cost burdened on the land owner. bringing up the necessity of documented cleanup strategy in the contract pretty much immediately leads to the solar company withdrawing its proposal (in fact only one company even bothered to politely say no, everyone else just ghosted).

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, the owners typically have neither expertise nor the ability to continue operating an industrial site past the lifetime of a contract, or past its operational lifetime for that matter. a lot of these installations exploit the old age and the effective poverty of the site owners (those 100 acres are a low-liquidity asset, while the industry they supported is no longer there due to aging population and regulatory changes), the companies despite the good cause they are attached to seem to be interested purely in short term gains, the contracts are all about externalizing as much cost as possible, the installed equipment is presumably all treated as write off (i sort of wonder how subsidies factor into this, i suspect that they are significantly enabling this kind of behavior).

american socioeconomic model somehow managed to take a wonderful future looking thing and turn it (at least in some instances, but also every single one i had to deal with) into a scorched earth, after après moi, le déluge thing. recyclers will possibly improve the situation, at least for the people who are already locked into financially disadvantageous contracts, but that really depends on how much deinstallation they'll be willing to take up.

ToucanLoucan• 2 years ago

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.

bombcar2• 2 years ago

Incentives make it worse, because it provides a fig leaf - we’re doing this because the $Xk incentive is available to homeowners only.

Otherwise if it was a good deal the companies would do it directly, and you’d be able to ask why they’re not and instead selling you something.

robertlagrant• 2 years ago

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?

At least over here in the UK, people got money from other taxpayers to buy solar panels. This isn't a very capitalist scenario. You're right that some regulation around advertising TCO would have been useful, and markets that do well need informed consumers. So add good regulations and subtract incentives; both of these aren't things markets can control. They sound like government failings.

foobarian• 2 years ago

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.

bettercaust• 2 years ago

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

ethagnawl• 2 years ago

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/

g1297743• 2 years ago

i don't otherwise follow solar, beyond being a strong supporter in theory. i'm an eastern european autist, who used his soviet education to price financial instruments for capitalist. i bought a farm to raise ponies, and got into solar contracts purely because a friend asked me to look at hers. the opening paragraph strongly resonates though. at least the people i deal with are country rich, they have land, they have some savings, they want to leave a little something for their grandkids. i wasn't aware of the details of rooftop solar (another sibling commentor pointed it out also), but i'm smh not surprised.

tsjackson• 2 years ago

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.

konschubert6• 2 years ago

When repowering, what happens to the old modules and inverters?

g1297743• 2 years ago

i appreciate your comment, i'm glad that industry is developing mitigations, even if they are profit driven. i haven't looked at solar contracts in a few years (hence "were" in op), but i'm sure recent improvements make them significantly more attractive. like a sibling commentor given the massive information assimetry i would prefer significant regulatory scrutiny, specifically standartization, mandatory disclosure of known externalities, perhaps established by cfpb.

the op link though is about solar installations approaching their lifetime, which means contracts from 10-20 years ago. i'd like to point out that you started with a very strong statement ("in practice not true"), which was then variously hedged. more importantly the fact that in practice the mitigations have manifested ("repowering is a windfall") doesn't after the fact negate that the initial contracts were exploitative. in my experience simply verbalizing and pricing various hidden factors (i used Shannon L. Ferrell's "understanding solar energy agreements" as starting point), decomissioning being one of them but other points in ferrell also played a role, or even just developing a rudimentary payments schedule, ended up strongly discouraging land owners (and smh als the solar representatives). i'm glad that we're having this dialogue though, because i'm sure there was no malicious intent behind those omittions, and solar industry has become significantly more transparent since.

photochemsyn• 2 years ago

This article doesn't discuss the lifetime differences between monocrystalline silicon panels and the various thin-film products such as cadmium telluride or lead perovskite. Defect-free monocrystalline silicon PV can last >50 years, and can be refurbished.

Unfortunately the US (unlike China) never invested in a robust monocrystalline capacity, and the only US manufacturers of solar panels appears to be First Solar of AZ which uses CdTe (toxic waste). Many other purported manufacturers of monocrystalline silicon are just assembling panels using Chinese-origin wafers, now produced in places like Vietnam to avoid sanctions issues.

If the billions poured into fradulent and useless 'clean coal' programs during the past two decades in the US had instead gone to solar PV programs, things might have been different, but the fossil fuel & investor-owned power utility sectors didn't want to face competition, so we got garbage like 'FutureGen' under Bush and stuff like this under Obama (doe.gov):

"In December 2009, the U.S. Department of Energy announced the selection of three new projects with a value of $3.18 billion to accelerate the development of advanced coal technologies with carbon capture and storage at commercial-scale."

There were eight major clean coal projects - only one was completed, and it shut down later - a complete waste of billions of dollars.

jeffbee• 2 years ago

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

powera• 2 years ago

Two points:

1) The panels being de-commissioned now aren't modern panels, they are 20+ years old. They were substantially less efficient (per square-meter) than today's panels when they were new, and they (probably) are aging worse.

2) A lot of these "the solar panels have to be deconstructed for economic reasons" arguments are the same arguments as "Coyote v. ACME has to be destroyed for economic reasons". The reasons are completely fake; designed purely to feed Moloch.

hedgehog• 2 years ago

If, as commenters here have pointed out, the grid interconnect is the valuable part of a solar site, it might pencil out to relocate the solar hardware to some less convenient location for a non-grid-tied smelting operation or similar. Or build a very large bulk compute cluster bringing in decommissioned servers. If power is free, all the hardware is available for better than free, and the plan is to run until failure and then recycle, I wonder how the math works out.

friend_and_foe• 2 years ago

If there's anything we have learned from plastic, it's that if recycling is not economically viable it won't happen. Reducing waste is simply not a potent motivator. If you can get your hands on expired panels for really cheap and still can't make new ones with the materials in them cheaper per energy produced than brand new ones then there's no viability. So much for sustainable energy.

I'm really hoping that this can be done, I hope the recyclers make a killing.

As solar panels age out, recyclers hope to cash in

Related Stories