Recycling Solar Panels: The Next Big Thing in Renewable Energy with Connor Hogan

In this episode of Green Giants: Titans of Renewable Energy, host Wes Ashworth sits down with Connor Hogan, Co-Founder of OnePlanet Solar Recycling, to explore the groundbreaking work being done in solar panel recycling. As the solar industry rapidly grows, so does the pressing need to manage end-of-life solar panels. Connor shares his journey from working at Goldman Sachs and Pine Gate Renewables to pioneering innovative recycling solutions that are set to transform the industry. Discover how OnePlanet is tackling the challenge of keeping solar panels out of landfills and contributing to a circular economy that could redefine sustainability in renewable energy.

Connor discusses the complexities of solar panel recycling, the current technological landscape, and the critical role that recycling will play in the future of solar energy. From the intricate processes of extracting valuable materials from old panels to the exciting innovations on the horizon, this episode dives deep into what it takes to turn solar waste into a resource. Connor also dispels common misconceptions about solar panel recycling and shares insights on the financial and logistical challenges involved.

If you're passionate about renewable energy and the future of solar, this episode offers invaluable insights into the next frontier of the industry.

Show Notes:

• Introduction to Connor Hogan and OnePlanet Solar Recycling (00:25)
• The Genesis of OnePlanet: From Goldman Sachs to Solar Recycling (01:26)
• Why Solar Panel Recycling is Critical for the Industry (03:34)
• Technological Innovations in Solar Recycling (07:12)
• The Complexities and Opportunities of Solar Panel Recycling (09:04)
• Current Challenges: Feedstock Variability and Glass Removal (12:13)
• The Role of the IRA and Section 48C Tax Credits in Advancing Solar Recycling (34:08)
• Logistical Challenges and Innovations in Solar Panel Shipping (36:07)
• Team Building in a Startup: Creative Problem Solving and Technical Talent (39:16)
• Final Thoughts: The Future of Solar Recycling and Its Role in Renewable Energy Growth (44:23)

Links and Resources:

• Photovoltaic Toxicity and Waste Concerns Are Overblown, Slowing Decarbonization
  NREL Article
• OnePlanet Solar Recycling
  Website
• Connor Hogan: LinkedIn Profile

Wes Ashworth: https://www.linkedin.com/in/weslgs/

• Email: wes@leegroupsearch.com
• https://leegroupsearch.com/green-giants-podcast/
• https://leegroupsearch.com/

Transcript

Transcript

Welcome to Green Giants: Titans of Renewable Energy, the podcast where insights and innovation meet. Every episode, we dive into conversations with industry leaders, experts and change makers, bringing you the stories and ideas in the renewable energy sector that shape our world. And now let’s jump into today’s episode with your host, Wes Ashworth.

Wes Ashworth (00:25)

Welcome back to another episode of Green Giants: Titans of Renewable Energy. Today we have an exciting guest, Connor Hogan, co-founder of One Planet Solar Recycling. Connor is a seasoned renewable energy specialist with a decade of experience in finance and development. He has been instrumental in major portfolio acquisitions, managing over 500 projects, 1.2 gigawatts of PV capacity, and 1.5 gigawatts of BESS power across the U.S. Connor’s journey includes significant roles at Euclid Power, Goldman Sachs, and Pine Gate Renewables, where he contributed to strategic markets and project finance. Now he’s tackling one of the critical challenges in the solar industry, solar panel recycling. At One Planet Solar Recycling, Connor’s pioneering efforts to recycle PV modules, keeping panels out of landfills, and supporting the US manufacturing base. Join us as we dive into Connor’s innovative work and his vision for the future of solar energy recycling. Let’s get started. Connor, welcome to the show.

Connor Hogan (01:01.134)

Hey Wes, thanks for having me.

Wes Ashworth (01:03.081)

Yeah, of course, it’s a pleasure. So we’ll start out at an easy place. You share a little bit about your background and the story of just how you got started in renewable energy, particularly with One Planet Solar Recycling.

Connor Hogan (01:16.41)

Yeah, definitely. So if I could go back to a pretty specific point in time, it’d be in 2018 at Goldman, there was a specific project that we ran into some pretty lengthy discussions surrounding decommissioning assumptions for the project. That was really the genesis moment for me, for this industry or this idea, this business. And it kind of lingered for a couple of years until the IRA comes around in 2020 or so, right?

And IRA gets passed and there’s just a lot of credits and grants carved out specifically to this sector. That was kind of the, I guess, the round two of “You probably should pursue this” popping up in my brain. And pretty shortly thereafter, about two, three years after that, at Euclid finally, again ran into the same issue.

Again, on the decommissioning front for a project. Right around that time, there was another company that was also working on this and that was another kind of a good vote of confidence. I reached out to some folks in the metals manufacturing and recycling world as well as Will Creel, who’s another one of the co-founders at One Planet, who I worked with at both Goldman and Euclid. We got started a little over a year ago now.

