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solar panels on small mom and pop properties (100 or so acres) were entirely exploitative and people in the comments don't seem to realize the nature and the extent of the exploitation. there was an analysis document from an ivy law professor which at some point was the only such source, but now googling for keywords brings up a lot of relevant material. few years back i was helping a number of farmland owners in a row with their solar installation deals, and every single one of those deals took a scorched earth approach (ianal, but i read contracts in my day job) cleanup specifically is a huge part, because it's an externalized cost burdened on the land owner. bringing up the necessity of documented cleanup strategy in the contract pretty much immediately leads to the solar company withdrawing its proposal (in fact only one company even bothered to politely say no, everyone else just ghosted). elsewhere in comments people are saying "well panels still work at 50% capacity, so why even dismount", but that's not how it works. the entire installation is leased and operated by the third party, the owners typically have neither expertise nor the ability to continue operating an industrial site past the lifetime of a contract, or past its operational lifetime for that matter. a lot of these installations exploit the old age and the effective poverty of the site owners (those 100 acres are a low-liquidity asset, while the industry they supported is no longer there due to aging population and regulatory changes), the companies despite the good cause they are attached to seem to be interested purely in short term gains, the contracts are all about externalizing as much cost as possible, the installed equipment is presumably all treated as write off (i sort of wonder how subsidies factor into this, i suspect that they are significantly enabling this kind of behavior). american socioeconomic model somehow managed to take a wonderful future looking thing and turn it (at least in some instances, but also every single one i had to deal with) into a scorched earth, after après moi, le déluge thing. recyclers will possibly improve the situation, at least for the people who are already locked into financially disadvantageous contracts, but that really depends on how much deinstallation they'll be willing to take up. |
First, bonds for decommissioning solar sites are required by many programs now. These usually cost 3-5% of total initial investment. Not insurmountable by any means.
In reality, these bonds are unlikely to ever be utilized. Most sites will never be decommissioned unless the owner wants to redevelop the land for something more profitable. The interconnection rights alone are worth way more than the cost of decommissioning.
Recently, repowering solar sites has become a hugely profitable endeavor. Most projects have a 20-30 year power purchase agreement, often at a fixed price per MWh. That initial price was set very high based on the massively more expensive cost of deployment (equipment and install cost about twice as much 10 years ago). Squeezing 20% more capacity out of these projects by repowering these sites with more efficient modules and new inverters, is often a windfall, given the falling costs involved.
That's not to say there are zero issues like the ones described. Like most early stage technology-heavy industries, early solar projects often utilized a lot of "innovative" technological strategies that dead-ended and are therefore much harder to maintain.
But overall this is just not much of an issue in practice.