For companies retiring end-of-life solar panels or undergoing repowering, that transition of power is often a necessary but expensive process. You know the saying: It’s out with the old, in with the new solar hardware and all the associated costs.
Yet, in most cases, the defunct solar panels still hold value even if they can no longer be used for power generation.
“Today, only around 20% of all electronics (including solar panels and EV chargers) are captured for reuse or recycling,” explained Grayson Shor, the co-founder and chief product officer of urban mining startup Buckstop.
Shor told pv magazine USA that the other 80% left on the table equates to hundreds of billions of dollars in annual revenue for recyclers and resellers.
Founded this year, Buckstop is building what it refers to as the “Kelley Blue Book for energy and industrial assets,” though the company is starting with solar and electric vehicle infrastructures. Rather than recycling or remanufacturing assets themselves, the company’s AI-powered instant asset appraisal model evaluates end-of-life (EOL) solar modules and identifies the most cost-effective method to recover value via a network of resale or recycling partners.
Shor explained that while the cofounding team came from industries ranging from national security and reverse logistics to critical minerals and commodity trading, all four cofounders saw a common problem in the renewables sector: a lack of circularity.
He noted that during his time as the senior lead for circular economy and battery sustainability at Amazon, an influx of EOL batteries triggered many a “WTF moment” when he realized that there existed no efficient standardized system for the disposition of energy assets. At any one time, Shor was juggling hundreds of assets at facilities across the world trying to find safe and responsible offtakers.
This often required hours of cold calls to recyclers to request and negotiate offtake quotes which differed widely in prices.
“A lot of asset operators will take the easy route and send their defunct assets either to a landfill or to a liquidator, where they have to pay to get rid of them,” Shor said, adding that there’s a lot of value that’s left untapped. In the case of solar assets, what existing disposal solutions for EOL systems fail to address, he said, is the fact that panels might need to be replaced before their performance warranties run out.
“It creates this massive value gap for operators who fail to capture resale opportunities in secondary markets and pay excessive decommissioning costs,” he said. “It turns repowering, which should be a strategic asset optimization decision, into an expensive operational burden.”
To date, Buckstop has appraised over $50 million of assets from initial customers, split between solar and EV charging companies; the company’s waitlist amounts to over $1.05 billion of customer assets waiting for appraisals. All that’s needed for the appraisal? The product name, ID, OEM and model, as well as the asset’s current condition, zip code and date of deployment.
Shor noted that having near-universally-applicable evaluation criteria was a priority for the company, who wanted to ensure a quick, seamless appraisal process. That’s why the company is developing an “algorithmic assay” that provides a novel approach to accurately valuing finished goods and their underlying components.
“You can’t manage what you can’t measure, and you can’t sell what you can’t price. There is not a single source of truth that values EOL assets,” he explained. That’s what Buckstop aims to create: a more efficient system that benefits asset owners, EOL processors and stakeholders like lenders by measuring deployed feedstock and helping downstream recyclers recover more material and critical minerals from domestically sourced “urban mined” EOL electronics.
“Our goal is that every single company that works with us ends up with more money in their pocket towards their bottom line than they had before they started working with us and that their EOL materials are being held as the highest environmental value possible,” Shor said. “That material is going to be reused and put back into the supply chain, which helps reduce beginning-of-life carbon emissions.”
“Every dollar we can put back in our customers’ and partners’ bank accounts helps them grow and helps the green energy transition roll on and expand,” he added.
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