The Solar Recycling Boom is Coming with SOLARCYCLE
Suvi Sharma is the CEO and Co-Founder at SOLARCYCLE.
SOLARCYCLE is an emerging leader in the nascent category of solar panel recycling. The astounding ramp of solar panels deployed across the world rivals almost any technology adoption curve in history, and it's far from over. There were only five gigawatts of solar deployed globally between 2000 and 2005. By the end of 2025, a mere 20 years later, there will be around 2,000 gigawatts of solar deployed globally, and the growth is expected to continue to be exponential. That's billions and billions of panels that collectively make up a few hundred thousand square miles of space. And given the rate of installation, most of these panels are early in their expected lifespans. So, what happens when they do hit the end of life? Surely they aren't going to just be landfilled, right? That's what Suvi's here to about.
Episode recorded on May 22, 2025 (Published on June 30, 2025)
In this episode, we cover:
[01:16] Solar panel deployment vs. end-of-life lag
[03:40] Billions of panels, billions of square feet
[05:11] 1.2B panels produced annually—set to triple
[07:06] Why is now the time to build recycling
[08:36] Who’s responsible for end-of-life? Developers
[9:36] Federal and state regulatory requirements
[10:46] Why landfilling is harder than it looks
[12:44] What makes solar panels tough to recycle
[14:01] The high-value metals: silver, copper, aluminum
[16:17] How SOLARCYCLE’s proprietary process works
[18:01] The company’s customer base
[19:18] Over 1M panels recycled in 2024
[20:44] Future opportunities in solar + storage recycling
[21:57] SOLARCYCLE’s funding to date
[24:55] Commodity markets for recycled materials
[26:39] What’s holding back growth for panel recycling
[30:05] SOLARCYCLE is hiring
[33:54] Panels as feedstock materials for domestic manufacturing
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Cody Simms (00:01):
Today on Inevitable, our guest is Suvi Sharma, CEO and Co-Founder at SOLARCYCLE. SOLARCYCLE is an emerging leader in the nascent category of solar panel recycling. The astounding ramp of solar panels deployed across the world rivals almost any technology adoption curve in history, and it's far from over. There were only five gigawatts of solar deployed globally between 2000 and 2005. By the end of 2025, a mere 20 years later, there will be around 2,000 gigawatts of solar deployed globally, and the growth is expected to continue to be exponential. That's billions and billions of panels that collectively make up a few hundred thousand square miles of space. And given the rate of installation, most of these panels are early in their expected lifespans. So, what happens when they do hit end of life? Surely they aren't going to just be landfilled, right? Right? That's what Suvi's here to talk with me about,
(01:16):
From MCJ, I'm Cody Simms, and this is Inevitable. Climate change is inevitable, it's already here, but so are the solutions shaping our future. Join us every week to learn from experts and entrepreneurs about the transition of energy and industry.
(01:43):
Suvi, welcome to the show.
Suvi Sharma (01:45):
Thank you, Cody. Happy to be here.
Cody Simms (01:47):
We haven't really talked about this topic at all, and we talk about the topic of solar and what an amazing revolution it's been and how quickly it's grown. Though I don't know that we've really stopped to take a breath and put it in context with some numbers, which I want to try to do here at the top of our conversation. But then there's the whole question of, and then what happens? What happens to all of this solar footprint that's out there, and I think that's where you step in. And so, really excited to learn from you today and understand more about what the plans are for navigating end of life of this vast, vast resource that we as a collective, we as a society have put out there in the world over the last couple decades.
Suvi Sharma (02:29):
Yeah, I've been in the solar industry for about 20 years now, and so I started seeing that it was all about trying to break through, produce more panels, install more panels. And then I started seeing, wow, the industry is maturing, now it's time to create a more full lifecycle solution for the industry, which is what led me to start the company.
