SolarCycle’s recycling facility in Texas with its secondhand solar power plant. Credit: SolarCycle
Solar panel recycling outfit SolarCycle announced it has installed a 500-kW system at its recycling facility in Odessa, Texas, that will provide around 50% of the electricity used at the factory. The nearly 1,000 panels used on the project come from decommissioned solar projects — some from utility-scale projects in Texas installed by Ørsted and others from residential projects from Sunrun.
It is a unique mix of utility-scale and residential solar panels being reused while they still are able to generate solar power.
“As retired solar panels from companies like Ørsted and Sunrun come offline, [SolarCycle] assesses the power and durability of the panels and evaluates whether they can be used again,” SolarCycle explained in a press email. “In five or ten years, once the solar array’s power production shrinks, the company will transfer the panels to their recycling lines and replace the panels with future feedstock.”
SolarCycle said it plans to expand this “secondhand power plant” to generate more of the company’s energy demands, including for its recycling facilities in Mesa, Arizona, and Cedartown, Georgia.
There’s another consideration here, the video is saying used panels tested and used for another 5 years at the recycling facility then taking those panels out and recycling them using recovered used panels from another site. For some time now Boron has been sputtered onto solar PV cells to stabilize them from micro cracking and has shown up as changing the degradation characteristics of solar PV panels from 3% degradation the first year and 1% degradation each year after. Now with sputtered on adders solar PV crystalline cells have typical 2% degradation the first year of use and 0.5% to 0.25% degradation each year there after. Today a modern utility scale solar PV panel of 500 watts could last 30 years and end up 419 watts after 30 years of daily use. New technologies as part of the quality control systems used to detect faults in crystal solar cell wafers allows rejection of wafers with too many defects and some burgeoning laser techniques that have had some success at taking wafers and “annealing” the wafer to correct weak spots where micro cracks can start. More modern solar PV panel manufacturing techniques like “shingling” cells, using IBC manufacturing techniques to help keep solar PV cells cooler overall. This may prove over the long term TOPCon cells and IBC contacts may create the 50 year solar PV panel in use.