re: Solar Panels - Yay or Nay

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The extent of the damage at a Scottsbluff solar farm that was heavily damaged in a hailstorm last week remains unknown.

“They’re still working through that process,” Grant Otten, spokesperson for the Nebraska Public Power District, which buys electricity from the solar farm, told Cowboy State Daily.

Cowboy State Daily reached out to Sol Systems, which financed and developed the project, but didn’t receive a response.

While some of the solar panels at the farm may be salvageable, as well as other equipment, it’s likely many of the panels will need to be discarded.

Even if solar panels aren’t destroyed by weather events, they gradually stop producing much electricity and reach the end of their lives in 20 to 30 years. By 2050, the International Renewable Energy Agency estimates that 78 million tons of solar panels will come to that point.

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Recycling

While renewable energy proponents are pinning their hopes on recycling to deal with this coming deluge of e-waste from dead solar panels, only about 10% of them are recycled, and only a small portion of any single panel provides recoverable minerals.

B.F. Randall, who has a background in project development and finance, told Cowboy State Daily that a lot of people are under the impression that recycling a solar panel means you make a new solar panel.

“A solar panel has very little mineral content relative to the volume of the panel,” Randall said. “So, it's just not something that can be recycled in that sense.”

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