The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) serves as the sponsor for the project. As NREL engages with various stakeholders in the clean energy landscape, they seek to better understand particular segments in greater detail. Alongside NREL’s research, the team was engaged to dig into the circular economy landscape of solar photovoltaic and large-format battery technologies. Specifically, the UM team split into two task groups to focus on the following headline questions:

What is the policy and regulatory landscape for solar PV recycling and end-of-life practices? What is the state of the end-of-life electric vehicle battery market, including stakeholders, value-added activities, and focus areas?

The group focusing on the solar PV recycling and end-of-life practices placed a special emphasis on finding, understanding and analyzing decommissioning plans of existing solar plants. By analyzing the plans the team now has an understanding of the major factors driving decommissioning costs, solar PV recycling estimates for different states across the US, and how these will influence future deployment of solar projects and present management of end of life solar products.

The group focusing on large-format batteries did a literature review and conducted interviews with industry experts to better understand what the end of life landscape for battery systems looks like. They found that a majority of stakeholders in the space are focused on recycling and reverse logistics. The drivers of circular economy for EV batteries include the value of the metals that can be recovered as well as policy, while the barriers are a need for more investment to build up infrastructure and cost-effectiveness of end-of-life processes.