A solar panel recycling company that recovers materials to feed back into the supply chain is taking the concept of a circular economy one step further.
SolarCycle has just set up its own 500-kilowatt photovoltaic array using secondhand panels to power its plant in Odessa, Texas, as Electrek reported. That should generate about half of the plant's electricity needs.
"We're making power to power a recycling facility [where] we're going to make new products to make new solar panels out of and really close the loop [to] make that circular economy happen for solar," as Todd Phillips, senior director of customer operations shared in a promotional video.
The 1,000-panel array is made up of both residential and commercial units that have been decommissioned by Danish renewable energy company Ørsted, along with home solar and storage provider Sunrun, as the report detailed.
When those secondhand panels truly reach end-of-life in five or 10 years, they'll be sent in for recycling and be replaced by additional units.
Ørsted committed to reusing or recycling all of its solar panels back in 2023, a step that will help to reduce the environmental impacts of mining and keep products out of landfills, which are notorious for releasing planet-warming methane.
"We want to create a world that runs entirely on green energy, and we want to do it in a sustainable way. Addressing the most critical waste problem of the solar industry, while mitigating social and environmental impacts in the supply chain, is essential to doing so," Ingrid Reumert, senior vice president and head of global stakeholder relations at Ørsted previously shared in a statement.
SolarCycle claims its recycling process can recover 95% of a panel's value, which is far greater than the industry standard of 50%. To do this, it has partnered with the Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory to optimize the recovery process while also making sure everything is safe for workers, communities, and the environment.
The use of solar panels is just one of many ways we can all work toward a cleaner environment. They can reduce our reliance on dirty fuels, which pollute the atmosphere and warm the planet, and along with battery storage, can supply us with vast amounts of sustainable energy.
As one commenter pointed out, many decommissioned units still have some life in them, which explains SolarCycle's thinking behind this new endeavor.
"They may be considered end-of-life after twenty years, but that only means they're out of warranty and may be producing less than they used to, say 80%. The only reason to pull them out of service is to put up newer higher-capacity panels to replace them," wrote the commenter.
The same can be said for the wind turbines, as another's reply explained:
"Wind farms have been doing that for quite some time, a practice called repowering, replacing the older smaller less efficient turbines with modern monsters and selling the old ones to businesses or farmers who have the space to put them up."
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