What REALLY happens to used Solar Panels?

What REALLY happens to used Solar Panels? Get an exclusive Surfshark Holiday deal! Enter promo code UNDECIDED to get up to 6 additional months for free at https://surfshark.deals/undecided This is going to take a little bit of explanation, but … probably to the surprise of no one … I’m fascinated by solar panel technology. Being able to generate electricity for yourself onsite, on your roof, is an insanely compelling technology. However, it has its downsides. There’s a growing tsunami of solar panels hitting their end of life coming in the next decade. And one of the most common things I see in my solar panel video comments is that “solar panels can’t be recycled.” That’s why I flew down to Odessa, Texas to visit SolarCycle to see if that’s really the case. What did I find out?

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“So the panel comes at the bottom and the  glass comes out at the top?” -Matt Ferrell “Yeah, the plastics and metals  come at the bottom there,   and then the glass comes at  the top here.” -Suvi Sharma “That is insanely cool.” -Matt Ferrell

“I know, having been, having worked in  solar manufacturing for so long, it’s,   yeah, we still just love watching this  thing, because it’s just…” -Suvi Sharma “It is like a magic trick. That is  like a magic trick.” -Matt Ferrell Okay, let me backup for a second.

This is going to take a little bit  of explanation, but … probably to   the surprise of no one … I’m fascinated by  solar panel technology. Being able to generate   electricity for yourself onsite, on your roof,  is an insanely compelling technology. However,  

It has its downsides. There’s a growing  tsunami of solar panels hitting their end   of life coming in the next decade. And one of  the most common things I see in my solar panel   video comments is that “solar panels can’t be  recycled.” That’s why I flew down to Odessa,  

Texas to visit SolarCycle to see if that’s  really the case. What did I find out? I’m Matt Ferrell … welcome to Undecided.  This video is brought to you by  Surfshark, but more on that later. I flew myself down to Texas to visit  SolarCycle on my own dime to see first  

Hand what recycling solar panels looks  like. To me the ironic part of where   they’re located is that it’s kind of  oil country in Texas. There were oil   rigs everywhere … and in the center of  all of that is a cutting edge renewable  

Energy company. What’s really funny is that  there’s even an old oil rig on their property. “There’s our oil rig. You don’t have a solar   recycling facility if you don’t  have an oil rig.” -Suvi Sharma I was taken on a tour of their facility by Suvi  Sharma, Solar Cycle’s CEO and founder, and Rob  

Vinje, their Chief Operating Officer. But to  pause for just a second, why is it so difficult to   recycle a solar panel? Why haven’t we been doing  this all along? While we’ve mastered how to make   long lasting solar panels cheaply and efficiently,  it’s that exact process that makes recycling them  

Difficult. A solar panel is made up of layers  of tempered glass and a vinyl acetate film (EVA)   that’s sandwiching the solar cells to protect  them. Then, that’s surrounded with an aluminum   frame. It doesn’t sound complicated, but because  of how these layers are essentially glued  

Together, it’s really hard to undo that. That’s  exactly what SolarCycle is focused on solving. Their process starts off by loading up a machine  with panels to be broken down one by one. This   first machine breaks off the aluminum frame in  one swift motion. The aluminum frame pieces are  

Collected and prepared for recycling, while  you’re left with the naked glass panel. The next step of the process is the tricky step  of delaminating the solar cells from the glass,   and doing it in a way that doesn’t  mix up the materials. This is one   of the hardest parts of recycling solar panels.

“This is glass, basically, but it was glued before  to plastics and metals, so we spent a lot of time   and effort on developing equipment to get this  glass out in a pure form. Because when you get  

It out in a pure form like this, you can reuse it  and make new glass with it. If you don’t do that,   you can’t make new glass with it. It’ll kill your  furnace or things like that because of the metal  

Impurities that are in there. So getting them out  in a pure form is the hardest part.” -Suvi Sharma The workers prep the glass before sending it  into the next machine, which is essentially   heating the panel up to soften the materials  and delaminate the glass from the solar cells.

