<
https://reneweconomy.com.au/solars-end-of-life-problem-is-not-about-panel-age-its-about-shifting-economics-and-untested-plans/>
"Solar’s end of life is not a problem for 2050. Decisions are being made right
now.
Ask most people when an Australian solar farm reaches end-of-life and they will
point to a date three decades later. The panels degrade, the story goes, and
around year 30 a crew arrives to pull them down and hand the land back. It is a
tidy picture.
It is also mostly wrong, based on what people running these assets tell us.
In recent months, we have spoken with utility-scale solar developers across
Australia about how these decisions actually get made. Two things came through
clearly and, together, they suggest we are watching the wrong clock.
The first is that end-of-life is not about age. It is about money.
The decisions that shape a solar farm’s fate are commercial and could be made
far earlier than any technical end point. One asset manager described starting
to weigh the asset’s future, whether to extend its life, repower it, or
decommission it, around “the halfway point of, you know, 15 years.”
What tips the decision is the market. The same manager watched large-scale
generation certificate prices fall from “forty-five or $50” a few years ago to
$4 today, pulling the business case with them.
A farm generating perfectly well can hit a decision point the moment its
off-take contract expires, and the contracts on offer are changing.
Conversely, an ageing asset can run long past its design life. As one
practitioner put it, “if it’s still producing and it’s still making money… just
let it drag on until it finally falls apart completely.”
The panels are not the point. The point is the revenue, as well as the
connection to the grid."
(Note that the decommissioning of other forms of generation and resource
extraction is equally problematic, if not more so. Every company likes to avoid
or escape obligations.)
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