Wes Ashworth (02:36.533)

Yeah, no, that’s awesome. And it’s such a big issue, right? I think that it’s starting to get a little bit of publicity, but not a ton. But if you look at the lifespan of a solar panel, maybe 25, 30 years, and we’re coming up on this point where there’s going to be a lot of decommissioning of solar panels, there aren’t a lot of solutions. A handful, probably, of companies in the US that are starting to try to tackle this issue. So I think what you’re doing is really critically important, and I’m excited to get into it. So we talked before, so you mentioned solar has a potential to become a self-replenishing energy source. Can you elaborate on what this means to you and how One Planet Solar Recycling is contributing to that?

Connor Hogan (03:20.206)

Yeah, this is the most exciting topic for me. Like, this is really I think the coolest part about this whole business, right? Is if you look at any other extractive energy source like coal or gas, there’s carbon emissions aside, if you extract that resource and you burn it, it is extinguished and it’s done. Even, other batteries are very similar in the sense that batteries, they have a 10-year useful life, and now there’s been a lot of people who’ve entered that space to turn batteries into a circular energy resource where you can take the lithium, you can get it down to the black mass and then reconvert it back into a battery.

So solar is similar to batteries in the sense that in my view, in the next decade, we’re probably going to have a solution where solar panels can be recycled directly back into a solar panel. And obviously, it’s not like you press a magic button in a panel. It turns into dust and then turns back. So there’s a series of sequences of steps and technologies that would take place to turn an old, discarded end-of-life module into its base components, refine those base components, and then re-enter them into the upstream manufacturing processes for solar, whether it be through the wafers or the glass or the aluminum frames.

So solar is really unique, and solar and storage frankly are really unique in the sense that going back to the earlier point, all of those other energy resources, they’re extractive, you extinguish them and then you can’t replenish that source of energy, or you could, I guess, over millions of years, right? That’s not really the table of options, but solar has this really unique potential in my mind to become a truly circular energy resource where after 30 years, the panels are decommissioned, they’re processed at a recycling facility. That recycling facility then takes that silicon powder or that glass and then reconverts that into solar glass, or same thing with the aluminum. And so that’s what I would call the holy grail of where this industry will head eventually, is that you have a full end-to-end or cradle-to-cradle type of a supply chain for solar, where there’s no gap in the panel ever reaching a landfill because it’s more economically attractive to turn it back into a panel. And you’ll probably see that too come up with domestic content. One of our main competitors really pursues that for glass.

There’s a lot of benefits, I think, beyond just being able to say that the embodied GHG emissions profiles is improved as well. So it’s a really unique opportunity for the industry to kind of, I think, solidify itself over the centennial scale and truly become a dominant force in the US and global energy mix by being something that can be replenished. Hopefully that nails it.

Wes Ashworth (06:22.997)

Yeah, it does, it does. Yeah, no, it’s such a, just a great vision and dream. And I think it’s realistic. It’s not easy, it’s complicated. And there’s a lot that goes into it. But I think the stats right now, like, maybe 10% of panels are recycled, and something like 90% end up in landfills, which is the last thing that we want to happen.

So I think this is a critical thing. It is complex. It’s not easy as you said. You can’t just push a button and hey, it all magically happens. There’s a lot that goes into that. So thinking about that, what are the current processes and technologies involved in solar panel recycling? And where do you see the most significant opportunities for innovation and improvement in this?

Connor Hogan (07:11.93)

Yeah, so there’s – and before we even get into this too, I want to at some point, we’ll touch on the volume or the volume of panels, because this kind of all dovetails together with the process and technology – but the volume we’re seeing right now to your 90-10% point. And that’s my gut guess. That’s me taking a finger to the wind kind of an estimate. And I think there is some data to support that. And I think the data is even in the lower side in the single digits, but it’s kind of stale.

The volume of panels that we’re seeing is effectively, most of it is honestly operating losses and construction losses. Like you said, in a couple of years, we’re going to have this huge volume of repowering in the early 2030s. And that naturally kind of, like you said, dates the useful life of a panel. So 25 years ago is probably when that big flurry of QF PURPA utility scale projects got built out across the country.

And so now we’re kind of at that inflection point where the economics are beginning to make sense for recycling to enter the space because you need a certain volume of panels. And so we’re kind of in this R&D space. And this is how I’m going to tie back into the process and technology. So where we are today, the analogy I’ve used for a lot of people is solar panel recycling today is where solar panel manufacturing was in the early 2000s. So it’s very self-admit, you know,

100% self-admission here, it’s very inefficient right now. There’s a lot of complexity around it because you have a thousand different make and models. You have companies that went bankrupt from 20 years ago, you’re seeing totally different construction for modules, have screws that anchor in the frames. Some of the frames are just caulked on. The material composition of the panels vastly varies.

