The market for second-life solar modules is growing rapidly: in addition to use in smaller stand-alone systems and as balcony power plants, entire solar parks can also be equipped with used modules. After all, 70 per cent of old modules are immediately usable.
Flax, carbon, wood fibres and other renewable raw materials are the materials that make up the new mounting system for agrivoltaic systems. Identify what other advantages it has.
Just under a year after the opening of Reiling's first recycling plant for solar modules, two technological breakthroughs have been achieved. Firstly, the quality of the recovered solar glass has been significantly improved. In addition, the recovery of silicon has been realised on an industrial scale.
Mounting systems manufacturer Schletter Group has published its first CSR report. The report, which covers the full calendar year of 2023, contains the company’s strategies and measures pertaining to ecological responsibility, sustainable economics, and social commitment.
AGC Group has announced that it has succeeded for the first time in Japan in a demonstration test to recycle cover glass for solar modules into float glass. With the success of this test, AGC expects that cover glass can be used to make float glass.
Solar Materials have been awarded the Solar Startup Award 2024 for their pioneering recycling solution. They have developed a new recycling technology that allows the recovery of all raw materials from solar panels with a 98% recovery rate, and a 80% lower carbon footprint.
What causes the brown colouration of the EVA films? How do hotspots occur in the module and what can be done? Why do microcracks and cell breakage occur? How can they be recognised and what measures should be taken? How do you recognise delamination?
Researchers in Karlsruhe are using a new approach to analyse how and where a large amount of broken glass fibre from old wind turbine rotor blades can be reused.
Together with Meyer Burger, clean tech start-up LuxChemtech from Freiberg is laying the foundations for solar recycling on an industrial scale.
The waste management company Reiling is expanding its capacities to recycle old silicon-based modules. Up to 50,000 tonnes a year are dismantled and processed there, also to recover silicon or silver.
In Italy, the first renewable energy project financed by the Recovery and Resilience Facility in the European Union has been initiated, with the construction of a 50-million-euro, three-unit production plant entrusted to the Lithuanian company SoliTek.
The partners in the Demobat project have not only developed a flexible system to separate the individual components of the batteries from each other, but also a way to recover the raw materials they contain from the black mass.
Researchers in Belgium are exploring the benefits of silicon in the development of new, higher energy-density, batteries technologies, which would allow electric vehicles to travel further on one charge. Questions and answers from our partner SolarPower Europe.
The conference Sustainable Solar Europe takes place in Brussels, 27 October, organized by Intersolar Europe and SolarPower Europe.
In the new Libinfinity project, partners from research and industry are developing a concept to recycle materials from lithium batteries. They are developing an innovative process that does not require energy-intensive process steps and allows higher recycling rates.
From 2025, BASF will fully recycle shredded spent batteries in Schwarzheide. The plant will then recover materials for new lithium-ion batteries, entirely in the spirit of a circular economy.
With the distribution partnership, the two companies enable solar system operators in the Swiss Confederation to find replacements for defective modules. The partnership is supported by Swissolar, among others.
Rock Tech Lithium has agreed to collaborate with Fraunhofer Umsicht and supply chain tracking company Circulor to provide carbon-neutral lithium from Europe.
Fenecon's new factory will produce industrial storage batteries from so-called zero and second-life vehicle batteries. Accordingly, Europe's largest production facility for storage units made from vehicle batteries will be created. The EU is supporting the project with 4.5 million euros.
Re-used PV modules are mainly exported to Africa, Middle East and South-East Asia. Though it needs sufficient environmental and recycling regulations for those regions, a new study says.
As the number of batteries reaching their end of life is set to increase seven-fold by the end of this decade, the battery recycling industry is expecting to see substantial growth.
Demand for raw materials is rising fast as the transportation and energy sectors’ appetite for large lithium-ion batteries continues to grow. The European Union has designated some of these raw materials as being critical. Cobalt, lithium and natural graphite fall into that category, but today’s recycling processes can only recover some of the metals, and lithium not at all.
