SOLARCYCLE to build ‘first-of-its-kind’ solar recycling facility in Georgia

(Credit: SOLARCYCLE)

SOLARCYCLE, a solar recycling company, will invest an estimated $344 million into a new solar glass manufacturing facility in Cedartown, Georgia. The company says will it 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, is scheduled to begin construction in 2024 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.

“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,” said Governor Brian Kemp. “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.”

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.

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.

While it’s true that around 70% of solar projects were built in the past five years, and solar panels have a useful life of 30 years or more, demand for solar cycling is expected to increase significantly in the coming decades.

The International Renewable Energy Agency estimates that global solar PV waste will reach 78 million tonnes in 2050. The raw materials from that waste could be worth $15 billion, the agency said. Models from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, meanwhile, found that, should the U.S. install 500 GW of solar PV by 2050, 9.1 million metric tons of waste will be created. Based on the same models, 80% of panels from 2020 to 2050 would be landfilled, 1% reused, and 10% recycled.