Cody Simms (02:50):
I tried to do a little bit of research before our conversation, just to help myself understand the sense of scale here, because when we talk about solar capacity, we usually talk about it in terms of gigawatts. And so it's hard to understand what that means in terms of volume of physical things out there. And I did a little research, it looked like between 2000 and 2005, there were about five gigawatts of solar globally. So getting going, but small. In 2023, there were over 16,000 gigawatts, with almost 500 gigawatts installed just in 2023. And in 2025, it's estimated there will be around 2,000 gigawatts, and by 2030 potentially up to a terawatt of solar power. Those numbers are big, that's obviously a big ramped curve.
(03:40):
But in terms of number of panels, I tried to do some back of the envelope, but I'm going to guess you're going to have a more accurate view of that than probably I can. Can you help explain what this looks like, in terms of a physical footprint around the world?
Suvi Sharma (03:55):
Yeah, absolutely. Starting off, solar has grown so much. Last year it was about 70% of new power generating capacity put in the US. So that means every other energy source, coal, natural gas, nuclear, wind, hydro, you add them all up, and it's less than half of what solar deployed last year. So that shows you the scale the industry has reached. And to boil it down, if you look at a solar panel 20 years ago, it produced about 120 watts and costs over $4 a watt to manufacture. And today, you're getting panels 700 watts and costs 15 cents to 20 cents a watt to manufacture. So that says it all.
(04:32):
In terms of the scale though, it's mind-boggling, actually. Let me give you a quick anecdotal example. If you think about a product that everyone knows, television, and that usually you have in your home or building, your flat screen. The number of televisions being manufactured globally each year is about 230 million. So as humanity, we are producing 230 million televisions per year around the world, which is a lot.
Cody Simms (04:57):
They're clearly all making us smarter.
Suvi Sharma (04:59):
Right, exactly. I know when I saw that number, it worried me a little bit, I'll tell you. We will produce globally this year, 1.2 billion solar panels.
Cody Simms (05:10):
Amazing.
Suvi Sharma (05:11):
And it's set to triple in the next eight years. So, solar panels our forecast to become the largest form of electronic waste, just because there's so many we're producing, they're large, and just gives you a sense of the scale that the industry has reached.
Cody Simms (05:24):
And these things are 20 square feet, roughly each?
Suvi Sharma (05:27):
Yes.
Cody Simms (05:27):
So you're talking billions of panels at 20 square feet. We're talking a physical footprint globally today that's, I don't know what the size of Rhode Island, something like that? It's substantial.
Suvi Sharma (05:39):
Yeah, it is.
Cody Simms (05:40):
And tripling, you said.
Suvi Sharma (05:41):
And it's tripling, and we need more because solar is the cleanest and the cheapest form of electricity at this point.
Cody Simms (05:48):
So again, all this has happened in about the last 20 years. I think most of these panels are warranty'd or rated to last something like 25 or 30 years. So the vast majority of what's been installed, I assume, is still active out in the field somewhere.
Suvi Sharma (06:05):
It is, yes.
Cody Simms (06:07):
Help us understand what that turnover cycle is going to look like.
Suvi Sharma (06:11):
You're right, most solar has been installed in the last 20, and actually most of it's been installed in the last decade, so it's pretty recent. Solar panels and systems in general are very reliable. You think about it's an electronics product and it's got a 25-year warranty, and that warranty says that in your 25, it will produce 80% of the power it produced on day one, up to 90%. So think about any electronics product, think about your computer, if you put it outside for 25 years and it works similar to what it was when you bought it, very unlikely.
Cody Simms (06:43):
My iPhone is definitely not working as well as it was two years ago.
Suvi Sharma (06:47):
No, definitely not. Definitely not one of those. And so that's great, because these are long-term assets that people deploy out there to produce energy. But of course, all good things come to an end, and so do solar panels, and eventually they do. And because the volume has gone up, we've seen that we need to create the recycling infrastructure now to do that.
(07:06):
But one of the reasons why I started the company now, even though most of the panels will need to be recycled 10 years from now, is that we were already starting to see a first large wave of panels end of life that needed to be recycled, and I can go into why that is. But we started seeing it now and I felt like now is the time to develop the technology to do this really properly and well and scale it up so that when the really massive volumes come, we're ready for them.
Cody Simms (07:32):
How much of the current volume of panels, what happens to it? Does the bulk of it go to landfill? Where does it go today?
