Can solar avoid a recycling problem? Suvi Sharma is convinced it can

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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.

After two decades in solar, there weren't many pieces of the industry's value chain that Suvi Sharma hadn't touched.

He co-founded and was (twice) the CEO of Solaria, a leading manufacturer of high-efficiency solar panels, primarily serving the residential sector.

From inside Solaria, Sharma built what would become Nextracker, now a global leader in the manufacturing of tracking equipment and software for utility-scale solar projects. It was acquired by Flextronics by $389 million in 2015. He also recruited Dan Shugar, another solar industry titan, to lead Nextracker into the future.

Clearly, Sharma had accomplished plenty in his career. The solar industry and the planet were better off because of his work.

So, about two years ago, he decided he needed a break, and stepped out of his day-to-day operating role at Solaria.

Sharma said he "looked at the solar industry with a fresh set of eyes," hoping to spot the next set of obstacles he could help overcome in pursuit of terawatt-scale solar.

He saw plenty of challenges rising to the top: The industry needed higher-efficiency panels, cost needed to continue to fall, more financing needed to be made available.

But the one that he said was a glaring missing link was end-of-life; "what to do with all these solar panels," Sharma said on a recent episode of the Factor This! podcast by Renewable Energy World.

Realizing solar's circular economy

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. (Photo courtesy of iStock)

A personal and professional infatuation with the circular economy pushed Sharma to dig deeper.

Having launched a recycling program at Solaria years earlier, he said he was confident in his grasp of the solar recycling process.

But what he discovered shifted his entire perspective.

"I looked under the hood of what solar recycling was and I realized that it was not really recycling," Sharma said. "We weren't really extracting all of the crucial metal materials out of the solar panel and putting them back into the supply chain and using those for new solar panels."

While the moral incentive to recycle solar panels is clear, little financial incentive exists today.

Simply put, recycling a solar panel ranges in cost from $20 to $30, while dumping the same panel in a landfill runs $1 to $2 (SOLARCYCLE believes the cost to landfill to be much higher when factoring in logistics costs).

After years of manufacturing solar panels, Sharma made it his mission to become an expert in reverse logistics.

"I thought, I've been making solar panels for a long time. It's just not that expensive to make a solar panel. So, why should it be expensive to recycle it? It doesn't make sense," Sharma said.

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It was then that Sharma decided to take on solar's recycling imperative, along with former Sierra Club executive Jesse Simons and researcher Dr. Pablo Ribeiro Dias.

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.

"We have to figure out how to lower the cost through scale, engineering and technology," Sharma said.

SOLARCYCLE was formed to serve the residential, commercial, and utility-scale markets.

In June, the company raised $6.6 million in growth funding from SolarCity founders Peter and Lyndon Rive, former CEO of Sunpower Corporation Systems Tom Dinwoodie, Urban Innovation Fund, and Closed Loop Partners.

Glass represents about 75% of a solar panel's weight and recycling practices are already well known. Panels may also contain some critical minerals, including aluminum, tin, tellurium, and antimony.

Through a mixture of mechanical processes, SOLARCYCLE's goal is to recycle 95% of a solar panel. That will require significant capital to support research and development in the coming years, Sharma said.

SOLARCYCLE is working to bring its first facility online in the southwestern U.S., which will have the ability to extract all critical materials of the solar panel for recycled materials. The process won't use any hazardous chemicals, they said.

Next year, Sharma said SOLARCYCLE would have the capacity to recycle 1 million panels. In the coming years, he sees gigafactories supporting SOLARCYCLE's vertically-integrated recycling approach— the pickup, processing, and reselling of critical materials for use in recycled panels.

Sharma's vision for a centralized, domestic manufacturing base in the U.S. aims to reduce significant costs associated with logistics and transportation for recycling.

Sunrun's support

Images from the installation of a Sunrun solar panel system on the roof of the home of HGTV's Property Brothers.

SOLARCYCLE's path to scale relies heavily on partnerships in the early days.

In May, SOLARCYCLE announced its launch of operations through a partnership with Sunrun. SOLARCYCLE will use second-life panels from Sunrun to innovate and develop new ways to test, reuse and upcycle retired panels in Sunrun's project portfolio.

Residential solar only represents about a third of the U.S. market, and providing recycling services to individual rooftop solar customers will never realize economies of scale.

But Sunrun's footprint as the largest rooftop solar in the U.S. presents the volumes that SOLARCYCLE needs to drive down costs. By working with distributors with existing warehouses, SOLARCYCLE can efficiently collect rooftop solar panels that are ready for recycle.

"That's the novel way to leverage the infrastructure that's already out there," Sharma said.

Career culmination

Sharma believes all his accomplishments in the solar industry over the past two decades have led him to this moment— leading SOLARCYCLE.

While always guided by an entrepreneurial spirit, SOLARCYCLE will be Sharma's last stop.

"This is what I was meant to do," he said.