Solarcycle CTO Pablo Dias and COO Rob Vinje show a solar panel laminate after it has been cleanly separated from the glass to investors and partners. The laminate is where many of the value is contained in a panel, like silver, silicon, and copper.
Solarcycle
The growing importance of wind and solar energy to the U.S. power grid, and the rise of electrical vehicles, are all key to the nation’s growing need to cut back dependence on fossil fuels, lower carbon emissions and mitigate climate change.
But at the identical time, these burgeoning renewable energy industries will soon generate tons of waste as thousands and thousands of photovoltaic (PV) solar panels, wind turbines and lithium-ion EV batteries reach the top of their respective lifecycles.
Because the saying goes, though, one man’s trash is one other man’s treasure. Anticipating the pileup of exhausted clean-energy components — and wanting to proactively avoid past sins committed by not responsibly cleansing up after decommissioned coal mines, oil wells and power plants — plenty of progressive startups are striving to create a sustainable, and lucrative, circular economy to get well, recycle and reuse the core components of climate tech innovation.
Wind and solar energy combined to generate 13.6% of utility-scale electricity last 12 months, in keeping with the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), and people numbers will undoubtedly rise as renewable energy continues to scale up. Some leading utilities across the nation are far ahead of that pace already.
Meanwhile, sales of all-electric vehicles rose to five.8% of the whole 13.8 million vehicles Americans purchased in 2022, up from 3.2% in 2021. And with the Environmental Protection Agency’s newly proposed tailpipe emissions limits and power plant rules, EV sales could capture a 67% market share by 2032 and more utilities be forced to speed up their power generation transition.
Solarcycle is a primary example of the businesses seeking to solve this climate tech waste problem of the longer term. Launched last 12 months in Oakland, California, it has since constructed a recycling facility in Odessa, Texas, where it extracts 95% of the materials from end-of-life solar panels and reintroduces them into the provision chain. It sells recovered silver and copper on commodity markets and glass, silicon and aluminum to panel manufacturers and solar farm operators.
“Solar is becoming the dominant type of power generation,” Solarcycle CEO Suvi Sharma said, citing an EIA report stating that 54% of recent utility-scale electric-generating capability within the U.S. this 12 months will come from solar. “But with that comes a recent set of challenges and opportunities. We have now done an outstanding job making solar efficient and cost-effective, but really haven’t done anything yet on making it circular and coping with the end-of-life [panels].”
Keeping solar panels out of landfills
The typical lifespan of a solar panel is about 25 to 30 years, and there are greater than 500 million already installed across the country, Sharma said, starting from a dozen on a residential home’s rooftop to 1000’s in a business solar farm. With solar capability now rising a mean of 21% annually, tens of thousands and thousands more panels can be going up — and coming down. Between 2030 and 2060, roughly 9.8 million metric tons of solar panel waste are expected to build up, in keeping with a 2019 study published in Renewable Energy.
Currently, about 90% of end-of-life or defective solar panels find yourself in landfills, largely since it costs far less to dump them than to recycle them. “We see that gap closing over the following five to 10 years significantly,” Sharma said, “through a mix of recycling becoming cheaper and landfilling costs only increasing.”
Indeed, the marketplace for recycled solar panel materials is expected to grow exponentially over the following several years. A report by research firm Rystad Energy stated they’ll be price greater than $2.7 billion in 2030, up from only $170 million last 12 months, and speed up to around $80 billion by 2050. The Department of Energy’s National Renewable Laboratory (NREL) found that with modest government support, recycled materials can meet 30%-50% of solar manufacturing needs within the U.S. by 2040.
Each the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) provide tax credits and funding for domestic manufacturing of solar panels and components, in addition to research into recent solar technologies. Those provisions are intended to chop into China’s dominant position in the worldwide solar panel supply chain, which exceeds 80% today, in keeping with a recent report from the International Energy Agency.
One recipient of this federal funding is First Solar, the most important solar panel manufacturer within the U.S. Founded in 1999 in Tempe, Arizona, the corporate has production facilities in Ohio and one other under construction in Alabama. It has been awarded $7.3 million in research funds to develop a recent residential rooftop panel that is more efficient than current silicon or thin-film modules.
