{"id":33406,"date":"2018-04-15T08:52:45","date_gmt":"2018-04-15T13:52:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=33406"},"modified":"2018-04-15T08:53:39","modified_gmt":"2018-04-15T13:53:39","slug":"33406","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=33406","title":{"rendered":"What Will We Do With All Those Solar Panels When Their Useful Life is Over?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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WHAT WILL WE DO WITH ALL THOSE SOLAR PANELS WHEN THEIR USEFUL LIFE IS OVER?<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n
As solar power booms, businesses are exploring ways to ensure valuable components don\u2019t end up in landfills.<\/div>\n
\"Intro<\/div>\n
Photo courtesy of sinovoltaics.com<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
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April 11, 2018 \u2014 <\/span>Solar power is having its hockey stick<\/a> moment. Since the early 2000s, the amount of solar panels being installed worldwide has been growing<\/a> exponentially, and it\u2019s expected to continue to do so for decades. By the end of 2015, an estimated 222 gigawatts worth of solar energy had been installed worldwide. According to a recent report<\/a> from the International Renewable Energy Agency, that number could reach 4,500 GW by 2050.<\/div>\n
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But the solar panels generating that power don\u2019t last forever. The industry standard life span is about 25 to 30 years, and that means that some of the panels installed at the early end of the current boom aren\u2019t long from being retired. And each passing year, more and more will be pulled from service \u2014 glass and metal photovoltaic modules that will soon start adding up to millions, and then tens of millions of metric tons of material.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not too far off that those are going to be coming off line, and we\u2019re going to have a waste management issue,\u201d says Garvin Heath, a senior scientist at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory<\/a> and a solar power expert. \u201cIt\u2019s fair to say that it\u2019s starting to become more widely recognized as an issue that we\u2019re going to need to start working on pretty soon.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"As<\/a><\/p>\n

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As photovoltaic panel installations grow, so does the need for final disposition down the road. \u00a9 OECD\/IEA, Design: Becquerel Institute Editing: Mary Brunisholz, IEA PVPS Analysis: Ga\u00ebtan Masson, IEA PVPS Task 1, 2016, A Snapshot of Global PV (1992-2016), IEA Publishing. License: www.iea.org\/t&c. Click to expand.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

The solution many are looking to is recycling. But the ability to handle the coming flow of PV modules is not yet sufficient. \u201cThere\u2019s some infrastructure,\u201d Heath says. \u201cI wouldn\u2019t say it\u2019s especially well established at this point.\u201d<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

WHAT WILL WE DO WITH ALL THOSE SOLAR PANELS WHEN THEIR USEFUL LIFE IS OVER? As solar power booms, businesses are exploring ways to ensure valuable components don\u2019t end up in landfills. Photo courtesy of sinovoltaics.com April 11, 2018 \u2014 Solar power is having its hockey stick moment. Since the early 2000s, the amount of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4],"tags":[6513,19799,19798,19800,1564,4301],"class_list":["post-33406","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-energy-2","category-environment","tag-ensia","tag-international-renewable-energy-agency","tag-nate-berg","tag-photovoltaic-panels","tag-solar-energy","tag-solar-panels"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33406","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=33406"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33406\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33409,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33406\/revisions\/33409"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=33406"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=33406"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=33406"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}