Suvi Sharma (07:40):
Previously, yes, most panels went to landfills. Now, I believe that most panels in the US do end up at a recycling facility. That has been a sea change. There's no estimates out there exactly how many panels reach end of life, but we at SOLARCYCLE have a pretty good sense because we work with almost all the large solar companies now. We believe we're capturing greater than one out of every three solar panels that's reaching end of life in the US just at SOLARCYCLE and recycle them. And there's some other recyclers and e-waste recyclers that have gotten into it. So, I believe roughly half end up in the landfill and half end up in a recycling facility such as SOLARCYCLE's.
Cody Simms (08:18):
And is it the producers who ultimately take responsibility for end of life? Is it the project developers? What's the economics here look like of the various players involved in the solar industry and who feels the burden of wanting to help used panel reach an appropriate end of life?
Suvi Sharma (08:36):
The vast majority of time it's the developer, because they end up owning the panels long-term, and so then they need to figure out where it goes at the end of its life. In some cases also, the EPC, the engineering procurement construction company that's building or maintaining the power plants ends up being responsible, but it's usually one of those two. Occasionally, manufacturers are responsible, but the vast, vast majority of time it's the developer asset owner and EPC.
(09:04):
And what we do is, we have become their trusted recycling partner. We charge them a fee, what we call a take-back fee to take the panel off of their hands, and that covers the logistics cost for them so they don't have to worry about it. We go send trucks at the field or the factory, wherever the panels are, pick them up, recycle them, provide them with very strong transparent reporting about what we did with the panels, where the materials are going, was the landfill avoided. And then also provide them an environmental impact report of, what is the environmental benefit of this, so that they can account for that.
Cody Simms (09:36):
And are there regulatory requirements on a per state or, I don't think federal, basis to enable this, or is there an economic reason that the developers or EPCs are doing it today? Or is it, they have sustainability goals they're trying to hit or some combination of all of the above?
Suvi Sharma (09:55):
That's a good question. The short answer, it's a combination of the above, but just to dig into that for a minute. There's very limited regulatory reasons to recycle solar panels versus a landfill them. But there are some state by state, there's no federal requirement. However, there are federal rules about how solar panels that are end of life should be treated and whether those are considered hazardous materials or not, based on things like lead content. And so those drive and dictate where you can landfill and what kind of a landfill you can send it to. And so all these things create a lot of complexity in landfilling solar panels. And that's I think one of the most critical things that is not understood well in the industry or by people who write about it, is that it's not that easy to actually landfill solar panels in the US.
(10:46):
And so, what we found is that the big developers and EPCs, most of them, not all of them, but most of them saw that recycling is something they need to do and figure out with their solar panels. It's a long-term solution. Landfilling is either difficult or a very short-term solution because whether regulations exist or not, the view is that they will come over time. And guess what? Landfill costs go up every year. And so they're looking at, hey, my volumes are really going to grow big in five years, 10 years, I need a solution that's going to be cost-effective. And so that's the biggest driver, is really just having a license to operate and creating a scalable solution for a growing issue for them. And then obviously, some do have environmental goals. They have made pledges to recycle and that's a driver. But I would say the biggest one is just that from a practical standpoint, recycling is really the most simple solution to what to do with your panels.
Cody Simms (11:38):
Yeah, as you said, there may be state or local requirements or even federal around like you said, lead and whatnot around where they can go. You're still charging, it sounds like a tipping fee to them, but your goal is to make it to where that's cheaper than the landfill because you can turn around and sell the materials to someone else. Right?
Suvi Sharma (11:54):
Exactly. Cody, I would say the way that I personally approached recycling, having been in the solar industry for 20 years and having worked in it and developed technologies and manufacturing of panels, I looked at solar recycling as very similar to manufacturing of panels. The reason why we have so much solar, I mentioned 70% of new power generating capacity, is we scaled up the manufacturing of solar panels and we drove down the cost. Same thing as what we're working on doing in solar panel recycling.
Cody Simms (12:21):
I mean, by the way, those volumes we talked about at the start of the show, that's got to be one of the fastest manufacturing ramps in human history. That's incredible.
