Strengthening the American Clean Energy Grid
Eight projects to be selected for award negotiations because of President Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law will focus on reducing the cost and increasing the efficiency of panel recycling processes. As solar deployment increases, the end-of-life of photovoltaic (PV) components needs to be considered. Although 95% of a PV module is recyclable, the current economics of managing panels at end-of-life are unfavorable to recycling, according to DOE’s recent report. Modules designed for recycling will increase the percentage of materials that can be recovered during the recycling process and re-sold into the market. Increasing the amount of recovered materials such as silver and copper means these materials can contribute to the domestic supply chain.
The U.S. Department of Energy Solar Energy Technologies Office accelerates the advancement and deployment of solar technology in support of an equitable transition to a decarbonized economy. Learn more at energy.gov/eere/solar.
This $28 million funding program will reduce solar module costs and supply chain vulnerabilities, develop durable and recyclable solar technologies, and advance perovskite technologies toward commercialization.
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA BERKELEY
Project Name: Porous Aromatic Frameworks as Multifunctional Adsorbents for Selective Metal Recovery from Spent Photovoltaic Materials Location: Berkeley, CA DOE Award Amount: $1.5 million Awardee Cost Share: $375,000 Principal Investigator: Jeffrey Long Project Description: This project team is developing materials to selectively remove a variety of component metals from solar photovoltaic panels for reuse and recycling. These low-cost, porous materials can be used in different membranes that will each recover a particular metal from PV waste, including toxic materials like lead and iron and rare materials like indium and silver. The team will collaborate with industry to scale-up and test these membranes on actual PV waste streams.
Tandem PV is excited to be a part of this project team and bring its patent-pending perovskite and perovskite-silicon tandem panel recycling process to the project team and work to fully recover the component metals through the Porous Aromatic Frameworks in development at UC Berkeley and ChemFinity, Inc.