One of the significant problems with green energy is the lack of energy. The other is the lack of green. So we are vaguely encouraged to get an email from Canary Media about “A new plan to recycle solar”. Especially as the article it links to concedes that solar panels are a major environmental hazard. Indeed, it states frankly that “Each time a hurricane batters Florida, the country’s second-largest market for solar energy, broken panels pile up in landfills.” Which seems to combine unreliability and pollution in one big ugly pile (and we can’t help noticing that hurricanes tend not to smash up gas-fired or nuclear plants). But then Canary Media announces that a Jacksonville company has a plan to “break down busted panels and turn the waste stream into a new domestic source of metals such as copper and aluminum at a moment when tariffs are set to hike the price of imported materials.” Which surely beats, say, relying on child slave labour in Congo or a capricious Chinese regime… which owns the Congo mines anyway. The problem as always is the economics.

Canary Media praises OnePlanet Solar Recycling as a “startup”, which nowadays conveys cool images of smart rebels breaking molds. But of course it’s another way of saying the firm isn’t yet technically successful in the sense of making money selling things people want. So what’s the deal here?

Actually, before we get to it, let us confess to a genuine if naïve puzzlement that mining companies don’t pay to dig up existing landfills in North America and Europe. When you think of the effort that goes into extracting metal from “ore”, which means going somewhere remote with huge machines, digging up rocks, crushing them and doing some energy-intensive thing or another probably involving caustic chemicals to free the stuff, you’d think digging up trash, burning the eggshells and mattress stuffing and keeping the already refined metal would make sense.

At least we’d think so… if not for the fact that they don’t do it. And they know better than we the cost-benefit analysis. (Unless governments just don’t let them, which isn’t inconceivable either.)

By the same token, given the particular difficulty of procuring various components of alternative energy systems, difficulty here meaning hideous environmental footprint as well as cost, it seems like a no-brainer to take the ones that were already manufactured but quickly shattered or wore out, and tossing them back in the smelter. Except if it did, you’d expect someone in a relatively free-market economy would have started doing it long ago.

Still, someone has to go first, right? It’s therefore vaguely encouraging that OnePlanet’s CEO, André Pujadas, used to work at a steelmaker that pioneered using electric arc furnaces to turn scrap metal into new steel instead of using coal-fired blast furnaces to extract it from ore. As we were saying above.

Unfortunately a bit of rain promptly falls on the parade. According to Heatmap:

“The relentless cost declines for solar technology driven by mass production and steady innovation – largely in China – has resulted in a commercial ecosystem where pricing is dominated by everything but the solar panels themselves.”

This piece hypes a company focused on a very different issue. According to its chief executive:

“for utility scale, which is where we’re focused on, only 20% of the cost is the panel. So 80% of the actual cost of a solar deployment — which is what matters, right? The cost of deploying it — labor, land, the balance of systems, the construction loans. It’s typical, I would say, of engineers — everything’s about the commodity. Whereas from my experience, it depends on the total cost. What we’re doing is, we’re saving the cost where it matters: on the labor.”

Got it? In case not, supposedly the firm in question, Tandem PV:

“uses so-called perovskite technology to build solar panels that, the company says, are already more efficient than existing silicon panels, and could become almost twice as efficient as existing panels as the technology improves. Perovskite refers to a group of minerals that share a similar structure and which, when stacked with silicon, can absorb a broad range of light, maximizing the efficiency of converting light to electricity.”

Perovskite no less. And if you’re still wondering how stacking a group of minerals that share a similar structure to silicon saves you on labour, the answer is that it costs just as much to install them but they then produce a lot more energy, so you get far more energy per dollar of labour costs. Or it costs less to install them because you need fewer, again saving money. Which actually does make sense… if it works.

Which is always the hitch particularly if you’re dealing with people who’ve repeatedly assured you the next thing will be a huge success and it wasn’t. Including insisting that alternative energy is already cheaper than conventional and getting cheaper by the word, in which case cutting costs while desirable isn’t urgent.

Still, if they can do it let them. And they’ll still be making solar panels which will still end up on the junk heap one way or another. So back to the recycling of same.

Which supposedly just keeps getting better. From the PR department, in this case Canary Media, here’s the marvellous mold-breaking in that area:

“OnePlanet’s ambitious plans rest on its unique solar recycling process. The company uses existing technologies but developed a proprietary workflow for divvying panels by shape, model, and physical integrity before crushing, grinding, and chemically treating the hardware to extract raw materials.”

Egad. A startup and a proprietary workflow. On top of which:

“Employing artificial intelligence and state-of-the-art sensors, OnePlanet can recover not just the panels’ glass, plastic, and silicon but up to 97% of metal concentrates of aluminum and copper, Pujadas said.”

What could go wrong?

Well, for starters, or startuppers, the plan doesn’t see even the “debut disassembly line” up and running until 2027. And from the projected initial 2 million “solar modules” per year being deconstructed, they’re aiming for 6 million by 2030. Which sounds kind of slow.

Worse, the story admits that:

“Among the biggest challenges for recycling is finding cheap methods to transport panels to the processing facility.”

And when your better supply source is actually worse, it explains why you’re entering a virgin field. And of course here come the subsidies:

“OnePlanet is also getting some help from the Inflation Reduction Act. The company’s facility will be funded in part by a $14.5 million investment from the Department of Energy’s competitive 48C tax credit awarded last year.”

Since the plant is projected to cost $90 million and the firm has raised just $7 million so far according to Canary Media, it sounds uncomfortably like more starry-eyed hype from people who’ve been wildly overenthusiastic about everything else so far.

Still, we sincerely hope it works, by which we mean makes money without ongoing subsidies. Because especially if governments are going to keep subsidizing solar energy, it’s good to have someone cleaning up their mess.