How recyclability can lower the costs of US solar panels

“The buyers of the power, like the Microsofts, the Googles, the hyperscalers, they have commitments not only to climate and clean energy, but also to circularity, so they’re pushing the developers to do that,” he continues.

Recycling will be a regional market

Even though the US and Europe are ahead of the curve when talking about recycling, as Simons says that some of these incentives don’t exist in China, he expects China will sooner or later catch up with the rest of the world. He adds that he’s recently been in China and met with some of the companies that are making tools for recycling and says that: “I have no doubt that China will catch up and ultimately be recycling at scale.”

“I believe that recycling will ultimately be regional, that there will be a couple of big companies in the Americas that do it really well. There will probably be a couple of big companies in the EU that do it very well, and then there will be a couple or multiple Chinese companies handling a lot of Asia,” adds Simons.

The reason for this thinking is that the economics of building recycling hubs near where the solar projects and manufacturing facilities are located will make recycling locally much more affordable than shipping components and products overseas.

“Having said that, I wouldn’t be surprised if the technology that gets built [determines] the infrastructure for solar panel recycling,” says Simons.

“If China owns a piece of it, the EU owns a piece of it, [or] US, everybody’s learned that you don’t want to have technology built in just one country,” says Simons, adding that he doesn’t rule out that it is possible to ship modules from California to China, but it would still be more expensive than sending it to a recycling facility in Texas.

He adds that one of the biggest challenges that Solarcycle faces when recycling solar panels is the “reverse logistics cost of moving something that is no longer valuable from, say, California to San Antonio, where we have our closest factory.”

“People are increasingly moving closer and closer to where the panels are coming off. I don’t think we’re going to live in a world where the 50 million panels that are going to be coming offline every year in the US are going to be getting sent to China.”

Onshoring smelters to recycle rare metals

Another key aspect of building a robust local solar panel recycling sector is working with local companies or facilities that are capable of recycling some of the components in the modules, such as silver, aluminium or copper.

“I think a lot of people don’t fully understand or think through that once you’ve gotten those metals out, you still have to find some way to turn them back into something usable. And for that, you basically have to send it to a smelter,” explains Simons.

He notes that while the US has aluminium smelters that can be used to recycle the frames, silver is currently a bit trickier, with only one company, Glencore, able to recycle it in North America.

Simons adds that a US$7.4 billion investment from South Korean metal smelter Korea Zinc to build a smelting facility in Tennessee, US is a further step towards being able to recycle everything in the US.

“That’s where, ultimately, I think we can really domesticate the full life cycle of recycling by making sure the smelting capacity is here too. Because then not only you’re getting the silver out of the panel, but you’re turning it back into a silver bar here in the US. You can then turn that into silver paste and use that silver paste to sell back to the manufacturers who are building 60GW of manufacturing here in the US.”

Simons adds that Solarcycle partnered with Kore Zinc to co-manage some of the facilities they have across the country, including in Mesa, Arizona, San Antonio, Odessa, Chicago and Atlanta. This allows the company to be within 500 miles of 80% of all solar sites in the US.

“It’s really crucial to make sure that you have recycling locations as close to where customers’ panels are coming off in the line as possible.”

When looking at the costs of recycling solar panels, Simons says that ‘reverse logistics’ accounts for one-third of the overall cost. Thus, being as close as possible to the solar panels that are being decommissioned helps drastically reduce costs and be competitive with landfill.

Getting the cost of recycling below the cost of landfilling has been one of the main goals of Solarcycle, even back in 2023 when Simons spoke with PV Tech Premium about scaling solar panel recyclability.

Three years later, Simons says that “there are now plenty of examples where recycling is cheaper than landfill”, and he expects that in the next two or three years, Solarcycle will be able to offer all of its customers recycling costs lower than landfill.

US recycled glass to reduce module price

Onshoring smelters that can recycle aluminium or silver at a large-scale will also help balance out the economics of doing so and competing with module prices from Asia, explains Simons.

“If you’re able to make your aluminium frames here in the US with recycled aluminium from a recycled solar panel, you can do that and compete with Chinese frames by using the recycled content. The glass is probably the best example, and that’s why we started there,” adds Simons.

As Simons mentions, Solarcycle is currently building a solar glass recycling facility in Georgia that will produce 5-6GW of solar glass annually.

“When we use recycled cullet in the making of new glass, we can offset the cost of all that expensive raw material, the soda ash, the lines [and] the silicon, all the stuff that goes into the panel,” says Simons.

And the company already conducted a test that highlighted the use of recycled cullet to make new glass, showing it did not lose any transmissivity or exhibit any quality issues whatsoever, explains Simons. Realised in partnership with Arizona State University, the company used up to 50% recycled glass from other decommissioned panels that matched the performance of entirely new products.

“Instead of our glass in the US being at maybe a 20% premium to imported glass from China. All of a sudden, we’re competing head-to-head. Once you include the shipping costs and small tariffs.

“The reason is that we’re using domestic recycled content and can be close to our suppliers, and they can avoid all their warehousing costs and everything else, but really critically, because we’re using recycled content, all of a sudden we can compete directly with Asia.”

For Simons, the domestic recyclability of aluminium, silver, copper and glass will be a key aspect for the US solar industry to be able to compete with Asia when it comes to the final price per watt of a new solar PV panel.

“I don’t think we’re going to be the only ones who figure out that you can really reduce your cost through recycling, but if we can get to the same scale as China, particularly these days when so much of the price of a panel used to be that it was because labour was much cheaper in Asia, and the environmental rules were much lower in Asia, but today the reason they’re beating us is automation.”

“We can figure out automation, and once you have the same automated assembly tools, and we have the scale, I don’t see any reason why we can’t compete head-to-head, and part of that will be because we’ve domesticated the supply chain for all these critical minerals and materials through recycling,” explains Simons.

Microsoft and other tech companies’ push for PV recycling

Furthermore, interest in solar panel recycling isn’t exclusive to solar manufacturers and developers, but offtakers are also increasingly keen to implement recycling solutions for projects at which they sign power purchase agreements (PPAs).

Simons says that despite tech giants, such as Microsoft or Google, not owning the project sites themselves, the interest of these companies in recycling has been helping drive recycling.

“Microsoft is building 25GW of solar a year, massive amounts. And they looked at this, and they realised that there’s as much recyclable material in the solar projects they’re building as there is in all their data centres, all their Surfaces, all their Xboxes, all their other stuff combined.”

Simons explains that this goes beyond recycling modules, but the interest of companies such as Microsoft is also in reducing greenhouse gas emissions that are embedded in solar panels. Something that Solarcycle aims to achieve with its solar glass factory in Georgia is to reduce the carbon footprint of the solar glass used from that facility in new solar panels.

“It helps us with our circularity goals. Microsoft encourages the asset owners to think about buying modules with the glass, so now Qcells calls us, now Illuminate calls us, now T1 calls us, and they say: ‘Hey, we understand that you’re making domestic solar glass with low carbon content. The people who are buying the power, the actual energy users, are saying this is important to them.’”

And on top of that, having recycling agreements in place for a solar PV project also allows the project’s developer to show local communities that once the project comes to the end of its life, there is a plan to recycle the solar panels.

“A lot of our customers come to us because it’s actually really important to have a recycling agreement in place when you go talk to the community and say, look, we thought about that, we have a plan end-to-end. And so while the stuff that’s happening with Microsoft and Google is helping drive recycling forward, the local community pressure is also a big driver for why recycling is happening,” concludes Simons.