Huge orders of magnitude differences between certain module manufacturers and certain vintage years, right? So a 300 or a 200 watt panel is not totally different because that’s not 100% true, chemically, metallurgically, chemically speaking, it’s a pretty big difference in the silicon content, the aluminum content, much bigger frames on earlier modules because people were thinking about weight. Now modules have gotten like, 500, 600, I think there’s even like 700 watt Topcon bifacial type modules now, which is just mind numbing for people who’ve been around solar for a decade. But that all makes it really tough from a process standpoint. And we call that feedstock variability. So that’s the terminology that we use to describe that. And the current technology, there are a couple, I guess, commercially viable technologies that are in use right now. Most of it is a mechanical separation process with an electrical separation process included as well. And I think where you’ll see this go long-term is the introduction of chemical processes as well. But it becomes kind of a complex topic because you start to then have, you reduce the GHG profile of that process or you make it more carbon intensive by including chemicals. It makes it harder to permit.

There’s a lot of different things that whenever you add chemical treatment to a manufacturing process instantly complicates the whole thing. But it’s largely around the extraction of the rare earth metals.

So the way that the process currently works, I’ll just do a quick A to Z kind of a walk through, as a panel enters the line or the manufacturing or the demanufacturing line, the first step is essentially a physical assessment of the panel. There’s kind of a, you could think of it as like an XY coordinate, right? We use an AI program that scans that panel’s dimensions, plots it on an XY axis, then locates the J box, the junction box, or multiple junction boxes, on the back of the panel, identifies those and gives them effectively XY coordinates. Then it moves to, and also it gives you, broadly speaking, the length and width and the height, et cetera, of the module, the weight of the module. So that’s kind where we baseline the process from. So the module moves then into the junction box removal where a blade, using those coordinates, scrapes off the junction boxes. The next step, and those fall under a collection bin, right?

Next step is the frames. So the frames then are removed or pulled off mechanically. From there, the panel goes through a series of separation steps with grinding wheels or blades. The glass is the first thing that gets removed. I would say the best technology for glass removal right now is the hot knife method, which requires the glass to be intact, which again goes back to the feedstock variability component because a lot of panels are coming in cracked and broken, right? But there’s a couple of other different ways that the glass is removed as well. There’s one that uses essentially a thermal treatment. We’ve seen microwaves. There’s a lot of different, again, R&D type technology that’s out there for glass removal. And glass removal is probably one of the most important steps in the whole process because glass is the primary contaminant, it’s the lowest value of everything that we pull out of a panel. And it’s the biggest potential contaminant and everything downstream. So there’s a lot of emphasis, technologically speaking, on removing the glass. And you’ve seen at this point, there’s so many different techniques that are out there, and it’s still going to be determined what’s going to be the most commercially viable solution. We have our own view. And for proprietary reasons, we won’t go into it here.

But it’s one of those things that in the next five years you’re going to see that technology really really, really drastically expand, and honestly, this is where you got to give NREL a lot of credit – they are now acknowledging this issue, they’re now trying to implement standardized designs from the manufacturers that make it easier for people such as ourselves to then process them 30 years in the future or recycle them 30 years in the future. So there’s also a lot of work on the front end of this as well that’s going on right now with a lot of the major manufacturers who are designing for recyclability.

So after glass removal, several steps again, shredding, granulation to where you more or less you end up with the wafers and the back sheet on a monofacial panel, essentially end up in a pulverized powder.

That powder then is conveyed through a couple other separation steps. Some of it uses density separation principles. So air, water, vibration, and honestly, a lot of that stuff has been around for a hundred years in the mining industry. That’s honestly pretty, it’s pretty basic. It’s not rocket science. That’s kind of some of the other steps that go into pulling out the copper.

That’s one of the big ones because copper is one of the heaviest pieces of metal. Remember, the frames have been removed and now you just have this kind of granulated powder, right? So the copper is actually one of the densest metals that are in that. So it makes it relatively easy from a density separation standpoint to pull out. And then you’re kind of left with the silicon and the plastic.

And so then that’s where there’s an electrical separation step. That effectively pulls the silicon apart from or pulls the plastic and the silicon apart into two separate streams. So at the end of the process, if you were to think about the panel in the original state, end up with,I think it’s like seven, or I guess, if you include some of the actual dust and some of the other stuff that we collect through the negative induction or essentially a vacuum system, we have about seven or ten different commodities that we produce.

And so then those commodities are sold to a variety of different buyers. For instance, the aluminum will go right back into aluminum production through a local refiner. The glass is actually one of the most interesting, it goes into a whole lot. There’s a lot of, you and I are both solar people, right? So I didn’t really know it. I didn’t know this, all of this was pretty new to me that Andre and Mike from our team, they kind of were able to coach us up on pretty quickly. But the glass is a variety of different buyers, like, you know, obviously bottling is one, glass bottling. This has been around for a while. Sandblasting is another one. There’s a lot of different buyers for all these materials.

And so to go back to the first point about the replenishing, we started off, this is where the industry is starting off at, right? So we have to sell this material to other industrial users of that. Now the aluminum very well could get smelted, refined, turned back into rolled aluminum and then sent right back into a solar frame.

