Abstract
The spread of solar panel is accelerating after feed-in-tariff policy for renewable energy introduced in July 2012. The lifetime of photovoltaic (PV) panels generally is guessed 20 years. In the near future, big amount of PV panels will be expected to discard because of these rapid diffusion, so it is necessary to investigate and prepare treatment and recycling system for end-of-life PV panels from now.
In this paper, at first, the amount of annual introduction of PV systems which includes new introduction and replacement was estimated in Japan. Secondly, the future amount of discarded solar panel was estimated concerning discarded factors. We adapted 3 factors as discarded factors that include loss in manufacturing process of solar panels, loss at installation and end of life of solar panel. The amount of discarded solar panel by region was obtained by dividing according to the number of houses. Thirdly, we estimated the optimal distribution of stock yard (SY) according to total cost of transportation from place of generation to treatment plant in Kyushu area. SY is indicated the place for interim storage. Total cost is composed from transportation cost and management cost for SY. Optimal place of SY was obtained by using barycentric method in consideration of the transportation cost minimization. In addition, sensitivity analysis was conducted to understand the influence of each parameter to optimal place of SY.