Suvi Sharma (12:30):
It is, it's phenomenal. And I mentioned the 1.2 billion panels we're producing and installing a year. In the not too distant future, we're going to have to recycle that same number per year. So, we need to create the technology and the equipment and infrastructure to do that.
Cody Simms (12:44):
So what's difficult about recycling today? I would assume, look, these panels are built to last 30 years out in harsh environments, they're pretty solidly built, which I assume makes it hard to tear them down.
Suvi Sharma (12:56):
Yeah, you did a good job of answering your own question, but that's absolutely right. What is great about a solar panel from a recycling standpoint is it's 90 to 95% by weight, glass and metals. And if you think about your recycling bin at home, those are generally two materials you can put in there because they get recycled. It's the plastics that's challenging to recycle. So, most of it is glass and metal. The issue is that it's all glued together with plastics, and that's what creates a very strong product out there in the environment, but it makes it difficult to recycle. And so a lot of our technologies and equipment and processes are how to cleanly separate these materials from each other. And the clean separation is critical because if you just put these panels in a shredder, which was basically what was being done before we started developing the technology to do this at SOLARCYCLE, you're going to contaminate all the materials and you're not going to be able to put those in any useful supply chain back in manufacturing.
Cody Simms (13:50):
You said the materials, in terms of the bulk of the weight is metals and glass, which is easily recyclable. What is valuable from a dollar perspective of those panels?
Suvi Sharma (14:01):
Yeah, that's a great question. The metals. The three core metals in most solar panels is aluminum, which is the aluminum frames around the panels, and then next is silver, which is contained inside the panel, it's used as a conductive adhesive. And then the copper, and the copper exists both outside in the cables and then inside the panel as well, and on the solar cells.
Cody Simms (14:24):
Interesting. So the thing that actually does the power conversion, the silicon, sounds like is maybe the least valuable component in these cells?
Suvi Sharma (14:33):
Yeah, plastics are the least valuable, but they basically are very difficult to recycle. And then the other two that they have value but not huge value, are the glass and the silicon. And the reason for that is, pure silicon actually has high value. The silicon that you get from a recycling process, it's not highly pure, and so it needs to be purified again. And so it really serves as metallurgic grade silicon, which is what limits this. It's already been dealt with materials. And you'll see some nice science articles where someone says they got this high pure silicon out of the recycling process, and you can do it theoretically, but from a practical standpoint of running high volumes, you can recover the silicon, but it ends up as metallurgic grade silicon. And so you get value out of it, but it's not as much as what you can get for the silver and the aluminum and the copper.
Cody Simms (15:22):
If I'm not mistaken, the silicon is the thing that makes the solar panel actually black. That's the bulk of the film inside the panel.
Suvi Sharma (15:29):
Yeah, the solar cells inside the panel are made of silicon wafers, and then the silicon wafers are doped with some chemicals and then they're strung together and interconnected, and all those things end up adding contamination to the core silicon.
Cody Simms (15:43):
So does that part still get essentially thrown out then?
Suvi Sharma (15:46):
We're able to recover that, the silicon. The only thing that we today have to landfill is the plastics, and so that's about five to 8% of the weight of the panel. And so we landfill that, but we have an R&D project to actually make a new product ourselves with that plastic to use in our packaging materials for solar panels. And so that's one way that we're looking at how we can take these materials that don't have value and create valuable products out of them.
Cody Simms (16:13):
So, explain how the solar cycle process works.
Suvi Sharma (16:17):
So first of all, we developed this process in-house and have developed our own equipment and equipment set and process to do this. The first step is, we bring the panel in and we deframe it, it's called deframe. So we remove the aluminum frame and that's all done through automation, machines. It sounds simple and it is simple, but what makes it complicated is the frames are put on pretty tightly. Sometimes there's screwed, sometimes there's glue. So you have different ways that they're configured and there's different size and form factors to remove the aluminum frame and then the copper cables in the junction box. And now you have basically the laminate, what we call the laminate in the industry, which is a sandwich of glass and plastic and metals.