First Solar has maintained an in-house recycling program since 2005, in keeping with an email from chief product officer Pat Buehler. “We recognized that integrating circularity into our operations was needed to scale the business in a sustainable way,” he wrote. But somewhat than extracting metals and glass from retired panels and manufacturing scrap, “our recycling process provides closed-loop semiconductor recovery to be used in recent modules,” he added.
Massive wind turbines, blades are just about all recyclable
Retired wind turbines present one other recycling challenge, in addition to business opportunities. The U.S. wind energy industry began erecting turbines within the early Nineteen Eighties and has been steadily growing since. The American Clean Power Association estimates that today there are nearly 72,000 utility-scale turbines installed nationwide — all but seven of them land-based — generating 10.2% of the country’s electricity.
Although the industry stalled over the past two years, attributable to supply chain snags, inflation and rising costs, turbine manufacturers and wind farm developers are optimistic that the tide has turned, especially given the subsidies and tax credits for green energy projects within the IRA and the Biden administration’s pledge to jumpstart the nascent offshore wind sector.
The lifespan of a wind turbine is around 20 years, and most decommissioned ones have joined retired solar panels in landfills. Nonetheless, practically every thing comprising a turbine is recyclable, from the steel tower to the composite blades, typically 170 feet long, though the newest models exceed 350 feet.
Between 3,000 and 9,000 blades can be retired annually for the following five years within the U.S., after which the number will increase to between 10,000 and 20,000 until 2040, in keeping with a 2021 study by NREL. By 2050, 235,000 blades can be decommissioned, translating to a cumulative mass of two.2 million metric tons — or greater than 60,627 fully loaded tractor trailers.
How the circular renewable energy economy works
Players within the circular economy are determined to not let all that waste go to waste.
Knoxville-based Carbon Rivers, founded in 2019, has developed technology to shred not only turbine blades but additionally discarded composite materials from the automotive, construction and marine industries and convert them through a pyrolysis process into reclaimed glass fiber. “It could actually be used for next-generation manufacturing of turbine blades, marine vessels, composite concrete and auto parts,” said chief strategy officer David Morgan, adding that the method also harvests renewable oil and artificial gas for reuse.
While processing the shredded materials is fairly straightforward, transporting massive turbine blades and other composites over long distances by rail and truck is more complicated. “Logistics is far and away the costliest a part of this whole process,” Morgan said.
Along with existing facilities in Tennessee and Texas, Carbon Rivers plans to construct sites in Florida, Pennsylvania and Idaho over the following three years, strategically situated near wind farms and other feedstock sources. “We would like to construct one other five facilities within the U.K. and Europe, then get to the South American and Asian markets next,” he said.
Within the spirit of corporate sustainability — specifically not wanting their blades piling up in landfills — wind turbine manufacturers themselves are contracting with recycling partners. In December 2020, General Electric’s Renewable Energy unit signed a multi-year agreement with Boston-based Veolia North America to recycle decommissioned blades from land-based GE turbines within the U.S.
Veolia North America opened up a recycling plant in Missouri in 2020, where it has processed about 2,600 blades up to now, in keeping with Julie Angulo, senior vp, technical and performance. “We’re seeing the primary wave of blades which might be 10 to 12 years old, but we all know that number is going to go up year-on-year,” she said.
Using a process referred to as kiln co-processing, Veolia reconstitutes shredded blades and other composite materials right into a fuel it then sells to cement manufacturers as a alternative for coal, sand and clay. The method reduces carbon dioxide emissions by 27% and consumption of water by 13% in cement production.
“Cement manufacturers wish to walk away from coal for carbon emissions reasons,” Angulo said. “This is an excellent substitute, in order that they’re good partners for us.”
GE’s wind turbine competitors are devising ways to make the following generation of blades inherently more recyclable. Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy has begun producing fully recyclable blades for each its land-based and offshore wind turbines and has said it plans to make all of its turbines fully recyclable by 2040. Vestas Wind Systems has committed to producing zero-waste wind turbines by 2040, though it has not yet introduced such a version. In February, Vestas introduced a recent solution that renders epoxy-based turbine blades to be broken down and recycled.
