131: Recycling Solar

Hey, everybody on today’s episode of still to be determined, we’re gonna be discussing we

yep. As usual I’m Sean Ferrell. I’m a writer. I write some sci-fi. I write some stuff for kids. And I’m also curious about things that are tech. And luckily for me, my brother, Matt, is the Matt Ferrell. Undecided with Matt Ferrell, Matt, how you doing?

Good. It’s a, it’s a coincidence. The channel had my name.

It’s really bizarre. I was

going to ask you, did you have to like outbid somebody in order to get that? Yes. Yeah, a did I bet had to pay through the nose very expensive. Cause if I had to start a website, you know what, I’d go with Matt Ferrell. Today, we’re gonna be talking about Matt’s most recent episode, which is the truth about solar panels.

This episode dropped on August 16th, 2022. But before we get into that, I wanted to share a comment from a recent video that we had most recent episode of still to be determined, where we talked about CO2 batteries. And this comment that came in from nom, Ross Mora caught my eye. He writes; hi, Matt, have you done a video on net powers, CCS tech.

It’s a newish type of gas plant that uses super critical CO2 as the working fluid. I think their goal is to create a new type of gas powered plant that is built around CCS from the start might be interesting for you to look into.

Hmm, I have, I haven’t heard about that, but I’m adding into my list to look into

sounds good.

Just a quick reminder. I think that that comment is the perfect demonstration. Matt actually reads the comments he does the one thing that you’re not supposed to do, but he boldly goes and he does that. He reads the comments and. Uses it as a jumping off point, we use it as a jumping off point for our conversations here to talk about his most recent videos.

And we also look at the comments on these videos and these episodes of the podcast in order to reflect forward, even further on his channel. So, yeah, please, don’t forget to jump into the comments or reach out through the contact information in the podcast description but onto today’s discussion. As I mentioned before, we’re talking about solar panels, the truth about them, the truth about them is there’s not a whole lot of recycling going on yet.

No, yes, sadly, but there is, as your video discusses, there is, I think that one of the things that came out of your video was the fact that it seems like everybody involved in the life of a solar panel is like, yeah, we need to think about. Yes at every second process decades ahead of what was going on.

You used the lead acid battery as a model of here’s something that happened that needed to be dealt with, and a process was figured out that is having tremendous positive impact, right? Yep. I think one of the things that you didn’t point out was that led BA acid battery process. Was only developed after literally decades of ignoring the problem.

Yes. Yeah. I should have point that out, but it was decades before we did anything.

Yeah. So it’s like, you’re literally talking about decades of like, what are you gonna do with a battery? Just Chuck it in the landfill, outta sight, outta mind. And. I think that it’s important to remember that there’s a different kind of awareness right now.

And, and a lot of that comes from not only the manufacturers themselves. I think we have an awareness. In the researchers going into this, that they probably go into the research side and they go into the development side thinking in terms of, well, what is going to be the end life of this? I think that’s an important thing, but it also comes from the public, I think, for our listeners.

Yeah. And other members of the public, it’s important to know. That you can have that kind of voice pushing your local governmental agencies, your governmental representatives to say, think about these things. You’re encouraging us to put these on our home. What happens in 20 years when these panels that I’ve just put on are no longer as viable as new panels and a new homeowner wants to replace them.

So I think it’s, it’s really great that we’re already thinking about that now instead. In 20 years when suddenly all these panels needed to be replaced. So that’s a, that’s a

great starting point. We point out about the lead acid battery example that I hope came through in the video is that it wasn’t just the industry figuring out how to do it and then doing it.

It was also a combination of that plus legislation. Yeah. Those two things together really made it happen. And that’s the thing I think right now we’re missing here in the United States is the legislation. To help that industry really kind of ramp up speed.

Right. And you talked about the, one of the issues being, we w E E E, which is an acronym for reminding me what the acronym is for.

Oh,

please. Don’t don’t even do that. I can’t remember what it is off the top of

my head. Okay. Well, just remember it’s very exciting. The only thing I

remember is we

we is helping to. Push for corporate responsibility for the end life of their products. I think this is

that sentence makes it sound like you don’t know how to speak English. yes,

we as that is good. We as forcing we as forcing corporate responsibility, I’m just a cave man. so ultimately what we. Now you’ve got me doing it.

