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California has been a pioneer in pushing for rooftop solar power, building up the largest solar market in the U.S. More than 20 years and 1.3 million rooftops later, the bill is coming due. Beginning in 2006, the state, focused on how to incentivize people to take up solar power, showered subsidies on homeowners who installed photovoltaic panels but had no comprehensive plan to dispose of them. Now, panels purchased under those programs are nearing the end of their typical 25-to-30-year life cycle. Many are already winding up in landfills, where in some cases, they could potentially contaminate groundwater with toxic heavy metals...

From the Article  BY ANNE FISCHER The US Department of Energy (DOE) today released an action plan to enable the safe and responsible handling of solar photovoltaic (PV) end-of-life (EOL) materials. In order for solar to truly be a “clean” technology, it is imperative to have a plan for the disposal of solar panels at the end of their useful life. The current lifetime for solar panels is about 30 years, and while the solar industry grew slowly for several decades, about 70% of existing solar energy systems were deployed within the last five years. The International Renewable Energy Agency forecasts that the cumulative...

From the Article  BY ERIC WESOFF AND BECKY BEETZ The solar industry cannot claim to be a clean energy source if it leaves a trail of hazardous waste. But, absent a cogent PV recycling policy, the U.S. risks sending millions of solar modules and tons of toxics to landfill in the coming years. A new initiative by Recycle PV Solar seeks to address this problem. The U.S. solar industry continued its torrid growth in 2020, driven by market-leading pricing and climate change concerns. Industry expansion has been slowed, but not thwarted by the challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic and the financial weight of Trump-era import tariffs. Utility scale and...

From the Article by Jason Deign Solar PV is now the dominant technology for new electricity generation capacity additions. That’s a huge achievement, but it brings up the vital question of what will happen to all those panels when they reach the end of their useful life. In April, GTM reported on what was then unpublished research showing that solar panels can be landfilled without endangering human health. That’s good news, but landfills are hardly an ideal way to deal with solar industry waste. The cumulative mass of end-of-life PV modules is expected to hit 8 million metric tons globally by 2030, so improving recycling rates is an increasingly critical issue...

From the Article Solar panels are an increasingly important source of renewable power that will play an essential role in fighting climate change. They are also complex pieces of technology that become big, bulky sheets of electronic waste at the end of their lives — and right now, most of the world doesn’t have a plan for dealing with that. But we’ll need to develop one soon, because the solar e-waste glut is coming. By 2050, the International Renewable Energy Agency projects that up to 78 million metric tons of solar panels will have reached the end of their life, and that...