End-of-life solar panel recycling decisions for Malaysia

Lim, Jie Xiang (2023) End-of-life solar panel recycling decisions for Malaysia. Project Report. Universiti Teknikal Malaysia Melaka, Melaka, Malaysia. (Submitted)

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Abstract

The widespread use of fossil fuels, such as coal as the primary power generation, has been proved to have an adverse impact on the globe. Solar energy, the world's greatest readily accessible energetic resource and is now growing rapidly in the use of this renewable energy worldwide. At the end of 2017, the volume of the global mounted PV was around 400 GW, and is predicted to increase to 4500 GW by 2050. Malaysia is now expanding its use of renewable energy (particularly on solar energy), through several schemes and one of these is called Large Scale Solar (LSS). With the increase in the use of solar panels, the waste created after the EoL solar panels was also projected to rise steadily. The recycling decisions of EoL solar panels in Malaysia is just in an initial and immature state, with limited previous study regarding the method for selecting the recycling locations that considering the sustainable supply chain elements is reachable presently. Hence, it is necessary to identify and propose the possible location for EoL solar panel recycling centres that take into account the sustainable supply chain element in Malaysia as soon as possible to avoid the vast number of solar panel waste ending up in land-fields and causing pollution to the environment. The centre-of-gravity method, supply chain complexity, carbon footprint supply chain analysis, Analytical Hierarchy Process, and K-Means algorithm was applied in this study. In this study, a database regarding the information of the 454 LSS and Non-LSS farms was developed. Moreover, the gravity modelling method is adopted to identify the geographic midpoint location for the solar panel recycling centres in Malaysia. Next, the supply chain complexity and carbon footprint supply chain assessment was applied to determine the most ideal alternative from three alternatives proposed for transporting the waste to respective collection or recycling centres based on different attributes considered. The recycling location decisions is then decided by AHP (where alternative C was suggested). The combination of these approaches was classified as logistic supply chain assessment in this study. The study is then continued with the clustering optimisation, where the assessment of the clustering optimisation for LSS farm and overall farm without any geographic segmentation limitations was carried out via the k-means algorithm. The optimum clusters proposed for LSS farm and overall farm were 8 and 20 clusters respectively. This study proposed all of the important steps in deciding the recycling locations and clusters for solar farms in Malaysia. Therefore, this can be a reference to the authorities on recycling decisions that consider the sustainable supply chain.

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