[Enthalpy]

I'm so happy that art got its vital place in a many-M$ plant... There
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20180822-why-china-is-transforming-the-worlds-solar-energy
the pattern of solar panels in a giant plant makes two giant pandas. So cute!

Also impressive is the scale of solar power in China. Whooping 130GW peak, and 53GW installed last year. Even if the mean output is 1/7th the peak, it's over 18GW mean. Heavily subsidized (I wish the paper gave cost figures), but so is coal, nuclear and the others, in about every country. The fund has 15G$ debt, but how much did it spend? 15G$ is very little as compared with 130GW and reasonable for 18GW.

I don't understand why recycling should be a problem. Papers about photovoltaic panels keep mentioning it as if it were a regular suggestion by competing energies. Forgetting about the alleged sulphuric acid, most mass of a panel is just steel and glass, already done. The rest must still be semiconductors, and my guess is that manufacturers of unprocessed semiconducting materials will happily take the decommissioned panels as a source that spares much of the early processing.

Thinking at silicon (it needs not be), difficult chemical processing brings it to a purity like 1ppm, from where crystallization achieves 1ppb or better. Scrubbed semiconductor would be between 100ppm and 10ppm as a mean value, so injecting it on the way to 1ppm would save costly efforts.

Or did I miss something?