(16:56):
Then what we do is we remove the glass, and this is very important to do and we developed a lot of equipment to do that, even equipment to remove glass from broken panels. Most of the panels we get end up being broken by the time they enter our recycling process. So we remove the glass and it's very clean glass, and then the rest of the laminate is plastic and metals and we break that down and shred and crush it into granulated materials, and then we take that and we separate the metals from the plastics. And that metal mix is silicon, silver and copper. Out of it, we're able to sell the aluminum, the glass, and the mix of metals, which is the silver, silicon and copper.
Cody Simms (17:33):
And is most of this some form of, other than the first few steps you mentioned, it sounds like it's mechanical and automated. But beyond that, is it some form of hydrometallurgy, you're using waters and acids and various things to separate?
Suvi Sharma (17:45):
Actually, no. We primarily just use mechanical and thermal processes in the company. And there are final steps when I mentioned the mix of metals, that the final separation is done through a smelting, but that is done not in-house, but at our partner site.
Cody Simms (18:01):
Talk a bit about some of your customers. I assume you're mostly operating at utility scale solar farms that are bringing their panels back in. This is not whatever's left over on my roof when someone down the line decides I need a new roof and the panels need to go.
Suvi Sharma (18:17):
So first of all, we do bring in panels from residential, commercial and utility scale. A lot of people when think of solar, they think of solar as on a home, which it does, but most solar as you know, is installed utility scale and so therefore, that's where our largest volumes come from. But interestingly, our first customer at SOLARCYCLE was Sunrun, which is a leading residential solar company, and we do all their recycling and so they end up aggregating the panels into their warehouses from the homes. And then when they have enough volume, a truckload, we pick them up and recycle them.
(18:49):
Same thing commercial. One of our investors is Prologis, for example. Large commercial, building owner has a lot of solar. So when they have recycling needs, we recycle those panels, but the bulk of it, the largest is utility scale just because that's for the largest market is. And yeah, we've ended up picking up very high volume of panels from utility scale applications to recycle.
Cody Simms (19:10):
And maybe talk a bit about what kind of volumes you're doing. You guys put out an impact report for 2024 that had some pretty impressive numbers in it.
Suvi Sharma (19:18):
Thank you. Yeah, we've grown a lot, we're a three and a half year old company and we really started collecting panels about two years ago. Last year, we brought in over a million panels, and so pretty large volume. In the grand scheme of the billion panels we make, very small, but we're at a nascent stage in this and we are going to increase that number this year and growing. And we've announced a large scale recycling facility in Georgia, which eventually will be able to do by the end of the decade, about 10 million panels a year there.
Cody Simms (19:50):
How distributed does this need to be? I assume the more you can cut down on trucking these panels across the country, the much better your margins end up?
Suvi Sharma (19:59):
Yes, distributed nature is good from the standpoint, it reduces your logistics costs, but then if you are very distributed, it increases all your overhead costs and facilities costs. There's an economies of scale piece that operates here. So when we looked at it, we found that we try to optimize the scale versus the logistics footprint. And so what we have set up and announced is facilities in Arizona, Texas, and Georgia. And that puts us within a day's drive on a truck with the vast majority of installed solar panels out there. And so as we look at adding more facilities later, yes, that will bring the cost down, but already with this footprint we can manage with a very low logistics cost.
Cody Simms (20:44):
As solar and storage together start to become a little bit of a peanut butter and jelly situation, how do you work with some of the large battery recycling firms out there? Are there partnerships? Is there anything strategic about working together on these problems, or are they operating on different end of life cycles and different maintenance cycles so maybe it doesn't really matter?
Suvi Sharma (21:06):
Good question. You're right, from a deployment standpoint, these two technologies go hand in hand, solar and storage. And we're seeing increasingly, most solar projects have some form of storage on them. long-term, we see the ability to provide the service to our customers to handle the batteries, at least from a logistics standpoint, figuring out where they go. But right now, the grid scale storage, it's pretty new and we're not seeing much volumes. Really what we're seeing is from our customers, is they just want to understand what it will take when they're ready to recycle them. And the good thing is there are several companies out there that have set up good battery recycling capabilities, and so we will partner with them.