“So the panel comes out at the bottom and the  glass comes out at the top?” -Matt Ferrell “Yeah, the plastics and metals  come at the bottom there,   and then the glass comes at  the top here.” -Suvi Sharma “That is insanely cool.” -Matt Ferrell

“I know, having been, having worked in  solar manufacturing for so long, it’s,   yeah, we still just love watching this  thing, because it’s just…” -Suvi Sharma “It is like a magic trick. That is  like a magic trick.” -Matt Ferrell What you’re left with is glass that  can be processed for recycling and  

The solar cell itself, which is sent  off into the next set of machines.   Because many of the machines and exaction  processes they’ve developed are unique,   I can’t show the exact details. However,  the basics of what happens to the solar   cells is that they’re ground up into  a fine powder of metals and silicon.

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“So here, after you get that glass, the frame,  and the JBOX off. It’s just the back sheet,   and actually the cell material here. There’s lots  of valuable material here. And the plastic is on   the backside. So this goes through the additional  processing on the back end of the line. And what  

Comes out of here, bags of it over here. We  take that and it goes into individual people,   individual supply chains that really value  this. So it can all be reused. And here’s   a great example of solar metal. Copper,  aluminum, tin, and silicon.” -Rob Vinje “And Silver, of course.” -Suvi Sharma

“Silver is the big one in here. So,   this goes right back into use,  into the supply chain.” -Rob Vinje “That is so cool.” -Matt Ferrell None of these materials are difficult  to recycle on their own, but normally,   de-sandwiching a solar panel to get at the  goods is time consuming and labor-intensive,  

Which drives up the cost. A 2021 National  Renewable Energy Lab (NREL) study puts the   cost of trashing a solar panel at under $5,  but recycling one will run you between $15   and $45. So, in most cases, it’s just not  economically feasible to recycle solar panels.

That’s a big problem. There’s a lot of  solar panels out there, and that number is set to   grow. Just to be clear, this isn’t the problem  part, this is actually a good thing. `About   8 million metric tons of decommissioned solar  panels could accumulate globally by 2030. By 2050,  

That number could reach 80 million. Chucking  that much junk into the garbage isn’t very green. And calling decommissioned solar panels ‘junk’ is  a bit of a misnomer. As you saw just a moment ago,   they’re filled with lots of valuable materials  like copper, silver, and more. MIT estimates  

That just the materials in the solar panels  coming offline each year could be worth an   estimated $2 billion by 2050. But to get at  those materials, and reduce the amount of   solar panels going into landfills, we have to  find a better or cheaper way of deconstructing  

A solar sandwich. That’s why SolarCycle has been  investing a lot of time, money, and effort into   developing new machines and technologies to break  solar panels back down into their component parts. “…at a high level, taking the materials  apart and keeping them pure. That’s the  

Hardest job that we have, really, at  the end. And doing it in high volume,   you know, that’s the hardest job  that we have, you know.” -Suvi Sharma “We’ve developed machines to remove the  aluminum frames. We want to remove them  

So there’s not a lot of plastic residue and  things like that in there. So optimizing the   equipment and the processes. What  we’ve done is we’ve developed all   custom equipment to do what we do, because  it just didn’t exist, you know.” -Suvi Sharma

“So this tool is an interesting example  of where we took people that had developed   machines to put aluminum frames  on solar panels. We said, okay,   now let’s figure out how to take them  apart, reverse engineer that. And so  

That’s what we did here in this tool. It’s  very neat. And it’s fast.” -Suvi Sharma Speaking of aluminum, though it’s  not as prized as silver or copper,   recycling it still represents a massive energy  savings. Recycling aluminum uses 95 percent less  

Energy than making virgin aluminum. New aluminum  bears the costs of mining the raw material,   bauxite, and then transporting and refining  it. SolarCycle estimates that every solar   panel recycled using their method saves us about  97 pounds of CO2 emissions; that figure rises to  

More than 1.5 tons of CO2 if a panel goes on to  be reused. It’s a great circular economy showcase. “We are finding that there is an interest  in building these circular economy type   companies. At SolarCycle, we are focused not just  on recycling, but also manufacturing new materials  

From some of those recycled materials and becoming  a recycled material supplier into the industry.   So these are new business models effectively and  we’re participating in a very large growth curve,   which a lot of investors are seeing  and investing more in.” – Suvi Sharma

