How are old solar panels removed?
This isn't a parlor trick—it's a question that needs to be answered, and it's becoming increasingly important now that solar is the largest building category for new electricity generation in the US.
Currently, industrial solar cell recycling facilities are unable to process the volume of panels that need to be disposed of. Today, almost all panels that end up in the US end up in a landfill, which is the clean energy industry's dirty little secret. But there is a technical possibility to dismantle the old panels and make new ones from the material. If you don't believe, see for yourself in this video.
You'll see a plant in Odessa, Texas, built by the startup Solarcycle to test the solar panel recycling process. The company started last year with $6.6 million in funding and aims to recycle 95 percent of the valuable materials in solar modules.
“There is no real process to process solar energy on an industrial scale. We came to the conclusion that we need to develop it,” co-founder and CEO Suvi Sharma told Canary Media last year. “Our investors are inspired by the fact that we have a vision of a centralized gigafactory to process millions of panels. No one else works on this scale."
The solar cycle has not yet reached gigafactory scale; Sharma said last year that he was increasing capacity to process 300,000 panels annually by the end of 2022.
But it managed to raise another $30 million in a Series A investment it announced last Wednesday. Fifth Wall, an investment firm specializing in climate protection in anthropogenic environments, led the round, including infrastructure financing.
With the funding, Solarcycle hopes to increase its recycling capacity to one million solar panels by the end of this year. By 2024, it will be a "vertically integrated state-of-the-art recycling plant" and increase capacity to "millions of panels".
Solarcycle works with some of the largest solar panel owners, including Sunrun, the nation's largest solar rooftop installer. Another partner, Silicon Ranch, develops and owns solar projects across the country and has implemented a regenerative approach that provides tillage and end-of-life panel recycling.
Silicon Ranch recently sent some old and broken panels to Solarcycle and filmed what happened next for the video embedded above. You won't get any trade secrets, but you can watch the panels break down and return to their components like silicon, aluminum, glass, silver and copper. Solarcycle then sells the material to manufacturers.
If solar recyclers seize the opportunity, they can help achieve several things at once: limit the environmental burden of landfill waste generated by "clean" energy; reduce the carbon emissions required to manufacture new solar panels; to expand stocks of materials for the production of domestic diesel; and creating new jobs and factory sites to service the large solar giant.