That is a possibility, but it’s not a guarantee, because we view it as “I want to deliver the lowest cost of recycling humanly possible so that panels don’t end up in a landfill.” Well, if somebody who is in glass bottling is willing to pay me an extra three cents or two cents a pound, whatever it is for the glass, that’s the more economic choice that we would make, because then that translates to the lowest delivered cost of service for you if you’re an IPP or utility that has a solar fleet. That’s where we’re starting off. And kind of the long-term trajectory or the long-term plan is that these processes and technologies will become more and more efficient. They’ll become more higher yields, higher purities of these materials that are coming out. And eventually we’ll get to a point where you’ll see a lot of vertical integration in the solar supply chain.

And you’ve already started to see this, you saw that I think with the glass factory that Qcells and Solar Cycle announced, I think that, you know, kudos to them. I think that’s really the way that you’re going to see this kind of go. And, we have the same conviction as well. And then we have a different strategy than them. Obviously we have, we see the world a little bit differently with where we want to grow into this space. But that’s ultimately where I think you’ll end up seeing this work out, is a lot of these recyclers will become probably equipment suppliers. And if not equipment suppliers, they’re going to be raw material suppliers for solar equipment suppliers. So that’s the summary of the technology and where it’s at currently, how it works, and where we see it going.

Wes Ashworth (18:00.949)

Yeah, no, I love it. I was looking at even the aluminum alone, you know, and that’s probably, there are more valuable metals in these PV panels than aluminum, but just even the aluminum, recycling aluminum versus new production of aluminum, 95% less energy. And so you look at like all these little pieces that connect to it. It’s helping the clean energy transition in so many different facets. You could probably explore 20, 50 different pathways of how this is benefiting us. But it is newer. As you said, rewind 20, 30 years ago and you look at where solar PV was. Okay, now it’s kind of like, and we tend to do that, right? We don’t necessarily come up with great solutions until we have a problem. It’s like all these solar panels are getting to end a life and it’s like, man, I saw something that US solar panels due to retire by 2030 would cover about 3000 American football fields. And that’s just what’s been put into play in the last 30 years. And then you look at solar is only increasing and you’re seeing that happen. So this is a need that’s going to become more and more and more prevalent. And it’s critical for companies like yours to start today and where you are and to start on this journey.

Can you give us an idea of where’s One Planet now? And then if you look at the future and what that’s going to look like, what’s next for you guys?

Connor Hogan (19:39.0)

Yeah, man, what an exciting time. It’s very fun to be back in the startup world. Euclid was a lot of fun too. Its startups are always just an exhilarating head rush. A lot of ups and downs, but where we’re at currently is, we’re really all your eyes and ears on R&D right now. And what we’re doing is we’re operationally de-risking as much as we possibly can. We’re actively fundraising, so we’re going to close a seed venture around here relatively soon, and we’ll have that publicized, et cetera. And with that, that’s really gonna propel us to then start the engineering work on our next generation facility.

And so the current facility we operate, we call it a prototype or a pilot plant. If you’re familiar with the DOE technology readiness level or TRL scores, we self-assess that prototype facility at probably like a six, something like that from a one to nine scale. And so we think that we may be able to jump from a six to a seven or probably potentially an eight because we’ve spent so much time now essentially studying the current best technologies and our existing process, et cetera. And so the seed round, we’re really trying to gear towards one, broadening the team, right? I think everybody who’s worked in a startup knows that the team is the company.

So yeah, so we’re really going to try to work to bring on a lot of early stage people who have just huge outsized impacts at that stage. And so it’s going to be really exciting to bring some of those early folks on. Then – and we have a team of 10 employees right now at our facility – so then, obviously we’re going to scale that up as well. So a lot of HR headcount growth, I think is going to be a part of that. And then the third rung is to start working on some other solutions or some other novel IP that’s really addressed at one of the structural issues with solar panel recycling that we haven’t talked about, but that’s shipping.

So shipping is another one of those bottlenecks that really complicates this. Because the way that a lot of people on site handle modules is, our-end-of-life modules specifically, is they are beginning-of-life or new modules. So they’re packed neatly, you know, a lot of times and they’re stacked up on a pallet. And the problem is the freight density is really poor. And so you don’t end up getting like, you know, 600 panels on a 53 foot flatbed. Whereas if you were to, you know, maybe change some of the processes in place currently with some of the EPCs that are doing this repower work, could maximize freight density. I’ll leave it at that. It’s a cool project that we’re working on as well. But, those are kind of the three things, implementing that R&D or the lessons learned to date into a next generation technology, into a next generation facility, of which we intend to probably four to five across the United States, building out headcount and then working on a special piece of equipment that we’re pretty excited to roll out eventually that addresses the shipping bottleneck. So those are kind of the, guess if I had to summarize, it would be the big three things that we’re kind of focused on currently and where we see it going in the next year to two years.

Wes Ashworth (23:04.543)

Yeah, no, it’s exciting to see that evolve. And, he said, it’s kind of a head rush, kind of fast pace and it’s moving quickly. And it’s not easy by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s good you’re doing this.

