Note: I’m a big supporter of Sustainability and Green Energy, However, this dashboard is to highlight the importance of the solar panel recycling capacity Australia require in the immediate future and the investment to develop better technology.
After the refreshing Design challenge yesterday, we delved into the Solar panel data set and challenged to combine it with external data sets to obtain Insights. Needless to say, with my innate inclination toward Sustainability and Renewable energy, this was the most exciting piece to work on.
Based on my previous research around renewable energy and especially around Solar Power usage, there was a looming question in sustainability discussion forums around how clean solar energy was. Whilst touting the Solar energy cleanest source of energy production we currently have, we also need to remember that the lifetime for a panel is 20 years. Post its usage, the plan for disposing of the panel waste, which primarily contains cadmium, lead and glass, is incumbent.
To plan e-waste management of Solar panels, we need to predict the amount of waste generated in the near future and classify them accordingly to the waste category. To obtain this insight, I took an external data set from Solar Exposure data from the Bureau of Meteorology. Since Sydney had the more extensive data, I narrowed down my dashboards to Sydney.
The dashboard provides insights on
- Solar Waste that will be generated from 2036
- Cadmium and Lead Leeching due to the environment per postcode