Between 2005 and 2012, the Sacramento Municipal Utility District sold roughly 1 MW of used and salvaged modules, and the winning bids ranged from $0.04 to $1.26 per watt, according to a U.S. Department of Energy review of PV salvage values. That is a spread of more than 30 times for something most people would describe as one product, which is a used solar panel.
Prices overall are far lower today than they were in that period, but the spread has not gone away. If you are holding a few hundred or a few thousand retired modules, the question of what they are worth does not have a single answer. It has a set of factors, and some of those factors matter a great deal more than others.
This article goes through them in the order of how much each one tends to move a buyer’s offer. The ranking is our judgment from how secondary-market lots are quoted, not a dataset, and a lot with an unusual problem can reorder it.
Sellers tend to call everything “used panels.” Buyers do not, and the label on a lot changes how it is priced.
Surplus panels: new modules that were never installed, usually left over from canceled or delayed projects, overstock, or a distributor liquidation.
Used panels: modules that were installed and operated, then removed, and that still produce usable power.
Decommissioned panels: modules removed as part of the planned retirement or repowering of a whole array. A decommissioned lot can contain both used panels and end-of-life panels.
End-of-life panels: modules that are broken, unsafe, or degraded to the point that no buyer will reinstall them, so any value is in the materials and not in the power output.
Watt-peak (Wp): the nameplate output of a module under standard test conditions. Because used panels are priced per watt, the watt figure a buyer accepts is the number every offer is multiplied by.
Flash test: a lab measurement that hits the module with a calibrated pulse of light and records its actual output, so it can be compared with the nameplate rating.
Condition grade: many resellers sort modules into grades such as A, B, and C. There is no industry-wide standard for what each grade means, so it is worth asking any buyer to define its grades in writing.
If a panel fails a visual inspection, no installer will put it back on a roof or a rack, so its value as a working panel drops to close to zero. The DOE review cited above found that browning of the EVA encapsulant reduced resale value dramatically, and that glass breakage, delamination, burn marks, and damaged backsheets led to modules being discarded. In one 2011 salvage job described in the same review, about 15% of the modules were thrown out.
The following conditions usually take a panel out of the resale pool entirely:
Cracked or shattered glass, including small corner cracks that let moisture in.
A cracked, chalking, or peeling backsheet, which buyers treat as a fire and shock risk.
Burn marks or melted spots around cells or the junction box.
Visible delamination, where layers of the module have separated.
Sellers tend to quote the share of panels that “still work.” Buyers look at the share that will fail inspection, because every failed panel in the lot has to be recycled or disposed of, and that costs money instead of earning it.
A used module competes directly with new surplus modules that carry full warranties, and new surplus is not in short supply. According to Solar Builder’s report on the 2024 secondary-market price index, 95% of the roughly 1.7 million modules listed for resale on one large exchange in 2024 were new excess stock, and the average secondary prices for the second half of that year came in below the $0.33 per watt national average that NREL reported at the end of the third quarter of 2024. The same report notes that legacy polycrystalline modules do not hold their resale value well.
The practical meaning of this is simple, if a little uncomfortable for sellers. A buyer will only pay for a used panel at a discount to what a new surplus panel costs that same week, and when new-module prices fall, used values fall with them, and usually further. If you are waiting for prices to recover before you sell, it is worth knowing that the ceiling is set by a market you have no control over.
This is the factor that sellers most often leave out of their own math, and it is the one that most often decides whether a sale is worth doing at all. The arithmetic works like this: a used panel’s gross value is its accepted wattage multiplied by the per-watt price. As an illustration (not a quote), a 300 W panel at 10 cents per watt is worth $30 before any costs. Removal, packing, palletizing, loading, and freight are then taken out of that figure, and most of those costs are charged per truck or per job rather than per panel, so they do not shrink when the lot gets smaller. The DOE review makes the same point from the salvage side, noting that transport, warehousing, cleaning, sorting, and inventory all reduce the net value of a salvage operation.
Commercial buyers build this directly into how they quote. https://solarrecycling.com/, one of the buyers that has organized its model around this problem, purchases used and excess new panels from commercial and utility-scale decommissioning projects so owners can sell used solar panels by the lot, generally with a typical minimum of about 100 panels, and it prices them per watt (its published range for used panels is $0.05 to $0.60 per watt).
