The Circular Solar File
Suvi Sharma
He spent seventeen years putting solar panels up. Now he runs the company that figures out what to do when they come down.
CO-FOUNDER & CEO / SOLARCYCLE / OAKLAND, CA
Photo: SOLARCYCLE
He spent seventeen years putting solar panels up. Now he runs the company that figures out what to do when they come down.
CO-FOUNDER & CEO / SOLARCYCLE / OAKLAND, CA
Photo: SOLARCYCLE
Most people in solar are obsessed with the next gigawatt going onto a roof. Suvi Sharma got curious about the panel coming off it. After building solar his entire career, he started a company on the unglamorous end of the lifecycle - the part where a panel stops making power and most of the industry stops paying attention.
SOLARCYCLE, the company Sharma co-founded in 2022 and runs as CEO, takes in retired and broken solar panels and pulls them apart down to the molecule. Glass, silver, silicon, copper, aluminum - recovered, purified, and in many cases remanufactured into materials that go straight back into the supply chain. The company says it recovers up to roughly 95% of the value in a panel.
That last part is the twist. Plenty of recyclers shred panels for scrap. Sharma is building something closer to a refinery, where the output is not a pile of crushed glass but specialty solar glass good enough to make new panels with.
The proof is going up in Cedartown, Georgia. A $344 million plant, more than 600 jobs, and a plan to make 5 to 6 gigawatts of solar glass a year - some of the first crystalline-silicon panel glass manufactured in the United States. The adjacent recycling facility, a 5 GW operation, anchors the loop.
It is a strange place for a math major from Northwestern to end up. Then again, Sharma has made a career of being early to the next solar problem before it became obvious to everyone else.
We're not only extracting the materials out of the solar panel, but we are also purifying and remanufacturing some new materials from those so we enter those back into the supply chain.- Suvi Sharma, to Waste Dive
SOLARCYCLE was not a solo act. Sharma brought the manufacturing side, having spent two decades building panels and the machines that move them. His co-founders cover the parts he doesn't.
Jesse Simons came from the Sierra Club, where he ran national programs - the advocacy and policy instincts of someone who spent years arguing for the energy transition before it had a recycling problem worth solving. Pablo Ribeiro Dias arrived from the research bench, a photovoltaic recycling specialist who had spent his career on the chemistry of pulling a panel apart.
Put together: a builder, an advocate, and a scientist. The idea was that solar recycling would only work if it was cheap enough to beat the landfill, clean enough to satisfy the people who care, and technical enough to actually recover the good stuff. Each founder owns one of those.
The thesis landed with investors who don't usually agree on much. Fifth Wall and HG Ventures led the $30 million Series A. Microsoft signed on as a strategic investor. Prologis Ventures, Closed Loop Partners, and the Urban Innovation Fund came too. The federal government chipped in more than $64 million in 48C advanced-energy tax credits for the Georgia plant.
Suvi Sharma - manufacturing, scale, and 20+ years moving panels from factory to roof.
Jesse Simons - former Sierra Club National Program Director. Policy and mission.
Pablo Ribeiro Dias - photovoltaic recycling expert from a deep research background.
Inside Solaria, Sharma helped start Nextracker, the solar tracking company that follows the sun across the sky to squeeze more power out of a panel. It was spun out, scaled, acquired by Flex, and eventually went public. Most founders would lead with that. For Sharma it's a line on the resume.
The first big wave of solar is starting to age out. Sharma saw a coming mountain of panels and a supply chain with no plan for it - and decided the smartest move was to make the end of life look like the beginning of another one.
Strip a crystalline-silicon module and you get glass, aluminum framing, and small but valuable amounts of silver, silicon, and copper. SOLARCYCLE's pitch is that almost none of it needs to hit a landfill. The bars below show the rough share of value SOLARCYCLE says it can recover - the headline number is up around 95%.
Annual solar glass capacity planned at the Georgia plant - among the first c-Si panel glass made in the US.
Recycling capacity at the adjacent Georgia facility, anchoring the closed loop.
There's an easy political answer to solar waste: pass extended-producer-responsibility laws that force manufacturers to take panels back. Sharma isn't sold on rushing it. His argument is that heavy-handed mandates push the market toward cheap, low-value recycling - shredding panels to tick a box - instead of the advanced material recovery that makes the economics actually work.
Mandate the floor, he warns, and you may freeze the industry at the floor. It's a counterintuitive position for someone whose whole company is recycling, and exactly the kind of long-horizon read you'd expect from a founder who has watched solar policy cycles come and go since 2003.
By scaling recycling and solar glass manufacturing through a vertically integrated process, we're filling a critical gap in America's solar supply chain.- Suvi Sharma, on the Georgia plant
The goal is simple to say and hard to do: close the loop, so the cleanest energy we have doesn't leave a mess behind. No panel in a landfill.- The SOLARCYCLE thesis, in plain terms