Cody Simms (21:47):
I guess the battery recycling at this point is more focused on EVs and hybrid batteries and things like that?
Suvi Sharma (21:52):
That's correct, yes.
Cody Simms (21:54):
Talk a bit about the capital you've raised so far.
Suvi Sharma (21:57):
So we're a privately funded company, we've raised equity capital from venture capital firms and from strategic investors, firms like Fifth Wall, Heritage Group, Urban Innovation Fund, Closed Loop Partners, and then some strategic investors, Prologis, and then most recently, Microsoft that invested in the company.
(22:14):
Most of our capital has gone into two core things. R&D, putting all humility aside, we're the leading investor in technologies for solar recycling today. I mean, almost by order of magnitude. And we have dozens of advanced engineering degrees here in the company that are working on this. So that requires investment, and so we've utilized equity investment for that. And the rest is building up the infrastructure and scaling it up in these facilities and so on. And when I decided to start the company, I came to the conclusion that this business, it needed proper investment and scale to do that, and that's the way that we're building it out.
Cody Simms (22:50):
Obviously you're right now focused, I believe, US domestically. Have you seen any other companies or technology organizations like SOLARCYCLE elsewhere in the world that you think are doing a great job? Particularly China comes to mind, just given the vast solar installed capacity there. Any interesting firms that are models of yours or sister firms of yours in some way, shape or form? Given that you're probably not focused on a Chinese deployment market, I would think.
Suvi Sharma (23:20):
That's correct, yeah. Generally speaking, yes, there is development and there's interesting development going on outside of the US, namely and I would say Europe and China primarily. Interestingly, in Europe there are a few R&D companies that are developing advanced solutions, mainly thermal type solutions to extract the materials. And then in China what we've seen more, and we're very actively engaged in China, we have a team there, we have employees there, but it's a pretty nascent state of technology there. It's mostly been on equipment development. But right now what we've seen is the equipment that is available in China for solar recycling is not yet ready for scale. And so we've had to develop it ourselves, in effect, but I believe this will increase. And China being the largest solar market, not only solar manufacturing market, but solar deployment market, I do believe will develop more and more innovations and improvements and capability to do this. Their projects are even newer than in the US, so they're a little bit behind from a deployment standpoint, but as we know, they catch up fast.
Cody Simms (24:22):
Do you see for SOLARCYCLE a global footprint over time for your own business?
Suvi Sharma (24:27):
Short answer is, yes. Longer answer is, not in the next few years as we're focused on the US market and perfecting our technology and our scale and business processes here. But I think there's select markets that are very interesting, places like Europe and all that have a lot of solar deployment. And a lot of our customers here are European utilities, for example, who have expressed interest to us of going there to recycle. So I think over time as we perfect the technology and the business model, we can go overseas.
Cody Simms (24:55):
Shifting gears just a little bit, on the materials that you're able to extract from these panels, are you seeing any sort of even specialty markets emerge that is taking used solar panel or recycled solar panel materials and being able to essentially market it as such, that these materials came from solar panels, like we've seen from plastic water bottles, for example? Or is it going straight up into pure commodity markets today?
Suvi Sharma (25:21):
It's the latter, it's going into straight pure commodity markets. So aluminum for example, there's a real need for secondary aluminum and these secondary smelters and it could end up in a solar panel or it could end up in a car, it could end up in anything.
(25:35):
But generally speaking, whenever we do anything at SOLARCYCLE, we always think about scale and what's going to really scale., because we mentioned the volumes are so big and they're going to grow so large, and so we prefer to put them into the commodity markets. Now within those commodity markets, I think there's going to be an increasing value and desire for recycled materials and metals, but it's more in the general market as opposed to making specialty products. As your volumes are low to midsize, you really do want to put in commodity markets. As the volumes grow and you start to see that, then you can start to look at some tailored applications or products. I mentioned the plastics, because in the plastics there is no commodity market we can send it to, so that's where we're looking at making specialty products and materials for the solar industry from that.
