Recycling to alleviate the gap between supply and demand of raw materials in China's photovoltaic industry

Abstract

The photovoltaic (PV) market's expansion has increased PV waste exponentially. It is essential to conduct scientific research to determine the economics of recycling for the industry to grow sustainably. In this research, we proposes a multi-factor installed capacity prediction model based on bidirectional long short-term memory-grey relation analysis, which accurately predicts China's cumulative PV installed capacity in three growth scenarios from 2022 to 2050. With the Weibull distribution applied to predict the recovery potential of c-Si panels, the importance of recycling in balancing the supply and demand of raw materials is quantified. The results show that in the high-growth scenario, China's cumulative PV installed capacity will reach 2125 GW by 2050 while $400 to $700 million will be generated from the recycling. The study results demonstrate how crucial recycling is to close the loop of supply and demand for key raw materials in the PV industry.