U of C reearchers are saying the cost of replacing and disposing of solar panels will be much higher than regulators have anticipated. The efficiency of panels is improving so rapidly year over year that panels will not be in service for 30 years, but 10 years or less.
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If early replacements occur as predicted by our statistical model, they can produce 50 times more waste in just four years than IRENA anticipates. That figure translates to around 315,000 metric tonnes of waste, based on an estimate of 90 tonnes per MW weight-to-power ratio.
Alarming as they are, these stats may not do full justice to the crisis, as our analysis is restricted to residential installations. With commercial and industrial panels added to the picture, the scale of replacements could be much, much larger.
… The totality of these unforeseen costs could crush industry competitiveness. If we plot future installations according to a logistic growth curve capped at 700 GW by 2050 (NREL’s estimated ceiling for the U.S. residential market) alongside the early replacement curve, we see the volume of waste surpassing that of new installations by the year 2031. By 2035, discarded panels would outweigh new units sold by 2.56 times. In turn, this would catapult the LCOE (levelized cost of energy, a measure of the overall cost of an energy-producing asset over its lifetime) to four times the current projection. The economics of solar — so bright-seeming from the vantage point of 2021 — would darken quickly as the industry sinks under the weight of its own trash.
https://hbr.org/2021/06/the-dark-sid...hero-main-text
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If we’re going to increasingly rely on an energy source that produces huge amounts of toxic waste that cannot be readily disposed of, I wonder why we don’t just ramp up nuclear.