Electric vehicle lithium-ion battery scrap
Lithium-ion batteries have been in use for the reason that early Nineteen Nineties, at first powering laptops, cell phones and other consumer electronics, and for the past couple of a long time EVs and energy storage systems. Recycling of their worthwhile innards — lithium, cobalt, nickel, copper — is focused on EVs, especially as automakers ramp up production, including constructing battery gigafactories. But today’s EV batteries have a lifespan of 10-20 years, or 100,000-200,000 miles, so in the intervening time, recyclers are primarily processing battery manufacturers’ scrap.
Toronto-based Li-Cycle, launched in 2016, has developed a two-step technology that breaks down batteries and scrap to inert materials after which shreds them, using a hydrometallurgy process, to provide minerals which might be sold back into the overall manufacturing supply chain. To avoid high transportation costs for shipping feedstock from various sites, Li-Cycle has geographically interspersed 4 facilities — in Alabama, Arizona, Recent York and Ontario — where it’s deconstructed. It is constructing a large facility in Rochester, Recent York, where the materials can be processed.
“We’re on target to start out commissioning the Rochester [facility] at the top of this 12 months,” said Li-Cycle’s co-founder and CEO Ajay Kochhlar. Construction has been funded by a $375 loan from the Department of Energy (DOE), he said, adding that for the reason that company went public, it is also raised about $1 billion in private deals.
A distinct approach to battery recycling is underway at Redwood Materials, founded outside of Reno, Nevada, in 2017 by JB Straubel, the previous chief technology officer and co-founder of Tesla. Redwood also uses hydrometallurgy to interrupt down batteries and scrap, but produces anode copper foil and cathode-active materials for making recent EV batteries. Since the feedstock is not yet plentiful enough, the nickel and lithium in its cathode products will only be about 30% from recycled sources, with the rest coming from newly mined metals.
“We’re aiming to provide 100 GWh/12 months of cathode-active materials and anode foil for a million EVs by 2025,” Redwood said in an email statement. “By 2030, our goal is to scale to 500 GWh/12 months of materials, which might enable enough batteries to power five million EVs.”
Besides its Nevada facility, Redwood has broken ground on a second one in Charleston, South Carolina. The privately held company said it has raised greater than $1 billion, and in February it received a conditional commitment from the DOE for a $2-billion loan from the DOE as a part of the IRA. Last 12 months Redwood struck a multi-billion dollar take care of Tesla’s battery supplier Panasonic, and it is also inked partnerships with Volkswagen Group of America, Toyota, Ford and Volvo.
Ascend Elements, headquartered in Westborough, Massachusetts, utilizes hydrometallurgy technology to extract cathode-active material mostly from battery manufacturing scrap, but additionally spent lithium-ion batteries. Its processing facility is strategically situated in Covington, Georgia, a state that has attracted EV battery makers, including SK Group in nearby Commerce, in addition to EV maker Rivian, near Rutledge, and Hyundai, which is constructing an EV factory outside of Savannah.
Last October, Ascend began construction on a second recycling facility, in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, using federal dollars earmarked for green energy projects. “We have now received two grant awards from the [DOE] under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law that totaled around $480 million,” said CEO Mike O’Kronley. Such federal investments, he said, “incentivizes infrastructure that should be in-built the U.S., because around 96% of all cathode materials are made in East Asia, specifically China.”
Because the nation continues to construct out a multi-billion-dollar renewable energy supply chain around solar, wind and EVs, concurrently establishing a circular economy to get well, recycle and reuse end-of-life components from those industries is essential within the overarching goal of battling climate change.
“It is important to be certain that we take into account the context of those emerging technologies and understand their full lifecycle,” said Garvin Heath, a senior energy sustainability analyst at NREL. “The circular economy provides lots of opportunities to those industries to be as sustainable and environmentally friendly as possible at a comparatively early phase of their growth.”