SOLARCYCLE’s New Georgia Facility Will Recycle 5GW Of Solar Panels Per Year – CleanTechnica

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SOLARCYCLE’s recently announced 5GW solar panel recycling facility in Georgia will be able to recover “up to 90%” of the materials, some of which will end up as feedstock for the company’s nearby solar glass factory. The new recycling plant will initially have the capacity to recycle 2 million solar panels annually, and to then scale up to 10 million panels per year.

One of the oft-repeated anti-renewable energy talking points complaints is questioning where all of the raw materials for the various components are going to come from if solar electricity production is scaled up to a significantly higher level. And that is commonly followed by a snarky comment predicting mountains of trashed end-of-life solar panels (or wind turbine blades) every year, which is a rather strange idea, considering the value of the materials in those solar panels and the fact that recovering and recycling most of those materials is becoming increasingly effective and efficient.

SOLARCYCLE’s new solar recycling facility, a 255,000 square foot “move-in-ready” location expected to be operational by mid-2025, is adjacent to a recently announced solar glass factory in Cedartown, Georgia. It will employ the company’s proprietary recycling process “which will have the capacity to recover up to 99%” of the materials in photovoltaic panels, such as the glass, which will be turned into new solar glass at the nearby factory.

“This state-of-the-art closed loop process is significantly more flexible and scalable than previous recycling solutions while achieving much higher value and mass recovery rates. Current recyclers are using the same technology platform for both monofacial and bifacial panels, which is extremely inefficient and leads to much lower quality recovered materials. Recovered materials from this recycling facility will be manufactured into new solar glass at the adjacent factory and sold directly back to American solar manufacturers to fill a critical gap in the country’s solar supply chain. The company has long-term partnerships with more than 70 of the nation’s largest energy companies to recycle and recover value from retired solar panels.”

The new SOLARCYCLE glass factory, which will have the capacity to manufacture up to 6GW of glass annually, is expected to be “the first in the U.S. to produce specialized glass for crystalline-silicon (c-Si) photovoltaics,” and will create up to 600 new full-time jobs in the area.

“SOLARCYCLE’s first-of-its-kind facility is a transformational investment for the Polk County community and will help drive its economy for years to come. In Georgia, our strong energy mix is one of the key reasons our state has attracted generational investments in recent years. We will keep working to secure our power supply through exciting projects like this one.” — Governor Brian Kemp

The facility was partially enabled due to the company becoming a recipient of $64 million in Qualifying Advanced Energy Project Credits (48C), which is funded under the Inflation Reduction Act.

“SOLARCYCLE and our industry partners are working day and night to ensure that the United States has a resilient, circular solar supply chain. The IRA’s tax credits will allow our company to rapidly respond to the supply chain needs of domestic solar manufacturers who urgently need a trusted and sustainable domestic recycler that is using old solar materials to make new, ultra-low carbon glass in America. We thank and applaud the Biden-Harris administration and the Department of Energy for their investment in clean energy manufacturing.” — Suvi Sharma, SOLARCYCLE CEO and Co-Founder

In another first for SOLARCYCLE, the company built what it calls a first-of-its-kind 500kW solar plant by using more than 1000 used/reused solar panels “from various residential and utility-scale systems nationwide,” and it now provides approximately half of the electricity that is used to power its recycling facility in Odessa, TX.

“A unique aspect of designing and building a system from reused panels is that the panels have various power and form factors. We designed the system with this mixed feedstock of panels in mind, which combines the panel variety that’s currently in the market and the opportunity to extract the remaining potential productivity in a panel before it reaches full end-of-life.

“In five or ten years, once their power production shrinks, we will transfer the panels right into our nearby recycling lines and replace the panels with future feedstock, using the existing balance of system and continue to generate power for our facility. As we scale the Odessa facility’s capacity to one million panels a year, SOLARCYCLE’s plan is to expand this secondhand power plant to continue to generate more of our energy demands. This is an industrial strategy that is good for local communities, business, and the climate.” — Todd Phillips, Sr. Director Customer Operations, SOLARCYCLE