The Australian Governments official body for renewables – the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) has announced a distribution of funding that will see $15 million spans across research for the field. It aims to address issues relating to end-of-life challenges in solar PV panel and increase their cost-efficiency.
With hopes that the deployment of these systems continues to come down, innovations that will also reduce the cost of sustainably managing each panel at the end of their lifecycle will also become a crucial turning point for the industry.
This round of funding will see developments backed in order to improve the economics behind recycling, incorporating better design concepts, increasing the value of materials and developments across recycled and reused components for future panels. These cost savings will allow projects across large-scale solar and roof-top PV to better manage their waste, without having impacting the overall cost of renewable electricity creation.
Beyond addressing end-of-life concerns, the funding will also contribute to improving the efficiency of solar PV for new and existing purposes. It will support Australia’s growth in its world-leading solar PV R&D field, of which ARENA previously supported.
Where the funding will go
ARENA’s research and development funding will be placed in the following areas:
- End-of-life: addressing new solutions – including upfront solar power panel PV designs and processing; increasing the cost-effectiveness and creating sustainable end-of-life management processes for PV panels.
- Advanced silicon: Improvements to the cost-effectiveness of panels made from silicon currently in mass-market production. The processes surrounding their manufacturing will also be reviewed.
- Tandem silicon: ARENA will look to improve the cost-effectiveness of silicon-based solar PV by using tandem materials.
- New materials: New advancements in resources will help see new materials use their potential to reach better cost-efficiencies and assist in new deployment activities.
Darren Miller, ARENA CEO, said the recylcing of PV Panels adds a cost to the overall supply chain. R&D can support the field in finding innovatiove solutions to briing this cost down, allowing for a more sustainable management system for the lifecycle of the panels.
“The funding round also aims to build on Australia’s excellence in PV R&D, he said in an official statement. “To increase efficiencies and drive down costs even further and help bring about the next generation of solar technology.”
ARENA has previously provided more than $290 million to over 300 development projects in solar since 2009. These have been spread across programs from the Australian Solar Institute and includes $84 million towards the Australian Centre of Advanced Photovoltaics (ACAP), which will continue its operations until the year 2022.