What we is trying to do is encourage corporate responsibility for the end life of their products. This goes beyond just solar panels. This goes, this is a concept. Yes, that I think is important to remember across the board, that corporate responsibility for the end life of products is something that I don’t know.

There’s a part of me that recognizes, oh, that, that seems like such a foreign concept. But when you dig down into the idea, it really does hit a bedrock of yeah. Why shouldn’t. Bear responsibility for ensuring that yes. If you’re making something that includes toxic metals, how is it the customer’s responsibility only to say, well, I gotta make sure these go to the right place.

Right. You’re putting them in the product to begin with and you are marketing and selling that good. Without that element being heralded as now, you are aware you’re buying lead, right? You’re not, you’re keeping some of that in your hip pocket. And then you’re believing that responsibility on the consumer.

And that is. Really not ethically defensible. So I think that that’s an important part of all this, right? It’s

all, it’s all about incentives. It’s about like right now, there’s no incentive to do the recycling. It’s cheaper just to find the cheapest material they possibly can. And just churn these materials out.

Whether you’re talking about phones, EVs, solar panels, it doesn’t matter. It’s all e-waste, it’s just this kind of, they manufacture it, then never think about it again. And the incentivizing and putting the burden on the manufacturer to say, you have to have responsibility of getting rid of this now. And suddenly it’s like, oh, well maybe we shouldn’t be using these materials because they’re really hard to recycle.

We should be using these materials as said, right. And a good example would be like apple, apple computer is like, they’re, they’re taking all of their iPhones and they’re designing their computers to try to remove things like LEDs and like bad chemicals from their, their products to make them easier to recycle and safer.

Every company should be doing this. They shouldn’t be forced to do it, but sadly, we need incentives like that to try to get more of the, uh, industry across the board to make

these changes. Right. I kept running into this thought experiment as I was watching your video, which would be, is potentially leasing a, to forcing more corporate responsibility around this, as opposed to consumer ownership, consumer leasing, where the owner would remain.

The producer. So like you take a car mm-hmm and you lease a car from the manufacturer. And then when you’ve reached the end of your use of that product, its ownership is still with the manufacturer. Is that a model that you see anywhere in renewable energy, that something where. Okay. You’re leasing these solar panels.

These are being put up by a company that maintains ownership and they are responsible for continued maintenance and re and replacement. And as things move forward, those panels are not yours, the homeowners, but they are the company that owns quote unquote owns the panels. There

are lots of businesses Teslas, one of them that do that kind of thing, where you’re leasing your solar panel array.

You’re not buying it outright. The benefit is. Just like leasing a car. It’s like, you don’t have to have all this money down. It’s just, you get the panels installed, quote for free, and then you’re just paying a monthly fee mm-hmm and it makes it very easy to get into solar. That way. The downside is that you don’t get, as you don’t get to reap all the benefits of the solar panel system, that, that way.

So I don’t see that path being mainstream, like being the majority of what we’d see mm-hmm but it is definitely already a, a portion of it. Me personally, my personal take is I’m not a huge fan of the leasing model. It creates, it creates problems with homes. So imagine you own a home and you lease your solar panels and then you go to sell.

It puts a strange. Twist on the sale. Cause it’s like, yeah, you’re buying this house. Well, guess what? You’re now under a lease for these solar panels. And if you don’t want, if the, a new owner doesn’t want the solar panels or that lease, there might be an expensive buyout, which could impact the sale or it, they just might walk away and say, I don’t wanna deal with this.

So it’s like, it creates these. Logistics that, yeah, I

could imagine if you were buying a house just to put it into terms of something like that. I could connect to for my own personal experience going into a buying situation. And they’re like, you’re buying the house, but all those kitchen appliances are leased and it’s a 15 year lease.

And those are your kitchen appliances. Like, wait a minute. What

you have, you pay 300 bucks a month for ’em. It’s like, it’s like, like I don’t want, I don’t want that. Yeah. So that, that’s, that’s one of the problems with the leasing model, in my opinion. So it’s like, it’s not a, it’s not a bad thing. It’s just, you have.

weigh all the options, which is why I don’t think it will ever be a true, like majority

of solar panels being handled that way. Right. You just touched on this, but I wanted to share this comment from Calum Smith who wrote one of the big parts that’s never mentioned is designing the product itself to be easily recycled.