So, I do want to get into, you know, addressing some of the common misconceptions out there. I think you’ve, I’ve heard a lot, and you hear a lot of things come up about solar panel recycling. So tell me from your perspective, what are some of the common misconceptions that you hear about solar panel recycling and just end-of-life management of solar panels?

Connor Hogan (23:40.398)

Yeah, it’s funny, whenever an industry is started from nothing, there’s always so much hearsay. There’s always so much, you know, like it really is the telephone game from elementary school. Like stuff just spreads like wildfire. So there’s a lot.I think one of the big things right now, or if I had to think where the most common misconceptions is, that it just goes to a landfill. I’ve heard that too,  which is pretty interesting. Cause it’s like, well, I’d love to give you a tour of our facility.

That’s one of the first big ones is that we’re essentially, and to be frank too, this is where you got to do your due diligence. If you’re a solar owner and asset operator, you got to do that hard diligence on your vendors. At Goldman, we called it KYCP, is “know your counterparties” or “know your counterparty.” And it’s such an important part of doing business is ensuring that they have the ISO and the R2 standard certificates. It’s ensuring that the facility is frankly in good shape and good condition. I encourage people to do site visits and site tours because I think that if you talk to somebody and they don’t want you to come see how the secret stuff is made, I don’t know, it just never really rubbed me right. So that’s a big part, I think, that how you can de-risk that.

 One of the other misconceptions is that this really revolves around the definition of recycling. And, you know, I did not come from the recycled materials industry. Formerly, actually, ISRI. So ISRI rebranded to REMA, or ISRI used to be the International Scrap Recycling Institute, or something like that, I want to say. That was the former SEIA for the recycling world, and then they rebranded to REMA, which is the Recycled Materials Association. And so it’s funny because a lot of people who aren’t in that world, I think, there’s this misconception around what actually is recycling. And, you know, in their world, it doesn’t matter if it’s a bicycle or if it’s a, you know, wiring from a transmission tower, it doesn’t matter to them what it is. It goes through a series of separation steps. It’s re-melted back into metal and to them that’s a net positive. And I think a lot of people in solar are like, like I said, the beginning with the whole magic, you know, you can’t snap your fingers and turn an old panel back into a new one. A lot of people genuinely believe that it’s not recycling if the panel doesn’t turn back into a panel. And like I said, that’s the North Star. That’s where we want this to go. The problem though, is that it’s so capital. It’s so much capital intensity is what I’ve said before to build that type of an infrastructure from nothing.

You can’t, you just can’t do it. You have to start with baby steps. And like, I think that a lot of people get hung up on that, that it’s not truly recycling. Well, you know, the alternative to that is would you rather just wind up in a landfill? That’s really like, if you get down to it, in my mind, it boils down to, well, if you can’t do it, does that just mean you throw your hands up and it goes into a landfill? I disagree with that. I think that keeping it out of the landfill and putting it back into good use. And like you said, aluminum is a great example. There’s a 95% energy reduction by recycling aluminum. Glass is another huge one too. Like if you look at the GHG of concrete production. So using recycled materials in any shape or form is, in my opinion, that’s a net positive. And so that’s another one of the big misconceptions.

And I think one of the other things too with solar specifically that you’ve seen is the toxicity, right? So a lot of people say that solar panels are super toxic and a hazard and they’re like, if you were to look at thin film modules that are using cadmium telluride or CIGS modules, there are heavy metals in them, right? And our facility is not outfitted to handle that.

So First Solar is the only, to my knowledge, one of the only recyclers in the United States that can actually process or handle thin film modules because they’re anchored to their business. And so now it’s expensive to do so. I think it’s north of 50 something dollars per panel to recycle it. And First Solar has a long-term liability account dedicated to recycling modules. So they’ve kind of financially prepared themselves for that. Kudos to them, frankly, I think they’re a leader in that sense.

The toxicity argument for 90% of the market is crystal and silicon modules, in my opinion, it’s not really there. You look at a crystal and silicon module, the only serious contaminant is lead and some of the soldering. From what we’ve seen based on T-clip analysis, it’s a very, very, very small percentage of monofacial crystal and solar panels that fail the T-clip test, which means that the toxicity argument is really overblown. And NREL, again, did a phenomenal job with producing a two-page or a three-page document that just completely and totally destroys a lot of these myths. I think we had talked about that, including a link to it. So that’d be great for the audience to have on hand when the topic comes up, because a lot of developers run into this in the permitting and zoning period of a project’s life cycle during development. That’s how I stumbled into this, right? Was having community pushback surrounding the end-of-life asset disposition for solar. So it’s a great resource if you’re in the developer or that IPP kind of a world to take to local communities as well and dispel some of those misconceptions.

Wes Ashworth (29:21.033)

Yeah, no, absolutely. And I will link to that in the show notes. And I love that first point. I think that’s a recurring theme that comes up. I think the ones that the leaders in renewable energy that are really pushing things forward, there’s an acceptance that it’s not going to be perfect right away and instantly. It’s not, to your point, you can’t just magically overnight just recycle it into another panel and it just all works and it’s easy and all these sort of things.

