2023-06-21 14:53:36
Daniel GordonLe podcast “The Climate Question” de BBC Sounds
2 hours ago
image copyrightLaurent Julliand
The lifespan of solar panels, which are currently being touted around the world as an essential tool to help reduce carbon emissions, can reach 25 years.
Experts warn this means that eventually billions of panels will need to be scrapped and replaced.
“The world has an installed solar capacity of more than one terawatt. Regular solar panels have a capacity of around 400 W. If you count rooftops and solar farms, there might be up to 2 .5 billion solar panels,” says Dr Rong Deng, a solar panel recycling expert at the University of New South Wales, Australia.
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According to the UK government, there are tens of millions of solar panels in the UK, but there is not enough specialist infrastructure to dispose of and recycle them.
Energy experts are calling on governments to act urgently to avert an impending global environmental catastrophe.
“By 2050 we will have a mountain of waste if we don’t start recycling chains now,” says Ute Collier, Deputy Director of the International Renewable Energy Agency.
“We are producing more and more solar panels, which is great, but how are we going to deal with the waste?” she asks.
Recycling
An important milestone should be reached at the end of June, when the first factory in the world dedicated to the complete recycling of solar panels will officially open its doors in France.
ROSI, the solar panel recycling company that owns the facility in the Alpine town of Grenoble, hopes to extract and reuse 99% of the units’ components.
In addition to recycling glass fronts and aluminum frames, the new plant can recover almost all of the valuable materials contained in the panels, such as silver and copper, which are generally among the most difficult materials to extract. .
These rare materials can then be recycled and reused to make new, more powerful solar units.
image caption,
Silver fragments recovered at the ROSI factory.
Conventional methods of recycling solar panels recover most of the aluminum and glass, but ROSI says glass, in particular, is of relatively poor quality.
Glass recovered using these methods can be used to create tiles or be mixed with other materials to make asphalt, but cannot be used in applications that require high-quality glass, such as production of new solar panels.
Expansion period
The new ROSI factory opens its doors in the midst of a boom in the installation of solar panels.
Global solar power generation capacity has increased by 22% in 2021. Around 13,000 solar panels are installed each month in the UK, most of them on private roofs.
In many cases, solar units become relatively uneconomical before reaching the end of their expected lifespan. New, more efficient designs evolve at regular intervals, which means it can be more economical to replace solar panels that are only 10 or 15 years old with updated versions.
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If current growth trends continue, the amount of discarded solar panels might be enormous, according to Ms. Collier.
“By 2030, we estimate that we will have four million tonnes [de déchets]which is still manageable, but by 2050 we might end up with over 200 million tonnes globally.”
To put that into perspective, the world currently produces a total of 400 million tonnes of plastic per year.
The challenges of recycling
image copyrightLaurent Julliand
image caption,
The panels are transported in trucks to recycling plants.
The reason solar panel recycling facilities are so few is because, until recently, there wasn’t much waste to process and reuse.
The first generation of domestic solar panels is now reaching the end of its lifespan. As these units are nearing retirement, experts say urgent action is needed.
“Now is the time to think regarding it,” says Ms. Collier.
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According to Nicolas Defrenne, France is already at the top of European countries for the treatment of photovoltaic waste (ie objects that transform light into electricity). His organization, Soren, is teaming up with ROSI and other companies to coordinate the removal of solar panels across France.
“The biggest one we removed took us three months,” recalls Defrenne.
Soren’s team is experimenting with different ways to recycle what they collect: “We try everything and see what works.”
image copyrightLaurent Julliand
image caption,
The sheets of the solar panels are separated to recover the valuable materials.
In ROSI’s state-of-the-art factory in Grenoble, the solar panels are meticulously dismantled to recover the precious materials they contain, such as copper, silicon and silver.
Each solar panel contains only small fragments of these precious materials, and these fragments are so intertwined with other components that, until now, it was not economically viable to separate them.
But due to their high value, efficiently extracting these valuable materials might be a game-changer, according to Defrenne.
“More than 60% of the value is in the 3% of the weight of the solar panels”, he specifies.
Soren’s team hopes that in the future, nearly three-quarters of the materials needed to make new solar panels, including silver, can be salvaged from decommissioned PV units and recycled to speed up production. new panels.
There is currently not enough money available to build the millions of solar panels that will be needed to transition away from fossil fuels, says Defrenne: “You can see where the bottleneck is. of production is money”.
Meanwhile, British scientists have been trying to develop technology similar to ROSI.
image caption,
Fragments of solar panels at the recycling center.
Last year, researchers at the University of Leicester announced that they had discovered how to extract silver from photovoltaic units using a form of saline solution.
But so far, ROSI is the only company in its sector to have taken its operation to an industrial level.
Moreover, the technology is expensive. In Europe, importers or producers of solar panels are responsible for their disposal when they become unusable. And many prefer to grind or shred the waste, which is much less expensive.
Defrenne recognizes that the intensive recycling of solar panels is still in its infancy. Soren and his partners recycled just under 4,000 tons of French solar panels last year.
But much more can be done. He made it his mission.
“The weight of all the new solar panels sold last year in France was 232,000 tonnes, so when they wear out in 20 years, that’s the amount I will need to collect each year.
“At that time, my personal goal is to ensure that France is at the forefront of technology in the world.”
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