Superior Regeneration Know-how Extends The Life Of Photo voltaic Panels

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All the things degrades. Our our bodies, our vehicles, our buildings all degrade over time. Photo voltaic panels aren’t any completely different. After years of constructing electrical energy from daylight, they produce fewer electrons than once they have been new. Sooner or later, they have to be changed — an costly proposition whether or not it’s only a dozen on a rooftop or 1000’s in a business scale photo voltaic farm. The outdated panels are then recycled (hopefully) or just discarded.

Researchers at Nanyang Technological College in Singapore say there’s another choice. After years of trials, they are saying they’ve discovered a approach to rejuvenate present photo voltaic panels with a course of that doesn’t require eradicating the panels. They’ve created a brand new firm referred to as EtaVolt to commercialize the expertise.

The issue, in keeping with EtaVolt, is gentle induced degradation. The very factor that makes photo voltaic panels operate — daylight — additionally creates “holes” within the panels that degrade their efficiency. Warmth and humidity additionally contribute to the degradation course of. The Superior Regeneration Know-how machine created at NTU scans an ordinary photo voltaic panel in about 5 minutes. Utilizing excessive depth gentle, it’s mentioned to restore these “holes, bringing the photo voltaic panels again to optimum efficiency for as much as 5 years. The price of the remedy is alleged to be about 20 % of the price of a brand new photo voltaic set up. The process is relevant to 90 % of all photo voltaic panels in use at present, the corporate says.

“We’ve identified for a very long time that whereas harvesting daylight offers us an virtually inexhaustible supply of power, producing photo voltaic panels requires lots of power and generates a excessive carbon footprint. Whereas this carbon emission could be offset by the theoretical lengthy service lifetime of the photo voltaic panels, estimated at 25 years, the truth is that photo voltaic panels in tropical nations face harsher situations and there was no actual answer to revive and recycle the silicon cells — the core expertise of photo voltaic panels,” Professor Madhavi, the Govt Director of NTU’s Sustainability Workplace, tells Fascinating Engineering.

In line with EtaVolt, the restoration course of is like patching holes in a bucket. “It repairs photo voltaic panels to stop power leakage, making certain optimum gentle power assortment. The method takes lower than 5 minutes and might help handled photo voltaic panels get well as much as 5% of their misplaced area efficiency. As EtaVolt explains, when exact temperature and intense gentle are utilized to photo voltaic cells, they excite materials molecules, inflicting them to maneuver shortly, altering their association and repairing gentle and warmth injury.

On its web site, the corporate contains a graph that purports to indicate the advantage of its Superior Regeneration Know-how.

“Our photo voltaic rejuvenation technique has not solely been rigorously examined and validated however has proven field-proven leads to varied business functions. The expertise has been efficiently applied in initiatives with main companions within the photo voltaic trade, akin to renewable power options agency Vector Inexperienced, demonstrating its effectiveness and potential for widespread adoption,” mentioned NTU Singapore researcher Stanley Wang.

“With our regeneration answer, you could possibly save and earn as a lot as you probably did once you first turned in your PV belongings. Being an automatic course of, our regeneration would require much less time and manpower,” the corporate says. “This implies much less time wanted and prices incurred to get extra out of your PV belongings. We come to you. Our regeneration course of is completely onsite. This implies which you can regenerate your photo voltaic panels with out having to take them down and transport them someplace else. We like to go away issues the best way we discovered them, however higher.”

Recycling Photo voltaic Panels

EtaVolt isn’t just about rejuvenating present photo voltaic panels. Sooner or later, all panels will degrade to the purpose the place they’re now not serviceable. That’s when it’s time to recycle them. The corporate says it has additionally developed an automatic recycling facility for photo voltaic panels which it calls “a patented containerized recycling device line and mobilized answer to attain on-site PV recycling and cut back logistics and manpower prices.”

“With our superior PV recycling answer, it is possible for you to to shut your PV life cycle loop. What extra, our excessive yield recycling course of recovers a larger amount and higher high quality of supplies. We use these beneficial properties to decrease the prices for you. It’s pricey to move your panels. With our turnkey recycling line in a container-sized footprint, we deliver the road to you. A full featured mini-recycling plant, proper at your step.”

The Takeaway

All this appears like great information from EtaVolt and NTU, however we now have to admit we discover the corporate’s presentation on-line to be overly reliant on flowery, press release-type language backed up by too little technical info and too little actual world information. We aren’t specialists on photo voltaic panels however haven’t beforehand heard of those “holes” that may be repaired with excessive depth gentle. Certainly the corporate could possibly be extra forthcoming in explaining how its course of works. CleanTechnica readers are typically a skeptical lot and we think about lots of you desire to extra proof the Superior Regenerative Know-how truly performs its vaunted restore duties.

We’ve achieved plenty of tales on recycling photo voltaic panels, none of which make it sound like a straightforward course of. We hail EtaVolt and NTU if they’ve found out how to do that in a conveyable, containerized course of. That sounds too good to be true — which is why we want extra information and details about it.

Photo voltaic panels, by the very nature of how they’re made, are deucedly troublesome to take aside to get well the parts inside, primarily silicon wafers that do a lot of the work of reworking daylight into electrical energy. Two years in the past, Fraunhofer ISE in Germany mentioned it was beginning to get a deal with on that difficult course of. It says a number of hundred tons of silicon will likely be recoverable from photo voltaic panels annually by the top of this decade.

Earlier this yr we reported on SolarCycle, a California firm struggling to make recycling photo voltaic panels a worthwhile enterprise. Its founder, Jessie Simmons, is a former Sierra Membership govt who sees the want for his firm’s providers growing however is discovering the method daunting. The EtaVolt answer appears a bit too easy, fairly truthfully. If it really works as marketed at cheap price, it could possibly be an essential new expertise, however does it? “We’ll see,” mentioned the Zen grasp.

Hat tip to Dan Allard.