But I think what’s important and something that I really believe in is, got to start somewhere. You have to start, take those first steps. I mean, that’s how progress happens. But if you’re just waiting for this perfect solution, you’re never going to get anywhere. You’re never going to go anywhere. So I love that you made that point. And then some of the others as well too. So, you know, one of the other things that that comes up too is just costs. Like it is really expensive to recycle a panel, regardless of how it’s being used versus, yeah, because in a landfill, obviously considerably cheaper. How, I guess from a business standpoint, how do you start making that make sense, and sort of the business case behind that, looking at costs and weighing that out and just seeing the potential?

Connor Hogan (30:35.704)

Yeah, this is again, man, we could spend a whole hour talking about the cost curve for solar recycling. In my opinion, again, I kind of foresee this looking eerily reminiscent of the manufacturing cost curve for solar, where you just saw this huge exponential decrease in the built costs or the installed costs for solar. And I think that where we’re at right now is, the market would price these in, like if you went to, I guess what I would say an SEIA designated recycler. So somebody who is recognized on SEIA’s national PV recycling program and you were to quote out modules. It’s very regionally specific, right? Like if you’re in California, and we’ve done projects in California as a Florida recycler, right? So we’ve handled projects coast to coast. We’ve actually even taken modules from Hawaii and Puerto Rico too. So we’ve even had sea container experience.

I think like, geographics aside, you’re looking at a service fee somewhere in like the easily $10, probably more likely in the 15-plus range for most of the market. When we came online, we immediately essentially set pricing, we supplied and demanded out and we had a ton of supply and capacity to our plant. And now that we’ve booked up that capacity, we’re starting to kind of come up on costs. And I think that’s a pretty natural, it’s just natural, like I said, supply and demand. And so we’re now beginning to come up on price because of capacity. And that again, is, I think, one of the big reasons why pricing is the way it is, is because one, it’s a totally new technology. So the unit economics for this business are just unknown. You can’t, you have to start off somewhere. And so essentially, we can’t offer to pay people panels yet. And so that’s kind of why you’ve seen the pricing so high.

Second to that is capacity. Capacity is a real issue because these plants that do exist, they are pilot or prototype plants. So they’re pretty small, you know, it’s a pretty small nameplate rating. Like our place, our facility is right around, and again, it’s hard to measure too because you take in panels that are 200 watts all the way up to up to 500 watts. So it’s kind of hard to measure it in megawatt nameplate capacity like the manufacturers do, but we usually measure in module count, so we’re right around a little over half a million modules a year. Well, that actually books up pretty quick. Some of the orders that we get are from warehouses where we’ve had a client who’s assembled operating losses on a gigawatt fleet for two years, and it’s collected in a warehouse. So we get these huge lump sum orders of like 50,000, 20,000, 30,000 modules. Sometimes you’ll see a mass, a natural catastrophe loss event and you’ll have immediately, boom, 20,000 modules on a five megawatt plant. Like Scotts Bluff was a great example of this, or Fighting Jays I think recently that you saw in Texas and Brazoria County, where hail in the Midwest is really prevalent and there’s been a huge, huge fervor in the renewable energy property insurance markets about hail damage.

In our world, that translates to inventory and capacity issues, because if you had a 500,000 module plant come offline, you could decommission that plant in a month or two months. That’s more than our entire facility could handle. You kind of run into this capacity issue too, and we have other clients. You start to get into this bid framework where the prices are high because of those two driving factors.

Long-term, they’re going to go down to a point where more and more people enter, people such as ourselves who are established, we open up multiple locations that have four or five times the capacity of our current place. Like our next generation facility, we’re going to try to probably be able to hit two and a half million modules per year or more. So that changes the pricing dynamics again, right? And that again lines up closer with the 2030 timeframe. So we can kind of have that latent capacity built in.

So that’ll go down. The DOE has come out and said that they want to have a $3 per panel target by 2030. I think it’s still to be seen if it’ll play out that way or not. And then you’ll probably see pricing kind of hover at the landfill parity range for a while until even more technological progress is made. Then suddenly, ideally, if I’m being selfish from a solar owner operator world, I get paid for modules in the 2040s and 2050s. That would be great. So that’s kind of where we see that potentially developing. And it’s still, again, to be seen. Prices may hover at zero and remain there. I don’t have a crystal ball. But just inferring, that’s kind of where we see things growing and evolving.

Wes Ashworth (35:39.817)

Yeah, gotcha. And I wanted to go back to an earlier point you made in just things like the IRA and things like that, that potentially helped propel the business forward and making this feasible. How is that a direct benefit? What things are out there that are supporting companies like yours in solar panel recycling?