In other words, removable subs structures, and avoiding the use of adhesives and so on making the recycling process far more cost effective. Mentions their removal, removable substructures and the avoidance of adhesives. What are some of the other ways that design of let’s say solar panels, cuz that’s the main topic of your, of your video.

What are some of the other ways that the design concepts toward recyclability could be implement?

It it’s what he just described. It’s it’s, you’d have to be right now, the way solar panels are made and they’re just literally like layers glued to each other, and then they’re encapsulated in this material and then put in a frame.

So you’d have to rethink that entire thing. And I don’t know if that could be done because of. You have to encapsulate to protect the solar panel. Mm-hmm so it’s like, there’s gonna always be this kind of layered sandwich. Mm-hmm but the question is, could you engineer it so that they aren’t necessarily glued to each other?

Like they are, so it’d be easy to separate. Could they be, I don’t concealed. The question I would have is one, does that compromise longevity of the solar panel? Does that increase the cost dramatically? There’s all these things you’d have to factor. My take on it is more like not to keep bringing up apple, but like apple, like all of our phones are becoming, they’re less modular and they’re now like a brick of things that are just glued together.

Right. And it’s, it’s allowed them to get thinner and smaller and more compact. And as users it’s like, we like that, but then it’s like, well, it’s really hard to take this apart and repair it. Yeah. So there’s not really self repair anymore. But apple, what they’ve done is they’ve created these literally robots that take them apart.

so it’s like they have a system where they shovel it in this robot, like peels stuff apart. So it’s like if, if a manufacturer can engineer the panel, they should also be engineering. How the panel is separated, taken apart. Right. And if, if they design the entire experience like that, they could come up with different ways to put the panels.

Right. So it’s it’s but they haven’t been doing that. It’s the focus has been on how do we make panels as cheap and efficiently as we possibly can. Not even thinking about the other side.

There’s also this comment from Terry Hayward, who wrote a lot of solar panels are scrapped because they have dropped below their required output for commercial use selling these panels at a really low price to be used in off grid solutions would help a lot of people and give a profit in relation to paying for recycling.

I’m surprised this is not being done. A panel that has dropped below its optimum efficiency would still be really useful in non-critical use cases. I wanted to bring this up because it’s a, first of all, it’s a good idea, but also because Terry’s comment says I’m surprised this is not being done yet. I believe you’ve mentioned before that it is that there is a use solar panel market out.

And

it’s growing because of this exact thing. Um, so like my panels at my house are 25 year warranty. They’ll last, longer than that. So a homeowner is gonna like stretch out how long they can use these panels. When you’re talking about solar panel farms, they typically switch the panels out faster than that.

The. There’s reasons why they do that. So like they might retire a panel after 10 years. They may not wait for the 20 year, 25 year mark. Those panels typically end up getting resold because a commercial business is gonna wanna maximize their profits. So it’s like, okay, we’re changing these panels out every so often.

And then we take those panels and we check ’em on a second hand market and sell it. A friend of mine, Ricky, Roy from Tuit DaVinci. That’s how he did his panels on his last house. He bought secondhand panels and they were. I believe they were from a, a ma massive solar installation. So they were non-standard sizes.

Like the size of panel you get for your house is a slightly different size than you see in a solar panel farm. Right? So his panels were a little longer and taller than a typical panel. Mm. Because he bought them second hand. There’s a couple places like solar steels.com. And I think it’s, uh, San solar.com is another one.

There’s different places. You can go including Craigslist. It’s like, you can find ’em there too. It’s like you can buy secondhand panels. Really cheap. Um, I have a friend of mine. Who’s building a,

a

trailer home. Like he’s building this, you know, taking a truck trailer and he’s building a home down in Texas and he’s building it so they can be off grid with smart home capabilities.

And one of the things he did was he’s building his own battery array and he bought secondhand solar, uh, because you can get it for like less than half the cost of a brand new panel. So dirt cheap, very effective panels, and he’s getting all the solar he needs. It has the price

and it’s conceivably still under warranty for a decade.

It, it

depends. It depends on where you’re buying it from and where the manufacturer, the original panel was. But yeah, it’s in theory, you could potentially get a panel that’s still technically under some kind of manufacturer’s warranty, but even if you’re not, and you’re paying a third to half the price it’s, if a panel goes bad on you, it’s, it’s cheap to swap it out.

