Solar waste is piling up, but who’s footing the recycling bill?

By 2050, there is going to be almost as many decommissioned solar panels as newly installed solar panels. That’s according to data from the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), dating back to 2016. Fast forward eight years. It’s 2024. Solar panel prices hit an all-time low in November 2023 and haven’t moved much, driving some European homes to opt for solar panels as garden fencing material. But with regulations regarding solar waste lagging behind, it’s a time bomb waiting to be dealt with when these panels are decommissioned 25 to 30 years from now. Especially since China, once the world’s largest importer of waste plastics, decided to literally stop dealing with trash in 2017.To understand where the industry stands, I spoke to Dr Jeremy Ang, newly minted startup founder at Ambiguity Navigation and former research fellow at Nanyang Technological University (NTU). He’s created a process to extract silicon from decommissioned solar panels at higher purity and lower cost (aka “urban mining”) and is pushing for the solar energy industry to adopt circular economy principles. As with all ReFi Singapore meetups, the ask-me-anything session turned out to be surprisingly insightful, with friends from EDP Renewables (which acquired Singapore-based solar energy supplier Sunseap in 2022), Ong Gin Keat, Director at waste processing facility Envcares, and Henry Soediarko, Head of Portfolio Management at First Estate Capital Management chipping with industry insights. No time to listen to the whole thing? Read the writeup on Medium: https://medium.com/@shihan.fang/solar-waste-recycle-6be6f4cb2a82Read more on Medium or follow me on Twitter and LinkedIn.