Orsted has pledged to reuse or recycle all photovoltaic modules from its global portfolio of solar farms with immediate effect.
To assist this commitment Orsted has formed a partnership with Solarcycle, a technology-based PV recycling company, to process and recycle Orsted’s end-of-life solar panels from its projects across the US, which is one of the main solar markets for the developer.
Solar energy is a key technology for the green energy transition and for limiting global warming.
However, the deployment of this technology requires vast amounts of virgin materials.
The mining of these has environmental and social impacts, and competition to secure access to these materials is on the rise.
To lower dependency on virgin materials, a key solution is to reuse or recycle end-of-life solar panels and bring the materials back into manufacturing.
Today, reusing and recycling solar panels is limited, and landfilling is still common practice.
This means that materials with a high value to the green energy transition are simply let go to waste.
Ingrid Reumert, Senior Vice President, and Head of Global Stakeholder Relations at Orsted, said: “With this global solar commitment, Orsted is leveraging its position as a leader in sustainability and renewable energy to incentivise the creation of a market for – the recycling of solar panels – and with the Solarcycle partnership, we’re taking the first tangible steps to ensure that critical materials needed for green energy will be reused or recycled.”
Solarcycle’s recycling facility in Texas extracts the valuable materials from panels, including metals like silver, copper, and aluminium, and materials such as glass and silicon.
The company can take these materials and refine them to make the next generation of newer, higher-efficiency solar panels.
Orsted has been growing its onshore portfolio in the past few years with the ambition of reaching 17.5GW of wind and solar PV capacity for its global onshore portfolio by 2030.