Ground-mounted photovoltaic (PV) plants generate discrete end-of-life waste streams during repowering/revamping, yet damaged modules do not always leave the site. We document two field-verified case studies from Czechia, in which damaged PV modules remained stored outdoors on agricultural land after repowering/revamping. The two sites are treated as illustrative, field-verified cases rather than as a statistically representative sample of PV plants in Czechia or Europe. The sites were first identified during field visits in summer 2025, and a retrospective review of public CUZK orthophoto time series was then used to reconstruct when the stockpiles first became visible and whether they were still present in the latest available imagery. The stored module piles first became visible in 2022 and 2021 at the two sites, and were still present in summer 2025, corresponding to a minimum confirmed persistence of about 3 and 4 years, respectively. Orthophoto-based GIS supported by field photographs was used to quantify the land parcel area (19,560 and 22,100 m2), PV plan-view area (4960 and 5080 m2), storage footprint (109 and 100 m2), approximate stored module count (~1800 and ~2000), and stored mass (39.6 and 36.0 t). Using site-specific module footprints and a representative 30-module stack, the local stack-based pressures were calculated to be 3.92 and 3.26 kPa, respectively. Soil chemistry, leachate, and groundwater were not measured; therefore, the environmental implications should be interpreted as precautionary risk and as a need for monitoring, not as measured contamination at the two sites. The study shows that repowering/revamping can create a multi-year gap between module replacement and actual site clearance, during which recycling and final disposal are effectively delayed.
Kozelka et al. (Tue,) studied this question.