First generation of solar panels is wearing out – A recycling industry is salvaging them.

The unverified price I have heard for purchase and installation of solar cells is in the realm of $30,000. I have heard the electric district we are in which is District #3 drags their feet in approving installations. Why that would be, I am not sure.

Our monthly electric bill for a 1500 square foot home is approximately $125 per month. Summer months supersede the $125 and Fall through Winter it can be less than half. I am testing the $125 assumption as I write. Last month the cost was $149. I expect this month to be higher. I have built up a reserve to cover the excesses.

In comparison, our realtor who helped us obtain this home had an electric bill of ~$600 last month on a two-level 3000 square foot home. Our attic is cool thanks to the insulation in it. The two x six wall allow for additional open cell insulation with the standard 1-inch-thick foam board layer over the studs. The temperature is set at 78 right now and the outside temp is 105 degrees. Making it cooler makes no sense.

Just some thoughts. Anyway, in Yuma, AZ; they are recycling old solar panels. Some can be reused with a bit of refurbishing and sold again. The rest are broken down into recyclable components. Still, a majority of scrapped solar panels go to landfills which some companies like the one in the story salvage for materials. More to read in the AP News story below.

Oh, and the need for solar panels for us? I think we will pass for now.

The first generation of solar panels will wear out. A recycling industry is taking shape, AP News, Isabella O’Malley.

Sunlight beats down on a graveyard for dead solar panels in Yuma, Arizona, hundreds stacked in neat piles, waiting for their next life. The great majority of worn and damaged panels are still dumped in landfills. But with more and more piling up, many people know that needs to change.

In this desert city where Arizona, California, Sonora and Baja California meet, North America’s first utility-scale solar panel recycling plant has opened to address what founders of We Recycle Solar call a “tsunami” of solar waste. Plans to address climate change rely on massively scaling up clean, solar electricity.

The panels, stacked and banded, come here from the company’s main collection warehouse in Hackettstown, New Jersey, plus six other locations across the country.

Workers maneuver the stacks into the sprawling 75,000 square foot facility on forklifts, then gently lift each out by hand to begin separating by brand and model. Some only have a few cracks in their glass, sometimes from storm damage. These forklift operators undergo specialized Forklift Training to ensure safe and efficient handling of the equipment, contributing to the smooth operation of the sorting process.

These can be reused, said Adam Saghei, CEO of We Recycle Solar, and there is a market for them — clients around the world who search for refurbished panels for their affordability. The Yuma facility, he says, is like “your local thrift store that looks to upcycle.”

For example, some have been sold at the store Mercados Solar in Carolina, Puerto Rico.

Those that don’t go towards testing and resale head down a conveyor belt where glass, metals, and other materials with value are separated.

Solar panels are built to withstand decades of harsh weather, so it’s difficult to break the resilient bonding that keeps them together. Separating the glass without it shattering, for example, is a challenge. But with robotic suction arms assisted by workers, they come apart. You can visit this site to for more info about solar panels.

Some of the highest value materials are copper, silver, aluminum, glass, and crystalline silicon. Repurposing these means finding new uses for them, such as selling glass to companies that do sandblasting.

For Saghei, the inspiration for the company came in 2017. He was working in the computer electronic waste sector, seeing solar spread across warehouse roofs and wondering where it would go eventually. He realized green technology doesn’t stay green once it is decommissioned or retired.

“Solar energy is a great technology, but it can feed a whole industry like aluminum and glass. Why are we spending tens of millions of dollars on these materials from overseas when we can produce them right here, right now?” he thought.

Copper is one metal the recycling yields, said Dwight Clark, director of compliance and recycling technology at We Recycle Solar, as others nearby sorted incoming panels. “Granted, it’s not a lot of pounds per solar panel. But when we do 10,000 pounds of solar panels an hour, we end up with a hundreds pounds of copper an hour coming out of it,” he said.

“The aluminum … could come back as more solar panel frames or it could go into the flight deck of a new Boeing aircraft.”

By 2050, solar waste will total some 78 million tons globally, said Mool Gupta, a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of Virginia. The reason recycling and recovery isn’t robust yet, Gupta said, is that companies struggle to justify the $30 per panel cost when it costs only $1 to send it to a landfill.

If we hope to one day see 100% of retired solar recycled, said Garvin Heath, distinguished member of the research staff at the Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory, “Let’s not make it any more expensive than what it would cost to landfill the module … let’s not have it cost the consumer anything and instead have it break even for the recycler.”

Other companies are starting to get into the business.

Solarcycle, a startup based in Odessa, Texas, raised $30 million earlier this year, led by Fifth Wall, an asset manager focused on building decarbonization. And Solarpanelrecycling.com is an affiliate of electronics recycler PowerHouse Recycling.

The European Union has rules that require recycling of electronic waste under its Waste Electrical and Electronic Waste Directive (WEEE).

Market researcher Visiongain estimates the global market at US $138 million for last year and growing fast, boosted in part by incentives offered in the Inflation Reduction Act in the U.S.

As fast as possible, Jack Groppo, professor of mining engineering at the University of Kentucky, says, people have to stop scrapping the modules. “Once the solar panels go into the landfill, they’re gone unless we go back and mine the landfill,” he said.

Groppo estimates that in 20 years people will mine landfills to recover valuable materials in the junked panels, but “it makes an awful lot more sense for us to separate them now.”

The Yuma facility can process 7,500 panels in a single day or roughly 69 million pounds per year. As of early June, it estimates more than 650,000 tons of carbon dioxide have been avoided. It is reusing about 60% of the panels that come in.

The company plans to open another recycling facility alongside a large solar manufacturer in the Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina corridor.

For now, solar recycling companies are still figuring out how to make money. We Recycle Solar sends out employees to dismantle large solar arrays and that is currently its biggest source of revenue. Reselling refurbished solar panels is number two, and recycling brings in the least. Decommissioning and resale are actually subsidizing some of the recycling costs, Saghei said.

But Gupta said these profitability challenges are temporary and will be overcome. Researchers are hard at work on solving them, he said.

“Too many lives are lost to pollution and solar is one of the top solutions.”

Best Solar Panels For Homes Of 2023, – Forbes Home, Deane Biermeier and Lowe Saddler.

Thomas Machowicz, a freelance video journalist for The Associated Press, contributed