And of course, the less we can mine the  better, for a lot of reasons. Mining is   very rarely environmentally friendly,  especially when we’re talking about   rare earth or valuable metals that end up  in a lot of consumer electronics. Plus,   90% of solar panels are currently manufactured  in China, which represents a potential supply  

Chain bottleneck. Again, we want more solar  panels, and more affordable solar panels,   so finding any way of reducing our reliance  on those mines is a big win. And according   to Arizona State University’s Meng Tao, we’re  also going to face a silver shortage before  

We build all the solar panels we need, so  recovering those precious metals is critical. “Today to our knowledge, we’re the  first company to extract and get   the silver and the copper. Out of inside the  laminate or what’s already glued inside and  

Solar panels use about 15% of the world’s  silver supply and growing.” – Suvi Sharma “If you look at the forecast, by 2040,  the solar industry would use more than   a hundred percent of the annual  world silver supply.” – Suvi Sharma

“So it’s very important to get that silver  because it’s not easy to go mine more of that   from the ground. So yes, we do get the silver, the  silicon and the copper out of the panel and then  

Back into supply chains that can make new silver  products and materials out of it.” – Suvi Sharma So, yeah, recycling upwards of  90% of the panel or straight   refurbishing one like SolarCycle does?  That’s a REALLY big win, that’s value. And SolarCycle isn’t alone. Arizona State  University has received a $485,000 grant  

From the DOE Advanced Manufacturing Office. The  goal is to develop a new recycling process to   recover high value materials like silver and  silicon. Their process involves using a hot   blade to separate the silicon cells from the  sheets of polymers and glass surrounding them.  

Then they’ll use a chemical cocktail to ‘wash out’  and collect 100% of the precious metals. Though   the cocktail isn’t environmentally friendly, it  can be “regenerated” and used again and again. And the field gets even bigger when you look  overseas. This past Summer, Australia’s Macquarie  

University has come up with yet another innovative  way to recycle solar panels – just microwave   them. That’s an oversimplification, though their  research really did begin with a simple microwave   like the one that’s probably in your kitchen right  now. Cooking up parts of the solar panel with a  

Microwave ‘loosens’ them up, and should make it  easier to disassemble panels and recycle their   parts individually. Researchers from France’s  CEA-Liten are using a diamond wire to cut through   the photovoltaic cells, separating the module’s  glass front face from the polymer-based backsheet,   and thus making everything easy to  disassemble and recycle properly.

My point is, solar panel recycling is an  important and growing field, and it’s about   to pop off. There’s just so many cool techniques  being tried out. Innovation is running wild,   and companies like SolarCycle are getting traction  and making headway. Their recycling plant in Texas  

Is already on track to recycle 500,000 to 1  million solar panels by the end of the year. That said, at the time of making this video,  SolarCycle can salvage a panel for about $15-18,   which is on the very low end of the recycling  price range I mentioned earlier. But  

I saw some new machines they’re working on  that should drive that cost down further.   There’s really good reason to believe that as  innovation spreads and economies of scale begin   to kick in, that the price of recycling a solar  panel will continue to drop. Here’s Suvi Again

“You know, if you look back 30 years ago, solar  panels used to produce about 50 watts. And they’d   cost, you know, easily north of $10 a watt  to manufacture, right? Today, you can make   them 600 watts and they cost 30 cents a watt.  So how did that happen? That happened through  

Technology innovation. Bringing the cost down,  developing equipment, developing the materials.   And in continuous R& D and innovation, that’s  what we have to do on the recycling side now. So,   absolutely it can be recycled, but we just  have to develop the tools and technologies  

To do it. And that’s what, you know, we’re  working on at SolarCycle.” – Suvi Sharma I want to thank Suvi, Rob, and the rest of  SolarCycle for inviting me in to check out   what they’re doing. I’m going to be keeping  close tabs on how this industry progresses.

But what do you think? Do you think companies  like SolarCycle will become the norm in the   future? Jump into the comments and let me know.  And be sure to check out my follow up podcast   Still TBD where we’ll be discussing some of  your feedback. Thanks to all of my patrons,  

Who get ad free versions of every video.  Your support really helps us to keep   delivering you these videos every week.  If you’d like to support the channel and   get in on early videos, check out the link in  the description. I’ll see you in the next one.