Right.

This comment from sinister MD caught my eye. First of all, because of the user. Sinister MD MD rights. I just ordered to have solar panels put on my home. I’m excited to see how much of an impact it makes for me, but by the time they’re needing to be replaced will be decades down the road. So hopefully even more recycling options will be available.

How long do you think some of the technologies that you talked about? Like there’s, I guess there’s two paths. There’s the path of ramping up recycling projects. To be able to manage what’s currently out in the world. Mm-hmm and then there’s a future 10 or 15 years down the road of perhaps different manufacturing that makes for more easily recycled panels.

Right. How long do you think it’s going to take for the recycling effort to actually reach a point where 10, 15 years down the road. People are going to be able to say, oh, I know what to do with these panels. Do you think that 10 years down the road, people are gonna be saying like, I know what to do with these.

It’s not a question mark for me. Or do you think we’re gonna be still in early days of people saying, wait a minute, I’ve got, I’m suddenly responsible for these things. And I don’t know what to do with them.

It’s hard to answer, but I would kind of look at the lithium ion battery recycling effort as a kind of a litmus test because rewind.

Four years ago, and there really was nobody doing it in a significant way. And today we got several Redwood materials, life cycle, American manganese, and others that are already recovering 98, 90%, 99% of the materials out of a battery mm-hmm so it’s they’re and they’re doing it affordably. That’s the most important part, but they’re still small scale.

So it’s like I could see the solar panel industry with proper legislation in the next five years. They’re they’re doing a, doing a good job, but they’re still lagging behind fast forward 10 years. I could see them potentially being in a much better place. Still, maybe lagging a little bit behind talk 15 years.

I think that’s when we’d be looking at like, we’re, we’re good. We’re totally fine. Um, but it’s, it’s gonna be a long road and it’s gonna, I think part of the biggest problem is that legislation because right. We have the technology now to do it. It’s just more. if you do that, we kind of technique . Yeah. It, it shifts to where the costs are and it changes the incentives and motivations for companies and it can help make it more affordable or more cost effective to recycle versus just chucking ’em into the landfill.

So I think in the short term, we absolutely need legislation long term. I think it’s like if without legislation you’re talking 10 years or more probably for it to kind of solve itself, right.

And is there a model that you would suggest globally that the us and you mentioned Europe is already doing certain things.

Is there a specific thing in the European model that you’re just like, well, clearly that’s. 90% of your solution right there. Like, I think

exactly what they’re doing. It’s like the fact that they’ve labeled solar panels is e-waste and then they have that law that ma mandates that, you know, manufacturers are responsible for what they put out into the environment.

So they’re responsible for those electronics that they make and they have to figure out ways to dispose of it properly. It’s like, I think that is 90% of the solution right there. It’s just a matter of getting. China to do something similar, getting us to do something similar, making sure that it’s kind of rolled out across the major players in the world that are, you know, the United States, China and Europe are the biggest polluters in the world.

So it’s like you hit us and we get most of the way there.

Right? Well, all of it takes me right back to, uh, the sentiment that was already expressed by Matt. And it was expressed by some of the other commenters, but the comment from scout, right, that says very simply more products need to be designed to be recycled.

It just, it just like out of the gate. This thing is not a permanent thing in the world. Nothing is, is made to be a permanent thing in the world anymore. And I remember years ago, hearing our grandparents complain things aren’t filled to last, like they used to be well, that’s true. We need to understand and live with that in a way.

Yeah. That their complaints were, if I buy a fridge, I should know that that fridge is gonna outlast me. I don’t think you or I are looking to buy a fridge, that’s gonna outlast us. But I would like to know that when I buy a new thing, that that thing is not eventually gonna go off and become part of a toxic nightmare for yeah.

My children, my grandchildren, and future generations. So listeners, what do you think about all this? Do you see? Any steps in your area that demonstrates there is planning of this type that recycling is being. Built in to the manufacturing side of things, or what ways do you think that these could be improved?

The, the concepts could be improved and pushed. Do you agree with Matt, that legislation is one of the biggest solutions here? Or do you think there’s another way? Let us know in the comments, you can jump in the comments by reaching out to us through the contact information and the podcast description we’re on YouTube.

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