I started my career in the solar industry when the world's largest solar power systems were single digit megawatts and large commercial solar was measured in kilowatts. Twenty years later as a veteran of Sunpower and Nextracker, and now the Senior Director of Customer Operations at SOLARCYCLE, I have witnessed the industry grow immensely. With hundreds of megawatts on each solar farm, I could have only imagined two decades ago that the industry’s footprint would be so strong with a burgeoning circular economy.
At SOLARCYCLE, we believe it is possible to eliminate landfilling solar panels and alternatively circulate their materials back into the domestic economy. The opportunities and benefits of this approach are endless, and get us closer to a fully closed loop, ultra-low carbon solar industry.
Now, it is time to take it to the next step. We must reimagine how we power recycling and manufacturing facilities with the goal of fully decarbonizing manufacturing and recycling systems. That is why we are thrilled to share that we have built the first-of-its-kind solar power plant from reused solar panels. The plant is actively providing energy to our recycling facility in Odessa, Texas. The panels are reused from various residential and utility-scale systems nationwide.
This 500KW system made from over 1,000 reused panels will provide roughly 50% of the electricity we use to power our advanced recycling factory in Odessa, Texas. We used a mix of residential and commercial modules, from the wide variety of customers we have across the country. 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.
As we look to the future of our industry, this circular strategy to help decarbonize solar is backed by research. A peer-reviewed study, co-authored by one of SOLARCYCLE’s founders, Dr. Pablo Dias, found that if the solar industry deploys circular economy strategies for solar, it can address the emissions associated with manufacturing and deployment of solar by a whopping 85%.
SOLARCYCLE is now using the roadmap outlined in the study to help demonstrate how to further decarbonize the industry. I am proud to work at SOLARCYCLE and with our partners nationwide. It is an incredible feeling to take the panels I installed at the beginning of my career and redirect them from the landfill, back into the domestic supply chain.
For me, it’s a dream come true.
