Sustainable solar power
Getting energy from the sun isn’t renewable until the panels are recyclable. James Mitchell Crow talks to the scientists making it happen
The pathway to sustainable energy generation is not yet complete. A typical PV module is expected to have a 25–30 year working life. Today’s rapid growth in installed PV will be mirrored, a couple of decades down the track, by an equally sharp rise in PV panels ready to be retired. Heath and his Task 12 colleagues have estimated that the world will face a cumulative mass of 8 million tonnes of end-of-life PV modules by 2030, and 80 million tonnes by 2050, by which time it could represent more than 10% of global e-waste.
The end-of-life PV problem is widely acknowledged. Dedicated PV recycling facilities are now operating. But these processes are based on crushing the panels up, rather than trying to cleanly extract the high-quality silicon and other valuable materials they contain. The general consensus is that the silicon PV circular economy remains very much a work in progress.