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.
