By 2050, there is going to be almost as many decommissioned solar panels as newly installed solar panels. That’s according to data from the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), dating back to 2016.

Fast forward eight years. It’s 2024. Solar panel prices hit an all-time low in November 2023 and haven’t moved much, driving some European homes to opt for solar panels as garden fencing material.

But with regulations regarding solar waste lagging behind, it’s a time bomb waiting to be dealt with when these panels are decommissioned 25 to 30 years from now. Especially since China, once the world’s largest importer of waste plastics, decided to literally stop dealing with trash in 2017.

To understand where the industry stands, I spoke to Dr Jeremy Ang, newly minted startup founder at Ambiguity Navigation and former research fellow at Nanyang Technological University (NTU). He’s created a process to extract silicon from decommissioned solar panels at higher purity and lower cost (aka “urban mining”) and is pushing for the solar energy industry to adopt circular economy principles.

As with all ReFi Singapore meetups, the ask-me-anything session turned out to be surprisingly insightful, with friends from EDP Renewables (which acquired Singapore-based solar energy supplier Sunseap in 2022), Ong Gin Keat, Director at waste processing facility Envcares, and Henry Soediarko, Head of Portfolio Management at First Estate Capital Management chipping with industry insights.

No time to listen to the whole thing?
Read the writeup on Medium: https://medium.com/@shihan.fang/solar-waste-recycle-6be6f4cb2a82

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While the rest of the carbon world was caught up with debates about whether Verra's REDD+ offsets were "worthless", and the drama involving South Pole's Project Kariba, Australia's carbon credit system was facing a crisis of its own.

Carbon offsets produced under Australian government standards are known as ACCUs, or Australian Carbon Credit Units.

In March 2022, Professor Andrew Macintosh, the former head of the Emissions Reduction Assurance Committee (ERAC), which approves ACCUs, described the government's forest regeneration scheme (known as Human Induced Regeneration, or HIR) as a "fraud".

Shortly after this podcast was recorded, Professor Macintosh and a group of researchers released a paper showing that HIR projects had limited regeneration in areas issuing ACCUs, and compared to baseline areas outside the crediting zone, HIR projects were non-additional.

Read the Guardian article on the paper for more: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/mar/27/australias-carbon-credits-system-a-failure-on-global-scale-study-finds

In this podcast, I chat with Guy Dickinson, the founder of Betacarbon, Clima, and Gondwana. These are a trio of companies that tokenize ACCUs, provide carbon advisory services, and develop carbon credit projects respectively.

Whistleblowing is tough, and so is developing a carbon market that’s built upon science that’s constantly evolving.

Dickinson says that there’s going to be a crunch in ACCU supply as the ERAC tightens its criteria for new projects. He also chats about upcoming regulatory developments in Australia, thoughts about Professor Macintosh, and getting transparency and access to the Aussie carbon market via the BCAU token.

Read the highlights on Medium: https://medium.com/@shihan.fang/australia-accu-hir-betacarbon-d1801e7d45fc

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Lawrence Xiao, co-founder of Nika.eco shares how his company is moving the carbon market forward into the digital age.

The company provides pre-project feasibility reports for carbon project developers and investors. It also provides digital measurement reporting and verification (dMRV) services at two stages of the carbon credit issuance process: to establish the accuracy of the carbon claims prior to issuance, and continued monitoring of the project after the carbon credits have been issued.

In this sharing session at ReFi Singapore's April meetup, Xiao talks about:

- PlanetGPT, a one-stop platform for carbon prospecting that Nika.eco is building in stealth mode
- The new VM0048 methodology by Verra
- The skill sets required in the carbon markets as the industry moves forward into the digital age
- Why human verification is still needed even as dMRV becomes the norm

Read the highlights from the AMA on Medium: https://medium.com/@shihan.fang/machine-learning-artificial-intelligence-nika-eco-redd-6cde1acd390b

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