Power producer Greenbacker Energy Company today announced an exclusive, long-term partnership with solar panel recycler SOLARCYCLE to recycle its decommissioned solar panels.
The new partnership provides Greenbacker’s fleet – which currently includes over 975 megawatts (MW) of operating solar projects – with a committed partner to recycle, and it provides SOLARCYCLE with a contracted volume of end-of-life panels that will help scale its recycling operations and thus reduce costs, as well as build out a domestic solar supply chain.
SOLARCYCLE asserts that its technology allows for the extraction of 95% of the value from recycled panels, including silver, silicon, copper, aluminum, and glass from recycled panels, a significant increase over the industry standard, which is currently below 50%.
Shannon Scarbrough, Greenbacker’s sustainability program manager, said, “Through this collaboration, we’re supporting green jobs, supply chain resilience, and a circular clean energy economy, while continuing to serve one of our core values: responsible environmental stewardship.”
SOLARCYCLE will be employing tailored recycling solutions at a number of Greenbacker assets, including two of its largest solar projects in New York State, the utility-scale Albany 1 and Albany 2 projects (both 25 MWdc). Greenbacker and its affiliates have 500 solar assets across 33 states, Canada, Puerto Rico, and Washington, DC.
In May, Solarcycle received $1.5 million from the US Department of Energy to work with the National Renewable Energy Lab to research how to extract higher-quality and higher-purity metals and materials from recycled solar panels for reuse in domestic solar manufacturing.
Current estimates from SOLARCYCLE’s Texas facility have shown that 1 old watt of recycled solar can be transformed into 1.4 new watts, which SOLARCYCLE says means that the US will be able to endlessly recycle old panels into new panels.
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