Connor Hogan (36:01.848)

Yeah, aside from grants, right? So direct, there’s directly applicable grants and that’s obviously extremely helpful for an R&D perspective. It helps attract private investment. I think that’s kind of a given, right? The more nuanced, or I guess, honestly, in the grand scheme of things, potentially one of the most impactful for me. And this is another one of the things that really directly got me into this industry was Section 48C tax credits. And so there were two rounds of them. There’s a second round that’s coming due and those are effectively a 30% ITC for manufacturers of solar equipment. And then they extended it under the IRA to include recyclers as well. So if you’re a recycler of solar equipment, you’re also eligible for these Section 48C credits.

It’s very similar at that point to solar and the capital stack for solar, right? And especially in a post transferability world, it makes those credits even easier to monetize. And so I think that is really one of the most unique and one of the cool, if I could be a nerd, one of the coolest things with the project finance world for clean tech or clean energy projects. And so I was really excited to see those get allocated or extended to include recyclers. But between grants and tax credits, I think that the DOE, everybody owes the DOE and NREL a huge round of applause for the work that they’ve done and kind of pointing the arrow for the industry.

Wes Ashworth (37:46.067)

Yeah, no, absolutely. And then you’re covering some other things too. Just we talked a little bit, you touched on some of the challenges and even from a logistical side of the equation. And I think there are some real logistical challenges associated with solar panel recycling, especially what we talked about there. Like how else are you maybe managing or thinking about those logistical complexities and ensuring that this can happen and it’s efficient and it’ll work?

Connor Hogan (38:18.2)

Yeah, so solar panel recycling is very different from traditional recycling, right? With traditional recycling, you take a truck to their location or they dispatch a truck to your location and you put it in a bin and it goes back with solar panel recycling. Again, my opinion here, I think that you’re going to find that it becomes much more intertwined with on-site EPC operations than people expect right now. And a lot of that is because the technology has to get, there’s always going to be fixed assets, or there’s always going to be a hub, so to speak, for these modules. Like to get the silicon, to get the copper out, that’s going to have to go to a central facility, a central recycling facility.

But logistically speaking, the on-site operations side of things, I think the palletization and the labor associated with the way currently it’s handled, where they take modules that have, for all intents and purposes, no value anymore. And they neatly band them and put them on pallets. And it’s effectively treated the same way as fresh-from-a-factory modules. I think that’s got to change. I think that’s one of those things that really complicates this from the EPC, just from a scope perspective, there’s so much to unpack with the logistics of how, and frankly, too, we’re not even at a point where we have this wealth of assets that are being repowered, right?

Like from Goldman, or the time that spent at M&A or GSRP, that was one of those things that we started to think about in earnest in the 2018, 2019 period because you’re starting to get now 20 year old assets for some of these, especially some of the smaller CNI stuff, like those 500 asset CNI portfolios, some of those are old.

And again, they’re on roofs. So it makes it even more complicated with having to take them down versus the utility scale asset, which is a little bit more cut and dry in a field, right? And so there’s just, there’s going to be this whole new-found world of repowering activity that’s conjoined at the hip with recycling operations. And you’ll probably see a lot of recyclers or, again, in our case, we kind of want to have an onsite, in the field, kind of a presence to help administer that work, make sure that it is appropriately handled and packaged, potentially deploy equipment. That’s kind of the way that we see this developing.

And I think one of the other things is, like I said, the palletization. Putting 20 panels on a pallet and neatly banding them, I think that that’ll probably change as well, where you could fit maybe 2,000 panels on a truck. And again, I won’t go into details with what we’re trying to do there, but we kind of see things moving that way in the EPC and O world and having a more active presence and being pretty actively involved with some of the repower work.

Wes Ashworth (41:18.261)

Gotcha. Yeah, absolutely. I want to shift gears completely for a second and talk about something you mentioned earlier, was just sort of like the team building and sort of the HR side of the equation, right? And I think that’s something, that the technology is important, R&D is important, but having the right people, especially in the startup environment, just to build and grow and accomplish what your company is setting out to accomplish. What does that look like for you in terms of like, are there some traits that you look for? What do you feel like adds into that recipe for success in building this innovative team, the startup team that’s going to take you to the levels you want to get to? And obviously our industry needs that to happen, so curious to hear your perspective.

Connor Hogan (42:04.53)

Yeah, I think the culture that we want to foster is really going to be centered around creative problem solving because it is very cutting edge. I think again, going back to the common misconceptions, people think that it’s arcane or barbaric, but it’s actually pretty cutting edge technology. Some of the stuff that we’re talking about developing is pretty, I’m not an engineer, but from Andre’s experience, it’s actually a lot of fun. And it’s cool to be able to solve problems that pose a serious long-term problem for the industry. That, for me, has been exhilarating.

And I think that in people who come on board, we really are going to look for creative problem solvers, first and foremost, because it just point-blank requires it. Second to that, personality and just being a team player is so much more important than being the person who knows it all. And it’s great to be the smartest person in the room, but if you can’t get along with everybody, you’re not a net positive or a value add for a team. So at this stage too, because of that ambiguity, because of a lot of the problems that we’re facing, you need really strong team players, people who are comfortable in ambiguous environments who don’t have necessarily a structured day-to-day regimen. The phrase that we use a lot in both this startup and at previous startups, was at Pine Gate Renewables, I was actually employee number 10 there as well. So I got to see them grow to 100 plus people, but you wear a lot of hats.

