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Truly sustainable solar panels (solar.lowtechmagazine.com)

submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Solar panels have always bothered me because they require such intense manufacturing and usage of scarce resources. TLDR of article: "Many people will argue that if low-tech solar panels are less efficient, we would need more solar panels to produce the same power output. Consequently, the resources saved by low-tech production methods would be compensated by the extra resources to build more solar panels. However, efficiency is only crucial when we take energy demand for granted, sacrificing some efficiency may gain us a lot in sustainability."

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

The article has a slight oversight - it is a bit behind the state of the art.

S. Korea develops technique to recycle discarded solar panels into high-performance solar cells

South Korea moves forward with long-expected solar panel recycling scheme

Reclaiming the aluminum has been possible for a long while. Reclaiming the glass has been "not worth the effort". Reclaiming the doped silicon is apparently a reality in South Korea, however.

As for the story itself, wow - very interesting. :)

“My hypothesis is that George Cove stumbled upon a Schottky contact photovoltaic cell, decades before it was described by Walter Schottky. 21 There is the possibility of both photovoltaic (predominantly) and thermoelectric responses from these devices. The plug was an alloy of zinc and antimony – which we now know is a semiconductor. It was alternately capped by German silver (a nickel, copper, and zinc alloy) and copper on opposite ends. This formed an ohmic contact and Schottky contact, respectively. This is a photovoltaic device.”

According to Philip Pesavento, George Cove probably started with “German silver” as the negative material on both ends of the plugs, and an antimony-zinc alloy (ZnSb) as the positive material. These were the best available thermoelectric materials at the time:

“He probably ran out of German silver and substituted copper to finish making up a bunch of plugs since the difference in thermoelectric voltage between using copper and German silver was small. Then, during testing, Cove noted that these plugs (with a German silver cap at one end and a copper cap at the other end) gave a much greater voltage: 100s of mV’s versus the usual 10s of mV for a thermoelectric generator.”