Solar

Closed loop? Reused solar panels to power solar panel recycling facility

Closed loop? Reused solar panels to power solar panel recycling facility

SOLARCYCLE, a solar recycling company, has installed an on-site solar farm made of reused solar panels that will power its industrial solar panel recycling facility.

The reused panels come from decommissioned utility-scale solar farms and residential installations across the United States. SOLARCYCLE says the project serves as a model of how to power an industrial facility through renewable energy as the US ramps up domestic manufacturing capacity. It will also help to build a fully closed loop, ultra-low carbon solar industry in America.

The 500KW system made from around 1,000 reused panels will provide around 50% of the electricity SOLARCYCLE uses to power their advanced recycling factory in Odessa, Texas. SOLARCYCLE’s plan is to expand this secondhand power plant to continue to generate more of the company’s energy demands, including its facilities in Mesa, Arizona, and Cedartown, Georgia. Two of SOLARCYCLE’s customers provided a significant percentage of the secondhand solar panels in use — Ørsted from their own Texas utility-scale operations and Sunrun, from their residential operations. 

PODCAST: Around 70% of solar systems in the U.S. are less than five years old, and with a lifespan of 30 years or more, recycling may not seem urgent. But multi-gigawatt demand for solar recycling awaits the industry in the decades to come.

How can solar recycling scale to meet the need, and who’s going to capture that market? In Episode 11 of the Factor This! podcast, Suvi Sharma – the solar veteran who co-founded Solaria and Nextracker – shares how his latest startup, SOLARCYCLE, plans to take on solar’s recycling imperative.

A recent peer-reviewed study, co-led by SOLARCYCLE’s Chief Technology Officer Pablo Dias, found that if the solar industry deploys circular economy strategies for solar, it can address the emissions associated with recycling, manufacturing, and deployment of solar by a staggering 85%. 

Earlier this year, SOLARCYCLE announced it would invest an estimated $344 million into a new solar glass manufacturing facility in Cedartown, Georgia. The company said it would be the “first-of-its-kind” in the United States to use recycled materials from retired solar panels to make new solar glass.

The facility will be located in Cedartown North Business Park, a Georgia Ready for Accelerated Development (GRAD) certified site in Cedartown. The plant, which will be the first of SOLARCYCLE’s facilities to manufacture glass in addition to recycling solar panels, was scheduled to begin construction this year and is expected to be operational in 2026.

SOLARCYCLE currently operates two solar panel recycling facilities in the United States and says its recycling technology allows it to extract up to 95% of the value from used solar panels. SOLARCYCLE’s new plant in Georgia will make the company one of the first manufacturers of specialized glass for crystalline-silicon (c-Si) photovoltaics in the U.S., with the capacity to make 5 to 6 GW worth of solar glass every year, it said. The glass will be sold directly back to the domestic solar manufacturers.

Solar photovoltaics are often recycled the same way as glass, cars, computer monitors, TVs, or lighting, but the process only recovers about 80% of PV materials. Nonspecialized recycling is one of the challenges to achieving a circular economy for solar photovoltaics.

While the moral incentive to recycle solar panels is clear, little financial incentive exists today. Recycling a solar panel ranges in cost from $20 to $30, while dumping the same panel in a landfill runs $1 to $2 – but SOLARCYCLE believes the cost to landfill to be much higher when factoring in logistics costs.

Tags