Superior Regeneration Expertise Extends The Life Of Photo voltaic Panels

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Every part degrades. Our our bodies, our vehicles, our buildings all degrade over time. Photo voltaic panels are not any completely different. After years of constructing electrical energy from daylight, they produce fewer electrons than after they had been new. In some unspecified time in the future, they must be changed — an costly proposition whether or not it’s only a dozen on a rooftop or hundreds 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 The outdated panels are then recycled (hopefully) or just discarded.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 an alternative choice. After years of trials, they are saying they’ve discovered a method 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 line with EtaVolt, is mild induced degradation. The very factor that makes photo voltaic panels perform — daylight — additionally creates “holes” within the panels that degrade their efficiency. Warmth and humidity additionally contribute to the degradation course of. The Superior Regeneration Expertise gadget created at NTU scans a typical photo voltaic panel in about 5 minutes. Utilizing excessive depth mild, 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 claimed 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 as we speak, the corporate says.

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

Based on EtaVolt, the restoration course of is like patching holes in a bucket. “It repairs photo voltaic panels to stop vitality leakage, guaranteeing optimum mild vitality assortment. The method takes lower than 5 minutes and might help handled photo voltaic panels get better as much as 5% of their misplaced area efficiency. As EtaVolt explains, when exact temperature and intense mild are utilized to photo voltaic cells, they excite materials molecules, inflicting them to maneuver rapidly, altering their association and repairing mild and warmth harm.

On its web site, the corporate encompasses a graph that purports to point out the good thing about its Superior Regeneration Expertise.

“Our photo voltaic rejuvenation technique has not solely been rigorously examined and validated however has proven field-proven ends in numerous business functions. The expertise has been efficiently applied in initiatives with main companions within the photo voltaic business, reminiscent of renewable vitality 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 if 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 fully onsite. This implies you could regenerate your photo voltaic panels with out having to take them down and transport them someplace else. We like to depart issues the way in which we discovered them, however higher.”

Recycling Photo voltaic Panels

EtaVolt is not only about rejuvenating present photo voltaic panels. In some unspecified time in the future, all panels will degrade to the purpose the place they’re 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 instrument 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 features 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 the doorstep.”

The Takeaway

All this seems 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 data and too little actual world information. We’re not consultants on photo voltaic panels however haven’t beforehand heard of those “holes” that may be repaired with excessive depth mild. Absolutely the corporate might be extra forthcoming in explaining how its course of works. CleanTechnica readers are usually a skeptical lot and we think about lots of you desire to extra proof the Superior Regenerative Expertise truly performs its vaunted restore duties.

We’ve got performed quite a lot 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 transportable, 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 tough to take aside to get better the elements inside, primarily silicon wafers that do many 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 tip of this decade.

Earlier this 12 months 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 government who sees the want for his firm’s companies growing however is discovering the method daunting. The EtaVolt answer appears a bit of too easy, fairly actually. If it really works as marketed at cheap price, it might be an necessary new expertise, however does it? “We’ll see,” mentioned the Zen grasp.

Hat tip to Dan Allard.