Upcycling End of Life Solar Panels to Lithium‐Ion Batteries Via a Low Temperature Approach
Yeow Boon Tay, Ying Sim, Jeremy Ang Koon Keong, Muhammad Iszaki Bin Patdillah, Huei Min Chua, Ernest Tang Jun Jie, Madhavi Srinivasan, Nripan Mathews
Abstract
Abstract The massive adoption of renewable energy especially photovoltaic (PVs) panels is expected to create a huge waste stream once they reach end‐of‐life (EoL). Despite having the highest embodied energy, present photovoltaic recycling neglects the high purity silicon found in the PV cell. Herein, a scalable and low energy process is developed to recover pristine silicon from EoL solar panel through a method which avoids energy‐intensive high temperature processes. The extracted silicon was upcycled to form lithium‐ion battery anodes with performances comparable to as‐purchased silicon. The anodes retained 87.5 % capacity after 200 cycles while maintaining high coulombic efficiency (>99 %) at 0.5 A g −1 charging rate. This simple and scalable process to upcycle EoL‐solar panels into high value silicon‐based anodes can narrow the gap towards a net‐zero waste economy.