**Title**: Energy in the North - Rich Stromberg
**Date**: April 8, 2026
**Participants**: Amanda Byrd, Rich Stromberg

00;00;00;00 - 00;00;12;24 [Rich Stromberg] If it passes our inspection, they can donate that to us, get a tax benefit rather than just throwing it away. And we'll put it back in service for low income households and communities, people who could never, ever afford a solar array otherwise.

00;00;12;24 - 00;00;32;11 [Amanda Byrd] This week on energy in the North, I speak to Rich Stromberg, a PhD student and affiliate researcher at the Alaska Center for Energy and Power. Rich is working on a dissertation titled Reuse of Photovoltaic Equipment for Social and Ecological Benefit. I started the conversation with Rich by asking him, how did he choose that topic?

00;00;32;11 - 00;01;48;21 [Rich Stromberg] I actually started a solar nonprofit down in Colorado with some students who were in their senior capstone course at Western Colorado University. And I had found a dozen used Kyocera PV modules that had been on a rooftop for about 18 years. And I, measured them and they were still producing 82, 83% of the original power output. So I bring them to the students as a possible, capstone project and said, hey, these still make power. They're going to get thrown away. Let's figure out a way that we can create, the greatest amount of value for those in our community with the greatest need. And that was the only constraint I gave them. And over the course of the semester, we actually developed a nonprofit model, called Equitable Solar Solutions, where by being a nonprofit as, array owners, whether they're homeowners, businesses and now utilities, when they're ready to upgrade to new equipment, If it passes our inspection, they can donate that to us, get a tax benefit rather than just throwing it away. And we'll put it back in service for low income households and communities, people who could never, ever afford a solar array otherwise. So after working on that for a few years, it became apparent, wow, this is a lot more complicated than just taking a meter. Measure a few modules and throwing them on a roof.

00;01;48;21 - 00;01;53;15 [Amanda Byrd] And so you say the word re-use and not recycle. What's the difference?

00;01;53;15 - 00;02;42;27 [Rich Stromberg] Okay, so there's a couple of terms reuse recycle and repurpose. So reuse would be to take a object and use it again in its original intended function. So in the case of solar panels there are on one array a rooftop on a ground mount array, those, get removed and we test them. And then we would put them on another array, another rooftop or ground mount system, for recycling. That would be to take the original solar panels and tear them apart, grind them down and recover the constituent materials like aluminum, glass, silicon, silver. Some other trace elements. And then repurpose would be instead of take a solar panel and turn it into furniture or siding for a wood shed or something like that.

00;02;42;27 - 00;02;450;25 [Amanda Byrd] I'm imagining a stethoscope and a solar panel. What does it look like to look at the health of a solar panel?

00;02;50;25 - 00;05;00;03 [Rich Stromberg] Your eyes tell you a lot. And your eyes get calibrated over time of doing, walking up and down rows of modules, doing visual inspections, and, for the front side and all the cells in the back sheets and cables and connectors, all those kind of things. And then there's the electrical measurements that obviously we do, a lot of time we can, do those measurements at central locations within an array. That might be a DC combiner box that has 15 to 20 strings of module, each string maybe having 15 to 20 modules connected in series. Or sometimes at the inverter, you've got a bunch of strings of, of, of modules coming in. So we can do electrical characterization. And then there are other fancier, wonky, cool techniques that are really fun to, bring students in on and train them. But one is called ultraviolet fluorescence or UV fluorescence. Ultraviolet light is a little bit below the visible spectrum. The wavelength, from visible light is that we can see is 400 to 700 nanometers about. So UV light at night time, we'll go walking up and down the solar arrays and we'll shine a light that transmits either in 395 nanometers or 365 nanometers. And you have to wear safety goggles when you're doing that because it's nothing but UV light. And at night time, your pupils are all dilated. And so you don't want that UV light reflecting and getting into your eyes and giving you a sunburn on your retina. We do that and, fluorescence will actually the light to bounce back to the material absorbs some of that light. And what it bounces back shifts the wavelength into the visible spectrum. So we can actually see with while wearing a protective goggles, incidence of cracks or other defects, under UV light at night that you wouldn't be able to, visibly detect during the day. One thing that's really nice about that technique is it's really quick. You don't have to scan modules slowly with some equipment. You literally just walk up and down with your, UV torch, your flashlight, and, and you're looking in and you'll see right away will something pop out

00;05;00;03 - 00;05;13;07 [Amanda Byrd] Rich Stromberg is a PhD student and affiliate researcher at the Alaska Center for Energy and Power at 51·çÁ÷¹ÙÍø.And I'm Amanda Byrd, chief storyteller for ACEP Find this story and more at uaf.edu/acep.