OT. Renewable Energy Waste

[Dean Hoffman]

CBS had an early morning segment showing junk solar panels and wind generator blades that are junked. Landfills will be busy. Nothing humans do will hide our footprint.

[T]

We seriously need to get "Big Daddy in the Sky" out of this and let free people decide things like free men in the an open marketplace.

Government DOES NOT know better how to run our lives

[invalid unparseable]

They are there to protect us not dominate us and tell us everything we must do.

[invalid unparseable]

Silicon solar modules are primarily composed of glass, aluminum frame, plastic, copper wires and lead solder.

The glass can be definitely be recycled. I can think of an easy way to remove the glass component by running over the solar panels with a steam roller. All the glass will be broken into shards. Then the frames can be clawed off the ground easily. All the metal components in the frame have different melting points. Put them in the furnace to separate the metal components by melting points.

[T]

Any idea how the handle the dopants in the silicon? Boron, arsenic, phosphorus, gallium, antimony, arsenic?

[invalid unparseable]

Silicon is highly purified silica (major component of desert sand).

After you have obtained silica from silica sand, you have purge the silica of all impurities to get as close to 100% pure silicon as possible.

One way to do that (the old way that I know) is to put the silica in a cylinder. A heating coil is moving very slowly up and down the cylinder of silica. The heat from the heating coil will melt the section of silica nearest to the heating coil. The molten silica will have a tendency to crystallize upon cooling. The crystallization process will expel impurities (similar to sea water forming ice to expel salt). Given long enough time, the column of silica will have gone through numerous heating-cooling crystallization cycles to drive all the impurities to the top and bottom of the column. The part in the column between the top and bottom will become pure silicon.

The same process can be used to recycle old solar panel wafers to remove the dopant to get pure silicon back.

[T]

Great explanation!

[rbowman]

They are a little more sophisticated than running over the panels with a 'steam roller'. Depending on the panel there may be 20% or more of plastics like EVA than are bonded to the cells and the glass.

At least when that was written they were charging $20 a panel to recycle them and only getting $2 to $7 worth of material out of the process. Until the process can pay for itself, including transportation of the panels to a processing plant and transportation of the recycled material to the end users. they'll continue to go into landfills.

A more feasible solution would be resale. Close to 30 years ago I bought a used panel that was a take-off. It still produces usable output. Many of the solar farms replace panels after N years. While the output of individual panels could be monitored that isn't usually the case so it's based on the projected efficiency over time.

Those panels aren't dead by any means. It's rather like cars where a rental operation replaces the vehicle after so many thousand miles rather than on the condition of a particular vehicle.

[invalid unparseable]

I have watched the video in the link. They are using manual labour to disassemble each solar panel. That's why the cost is so high. Steamrolling the panels, as I suggested, is the way to go. Imagine using a team of workers to painstakingly disassemble a junk car instead of using hydraulic press to compact it into a twisted metal cube to be melted down in a blast furnace.

[Skid Marks]

From the far-left wikipedia (so you know it has been fact-checked)

"Blast furnaces are estimated to have been responsible for over 4% of global greenhouse gas emissions between 1900 and 2015, but are difficult to decarbonize."

[hubops]

Electric arc furnace :

Like at Gerdau Steel plants across North America :

" Emissions are even lower in North America, where all Gerdau locations utilize scrap-based electric arc furnace technology. "

John T.

[invalid unparseable]

You are the first poster I have noticed using Forte Agent who can correctly quote "😎 Mighty Wannabe ✅" instead of "? Mighty Wannabe ?" in the reply to my post.

[rbowman]

First you would have to find a steamroller... Then what you would find up with would be a pile of unusable garbage.

[invalid unparseable]

Using electricity to melt metal maybe more expensive than using coal if you don't have cheap electricity from the excess capacity of wind mill and solar panel farms.

If you are melting mostly ferrous metal, induction furnace may be an alternative.

[invalid unparseable]

Of course you do that on industrial scale, not as a small project in you backyard.

You can lay down the solar panels in a long row, then steamroll over them to break all the glass. Use a backhoe to claw the scrap metal frames away and then repeat the process. After you have done thousands of solar panels, you will end up with a deep bed of broken glass, and a tall heap of twisted metal frames.