The company states plainly that shipping and handling is usually the biggest expense offsetting a panel’s value, which is the reason for the volume floor, and for panels in the same lot that cannot be resold it offers downstream recycling (about $20 to $50 per panel plus shipping, on its own published figures), so a mixed lot from a commercial decommission can be settled in one quote instead of being split between a buyer and a separate recycler.
If you want the per-panel freight cost to stay low, the following steps help:
Keep modules of the same make and model together, ideally on their original pallets.
Prepare a count by model, with clear photos of a sample of labels.
Separate visibly damaged modules before the buyer arrives, so they are not priced into the good stock.
Confirm loading access (a dock or a forklift on site) before the truck is booked.
Once a panel passes inspection and the freight math works, age and measured output decide where it sits within the resale band. Degradation is slower than many sellers assume. NREL’s PV lifetime research reports a degradation rate of 0.5% per year when only high-quality data for crystalline silicon modules is used, and it notes that a long tail of lower-reliability products raised the average in an earlier review to 0.8% per year.
On a simple straight-line basis, a 300 W module that is 10 years old would be producing roughly 285 W at 0.5% per year, or roughly 276 W at 0.8% per year. The difference sounds small, but buyers price on the watts they believe they are getting and not on the nameplate, so with test data showing the lower degradation rate is easier to price at the top of the band.
A common trade rule of thumb is that buyers want at least 10 years of useful production left in a module, and panels that are clearly older than that are usually treated as recycling stock regardless of how they look.
Not every working module is equally easy to resell. The DOE review found that amorphous silicon modules on breakable float glass sold for considerably less than single-crystal and polycrystalline modules with tempered glass, and that modules with junction boxes still attached sold for more than modules without them.
The same logic applies today with different technologies:
Older, lower-wattage modules are harder to match into new designs, because buyers usually need enough identical units to fill complete strings.
Polycrystalline modules are discounted against monocrystalline modules, as noted in the Solar Builder report above.
Thin-film modules have a smaller pool of buyers, which tends to lengthen the time it takes to sell a lot.
Modules with cut leads or missing connectors take extra labor before reinstallation, and buyers price that labor in.
Paperwork rarely adds much to an offer, but missing paperwork can reduce one or slow a sale down. A legible label (model, Wp, open-circuit voltage, and short-circuit current), the original datasheet, the install and removal dates, and any flash test or electroluminescence (EL) images make it easier for a buyer to commit to a price without discounting for uncertainty.
Warranties are where sellers tend to overestimate value. Many manufacturer warranties are written for the original purchaser or the original installation, and a transfer may require the manufacturer’s approval or may not be permitted at all, so you should read the actual warranty terms before you count on them.
In practice, secondary-market buyers generally price used modules as if no manufacturer warranty applies, which means a warranty that does transfer is treated as a small extra on top of the price.
Used panels are priced per watt, so the starting point is the verified wattage multiplied by the per-watt offer, and the offer depends on the six factors above. Most current quotes from commercial buyers come in at a fraction of the price of new surplus modules, and a lot with damaged panels or a long haul to the buyer can net close to zero.
For large lots, testing a sample of modules is usually worth the cost, because it gives the buyer a measured output figure instead of an assumption. For a small lot the testing cost can be larger than the price difference it produces, so it is often better to ask the buyer how it intends to test.
Yes, but the warranty may not go with them. Check whether the warranty terms allow a transfer to a new owner or a new site, and expect most secondary-market buyers to price the panels without relying on the warranty either way.
Inventory tends to collect where large fleets are being repowered or decommissioned and where distributors liquidate excess stock after projects are canceled or delayed. In the US this generally means the states with the largest installed commercial and utility-scale capacity, although the price you receive still depends on how far the lot has to travel to reach a buyer.
If you want the best number for a lot of retired panels, the order of work matters. Sort out the damaged modules first, check the current price of new surplus so your expectations are realistic, then make the lot as easy and cheap to ship as you can, and only after that spend time on test reports and warranty paperwork.
The lots that tend to sell well, whatever their age, are usually the lots that were sorted, counted, and documented before anyone asked for a price.
Daniel Hall is an experienced digital marketer, author and world traveller. He spends a lot of his free time flipping through books and learning about a plethora of topics.
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October 7, 2026
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