Cody Simms (26:26):
Suvi, I'm curious what things you see are holding back the growth of recycling. If you could wave a magic wand, what roadblocks would you try to remove from your current path?
Suvi Sharma (26:39):
I think the first thing is just awareness. A lot of people that are involved in figuring out what to do with these panels, they don't really know about what the proper recycling solution is. And so, that's one of the things as we've started working with these big customers and developers and EPCs, is just working with them to inform and educate their members and team and contractors about the fact that this is a good solution. So making people aware, I think that's the single biggest thing because once they're aware, then they can make an informed decision and choice on doing that. So from our standpoint, that's the single biggest thing.
(27:16):
But the second is, generally speaking, in many industries including in solar, recycling and dealing with end-of-life panels is an afterthought, it's not something people develop a project in mind. And what we are working to do and have started doing this now is incorporating recycling into the front end of the project. So when you build a project, you know eventually you're going to need recycle these, or even when you build a project, you're going to have construction breakage. So, bake that into the projects and project economics and all of that. And so the more we do that and incorporate that, then the more we just see recycling becoming more straightforward and mainstream.
Cody Simms (27:51):
Have you seen end-of-life start to be factored into project costs?
Suvi Sharma (27:56):
In select cases, yes, but it's typically only when a company like us is involved with the developers on embedding it into the project. We have done a few now where we've embedded it into the project. So meaning, when the project before it even starts construction, we're already contracted to recycle those panels. And so in those cases, yes, but otherwise there are decommissioning bonds on these projects, but they're typically not done in any scientific way, they're guesstimates. And so the more that as we're starting to provide customers with visibility into what recycling will look like the long-term, they can start to incorporate that into these projects.
Cody Simms (28:34):
Just to make sure I understand that, if you're funding a solar project that is going to have a 30-year lifespan, the overall economics of the project in theory should take into account what's going to happen to this facility at the end of that project because it needs to be inclusive in the cost of the project. Is that not the case today? Even if it's not recycled, even if it's torn down and landfilled?
Suvi Sharma (28:57):
No, it's being done, but it's being done in these, what are called decommissioning bonds or decommissioning reports, but they're not based on any specific, hard numbers. They're basically estimating, and what we're able to do is provide a more specific number on what it will be so that those decommissioning numbers or bonds can be more accurate.
Cody Simms (29:20):
Really interesting then, that you can essentially bake in cash flow 25, 30 years from now for your business. It gives you a nice longevity of a ramp to be able to look forward to, in terms of a baseline for what your company should be able to do.
Suvi Sharma (29:36):
Yeah, and part of that is important for us because we have always thought about this business long-term, and investing in the facilities and the technology for the long-term. And so it does start to supply us with visibility and forecastability and assurance that the volumes will come. And the quid pro quo is for the developers or asset owners, it gives them pure visibility and they know that this will be dealt with properly and at what cost when it's all said and done.
Cody Simms (30:03):
Suvi, where do you need help right now?
Suvi Sharma (30:05):
That's a broad question, but number one is I would say that we are continuing to invest in engineering of this. And the two areas that we're investing a lot is on the engineering side and on the equipment side, and so that's the area that we look for talent continually on is engineering and equipment maintenance and line maintenance talent because these facilities, we want to run efficiently, we want to keep improving the technology. And the reality is that in the US, there's a lot more manufacturing coming back but we haven't been making enough stuff here, so we don't have enough engineers, especially if you look at mechanical, electrical, equipment, that's an area.
(30:41):
And then secondly, I think is just, we've been able to get a lion's share of the big developers and EPCs to commit to us to recycle. But those partnerships and long-term partnerships like the ones we were talking about on the project, those really provide the stability and the cash flows for what we're doing, which is a very large investment in developing this technology and this infrastructure. And so the more long-term partnerships we have like that, the stronger our business and the stronger our operations and technology gets.
Cody Simms (31:13):
And I assume short term, a lot of the volume is coming in from things like extreme weather events where panels are destroyed earlier than planned or breakage of some sort. Is that where a lot of your current volume comes from?
