Wind and solar power face an end-of-life sustainability challenge

Just for starters: a facility run by Soren, a French organisation that recycles used solar panels. It anticipates a ‘huge wave’ of spent panels as governments switch to renewables

Cars were a novelty once; so were oil wells, plastic bottles and coal-fired power stations. Novelty wears off, though — and, as the industries concerned acquired global heft, the environmental downsides became ever clearer.

But it is not only the giants of the fossil fuel era that must confront the loss of innocence that comes with scale. The huge increase in renewable energy in recent years — a doubling of capacity since 2013, with COP28 expected to produce a push for a tripling by 2030 — means that the solar and wind power sectors will soon face their own sustainability challenges.