In startups, like if you’re an accountant, you may end up one day having to read engineering drawings. Like you wear so many different hats in a startup that you need people who can take it on with a smile and ask the dumb questions. I have gotten so comfortable asking the dumbest of dumb questions in a startup because you have to, and can’t have ego. You got to treat every day as a fresh day. Cause like I said, at the beginning, there’s a lot of ups that are there also, and there are a lot of downs. So being a team player is, I mean, sounds so redundant, and nobody wants to hear like, “Yeah, man, team player,” but honestly, like it is, it is really and truly you need to hear it a thousand times because it is such an important part.

And then the third thing I think that we’re looking for is we’re really looking to bring on a lot of top-tier technical talent. It draws a lot on metals manufacturing. It draws a lot on, frankly, solar module engineering and material science. There’s a lot of that having in-house would go a long way to better understand about it through our position as a company. Modules that come out today, we have to design for now, even though because we’re going to get them in construction and operating losses for 25 years and then 30 years in the future, it’s there. And not only that, you have to design for stuff that’s 30 years old. So there’s this huge, huge range of motion, or this huge topic area of concern that we have to address. And so a lot of that is centered around having the right technical people in-house.

So that’s kind of the third point I would say is, despite what you may believe, despite what you may have heard, it’s actually a really technically challenging area. And I think that you’ve even seen that NREL and other leading, cutting edge, Lawrence Berkeley type national laboratories are all working on this as well. If that’s an interest to you, we want to talk to you because it’s going to be a technically challenging industry and frankly career path.

Wes Ashworth (46:08.393)

Yeah, I love that message and I think that’s a key takeaway, is that I think at first blush, people might make assumptions that it’s, “I don’t want to go into solar panel recycling.” And that’s not that technically challenging, but it is. And as you said, it’s kind of like bleeding edge technology. It’s really on in the early stages of this. So I think it is a really exciting thing and exciting story. And that’s the message I want to get out there is like, you need to seek out companies like this.

For industry switchers, I think it’s a great spot, maybe some of the more traditional recycling technologies out there to two people in the industry, as you said, you got to understand the engineering that goes behind PV because you’re sort of reverse engineering and trying to figure that out and how you recycle it. So I think it’s an exciting industry to be and I encourage anybody out there to pursue it, look more into it, and go down that path.

So we’re coming close on time. I’ll leave this question just open and just anything that you feel, other key messages you want to get out there, things you didn’t get to touch on. Are some other, anything else important you want to share with the audience?

Connor Hogan (47:16.694)

The final message I would say to folks is, I said at the beginning, you’re looking at an industry that is in its infancy. There’s really only a handful of people doing this right now. And like I said earlier, it’s kind of like solar manufacturing in the early 2000s. And so the positive message for everybody, even if you are a naysayer, it will hit a point in the next decade where this is just a commonplace part of your day-to-day asset management, O&M type operations. And frankly too, it’s not just me saying that, a lot of the biggest IPPs and utilities in the energy sector or specifically in the renewable energy sector have already made commitments or have proactive internal policies in place to address this.

We’ve been approached and have talked to a laundry list of people that everybody in this phone call would know. I never cease to be amazed with how dedicated the solar energy industry is to solving problems. Like honestly, everybody in solar is just the most pick-yourself-up-and-figure-it-out kind of people.

And you see that with the cost curve of solar, right? And you’re going to see the same thing with solar recycling, where I really do genuinely believe that in a decade or maybe two, if it takes a little bit longer than we think. But I think that in the near term, you’re going to see this become something that is frankly a cornerstone to the industry. If you want to hit those 2050 terawatt, multiple terawatt type globally installed figures, my estimate is that this has to be a part of that growth trajectory. If you want to have that many panels deployed, you have to have some way to be able to at least, at a minimum, recapture that embodied materials in those panels. And so I think that if you do want to see solar succeed and grow to become that dominant player in the energy mix, solar recycling is going to be a cornerstone to that growth model. And I think that it’ll happen.

So, you know, I maintain a very optimistic view. I’m super happy to be in this space and frankly, for all the support I’ve gotten from people who are in solar as well and see the same vision that we do.

Wes Ashworth (49:48.041)

Yeah, no, that’s well said, and I agree completely with that. With that, that wraps up our conversation with Connor Hogan, co-founder of One Planet Solar Recycling. Connor, it really has been fascinating to explore your insights and your innovative work in solar panel recycling that you’re doing. Your efforts in advancing sustainable practices and creating a circular economy for solar panels are truly inspiring and I think what everybody can get excited about and I hope that’s a takeaway.

To our audience out there, thank you as always for tuning in to Green Giants, and thank you Connor for sharing your insights and vision for a sustainable future with us. If you enjoyed the episode be sure to subscribe, share it with your network, and stay tuned for more enlightening discussions with leaders in the renewable energy sector.