Suvi Sharma (31:26):
Yes. Today a lot of our volumes come from, number one is construction breakage. And there's these projects that are being built that are sometimes a million panels, more than that at a time, and you're just going to have 0.3 to 0.5% of the panels that are going to break in that. And so that's a steady stream of panels that we take off the site, recycle them. And then obviously there's always some O&M losses and all, but within that, weather damage is by far the single biggest, and hail damage is the biggest within the weather damage. But we see it from fires, flooding, tornadoes, hurricanes. But what we're starting to see, the biggest growth area that we're seeing, Cody, and what we see the largest in the next five to 10 years, is repowerings.
Cody Simms (32:07):
This is where an existing solar farm already has interconnect, they don't have to deal with that, but they can upgrade the panels and increase the capacity of their plant?
Suvi Sharma (32:15):
Exactly, and we're going to start seeing a lot of that in the next few years as some of the systems age to be about 12 or 15 years old. It's interesting when you see those 15-year-old panels, it's shocking to see how far the industry has come in that time because of the efficiencies and better improvements on the technology of the products.
Cody Simms (32:35):
Fascinating. So the projects will actually be terminated earlier than planned because the efficiency of the panels have increased so much more that they can refinance the plant and create better economics for everyone involved.
Suvi Sharma (32:48):
Yeah, and this is fundamental to why we started the company when we did, is we, and I absolutely believe that repowering is going to happen much sooner than really, most people even in the industry realized when we started doing the math, and we're starting to see that play out. It's kind of back to your iPhone analogy. You can use an iPhone for 10 years, but are you really going to use it for 10 years? Probably not, and you're going to upgrade to better technologies. And we've seen this already play out in wind. Today if you look in the wind industry, almost one out of every four new wind turbines being installed is a repower. We're going to start to see that in solar in a big way now, coming up.
Cody Simms (33:23):
I mean, it makes a lot of sense. If you can avoid having to deal with permitting and all of the interconnect queue issues-
Suvi Sharma (33:30):
Environmental permits, yeah, these are very costly and they take time. And so yeah, you can repower much faster.
Cody Simms (33:36):
Suvi, anything else we should have discussed and haven't covered?
Suvi Sharma (33:40):
I would say the only other thing is that because it's such the issue de jour right now is, a big reason why we set up SOLARCYCLE, one was obviously just addressing the end of life for solar, which needed to be addressed and wasn't being addressed. And we've talked a lot about that.
(33:54):
But the other one is, the solar panels are a great feedstock of materials and metals for domestic manufacturing here. And three and a half years ago when we started the company, we already saw the writing on the wall that that was going to become more and more important. If we're really going to build these domestic supply chains and manufacturing here, we need not only the assembly plants, but we need the raw materials, we need the feedstock, and so that was a big part of it. And things I mentioned, the aluminum side, copper, these are really important materials to be getting, especially as it can take to set up a new mine in the US, it can take 15 years. So these things don't happen fast, but recycling can scale up quite quickly. And so, one of the key elements we believe we're doing by the recycling process and getting all these metals out is putting them back and helping to reshore a lot of the manufacturing plants that are being built here.
Cody Simms (34:45):
I mean, there's nothing to be said that when you mine something, you have to mine it from the earth. You can mine it from something that already exists. Right?
Suvi Sharma (34:52):
Exactly. Yeah, absolutely. And in fact, if you look at the ore, if you will, the ore that we get, it's so much richer than the ore you get from the ground.
Cody Simms (35:01):
Well, that's a good note to end on. Suvi, thanks for taking the time. I learned a ton. It's a fascinating space. You certainly have incredible tailwinds behind you, and obviously an important problem for us to continue to innovate on broadly. And thanks for taking the ball with it and being the leader in this space.
Suvi Sharma (35:20):
Thanks, Cody. Really enjoyed it, appreciate it.
Cody Simms (35:24):
Inevitable is an MCJ podcast. At MCJ, we back founders driving the transition of energy and industry and solving the inevitable impacts of climate change. If you'd like to learn more about MCJ, visit us at mcj.vc, and subscribe to our weekly newsletter at Newsletter.mcj.vc. Thanks, and see you next episode.
