{"id":2087,"date":"2026-07-28T06:50:00","date_gmt":"2026-07-28T10:50:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/uk\/?p=2087"},"modified":"2026-07-28T06:50:00","modified_gmt":"2026-07-28T10:50:00","slug":"1-7-million-brand-new-solar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/uk\/1-7-million-brand-new-solar\/2087\/","title":{"rendered":"Over 1.7 million brand new solar panels hit the resale market in a single year, and the hidden reason almost none of them ever touched a rooftop reveals a global oversupply glut reshaping US project economics"},"content":{"rendered":"

Picture a warehouse the size of a city block, stacked floor to ceiling with gleaming solar panels<\/strong>, every one of them still in its original packaging.<\/p>\n

They were built for a roof or a field somewhere in America.<\/p>\n

They never got there.<\/p>\n

And the story of why they are sitting in that warehouse is reshaping the economics<\/strong> of solar power across the country.<\/p>\n

A market that almost nobody knows exists<\/h2>\n

Most people think of solar panels as things that go up on a roof and stay there for decades.<\/p>\n

That is mostly true, but there is a second market<\/strong> running underneath the main one.<\/p>\n

It is a wholesale trading world where panels change hands before they ever see daylight.<\/p>\n

This secondary market tracks wholesale pricing and supply of crystalline silicon modules that have fallen out of traditional distribution channels and are listed for resale on exchanges like EnergyBin.<\/p>\n

The scale of it surprises almost everyone who encounters it for the first time.<\/p>\n

In 2024 alone, 1.7 million<\/strong><\/a> solar panels were listed for resale on the EnergyBin platform, and in 2025 that figure reached 1.62 million modules.<\/p>\n

That is enough panels to power hundreds of thousands of American homes, and most buyers have never heard of this channel.<\/p>\n

The shape of the stockpile and why it keeps growing<\/h2>\n

You might assume most panels on this market are old and worn out.<\/p>\n

The actual picture is startling.<\/p>\n

In 2024, 95 percent of the inventory for resale was new excess stock<\/strong> that flowed from surplus and clearance closeouts, delayed or canceled projects, asset liquidations and installation leftovers.<\/p>\n

In other words, brand new panels, still under manufacturer warranty, were flooding a resale exchange because the projects they were built for had collapsed.<\/p>\n

By 2025, that share had risen further: 98 percent of the 1.62 million modules listed were brand new, never having been installed.<\/p>\n

In total, 1.62 million modules were listed for resale on EnergyBin in 2025, a 16.8 percent increase<\/strong> from 2020.<\/p>\n

An oversupply of new modules is creating a difficult economic environment for the reuse of older equipment, and the pipeline keeps growing.<\/p>\n

The price collapse hiding inside the good news<\/h2>\n

Cheap solar panels feel like a win for everyone.<\/p>\n

But the price story cuts in two directions at once.<\/p>\n

The utility scale solar module spot price<\/a> hit record lows globally in 2025, falling below $0.20 per watt according to the EIA’s Annual Energy Outlook 2025, but residential installed costs have not tracked that trajectory.<\/p>\n

Labor, hardware, balance of system<\/strong> components, permitting and installer margins make up the majority of the bill for homeowners.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, on the resale exchange, prices fell even further.<\/p>\n

The average price for used modules dropped by 30 percent from January 2024 levels, falling to $0.058 per watt by the fourth quarter of 2025.<\/p>\n

At that price, a standard 400 watt panel fetches roughly $23 on the secondary market.<\/p>\n

For a panel that originally cost $140 or more, that number tells a brutal story<\/strong> about where canceled project economics land.<\/p>\n

The real reason 1.7 million panels went nowhere<\/h2>\n

The panels did not pile up because demand for solar vanished.<\/p>\n

They piled up because the projects they were ordered for kept getting killed before construction began.<\/p>\n

Grid connection backlogs, financing gaps and shifting policy timelines have stranded hundreds of would be solar farms across the US.<\/p>\n

The panels that were already ordered and shipped<\/strong> had nowhere to go.<\/p>\n

The global secondary solar market is now estimated at around 1 gigawatt per year, with a substantial share decommissioned within just 10 years of operation.<\/p>\n

For context on what is driving US cancellations, over 200 projects<\/a> had their federal funding canceled by the US Department of Energy, representing roughly $8 billion in lost support, on top of nearly $35 billion in private sector clean energy investments abandoned or downsized across 2025.<\/p>\n

The panels get ordered, the project stalls, and the modules end up on an exchange at a fraction<\/strong> of their value.<\/p>\n

Where the stranded panels go next, and what it means for you<\/h2>\n

The story does not end in a warehouse.<\/p>\n

Much of the used module supply was exported directly to buyers in Pakistan, India, Nigeria, Afghanistan and South Africa, totaling 50 MW in 2025.<\/p>\n

Some panels also find a second life closer to home, redeployed as replacement parts for existing systems or repurposed into off grid setups and lower energy builds.<\/p>\n

And the economics may be shifting again in 2026.<\/p>\n

New panel prices are likely to increase due to input cost inflation and new tariff measures, which would close the gap between new and resale prices and make those stranded panels<\/strong> worth chasing again.<\/p>\n

For American homeowners exploring solar, California’s canal project<\/a> shows how creative deployment can squeeze more value out of every panel that gets installed.<\/p>\n

The warehouse full of brand new panels is not a failure of solar power itself.<\/p>\n

It is a sign that the supply chain got ahead of the grid, and the industry is slowly, genuinely, learning how to catch up.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Picture a warehouse the size of a city block, stacked floor to ceiling with gleaming solar panels, every one of them still in its original packaging. They were built for a roof or a field somewhere in America. They never got there. And the story of why they are sitting in that warehouse is reshaping …