Solar factories in a box. Is it sustainable?
Will turnkey solar fabrication surviveJust finished reading about how Oerlikon Solar raised its Amorph High Performance line's capacity by 50 percent using zinc oxide. According to GreentechMedia that means "along with an improvement in the speed of production, should bring the cost of making solar panels on this fabrication system from about $1.50 per watt to about $1.20 per watt for customers, he said. The company's goal is to get to the magic $1 per watt or less figure in "the next couple of years."
Like Applied Materials, Oerlikon is a turnkey provider of a solar factory in a box, where customers buy everything to produce their own solar cells. Both are a competitor with thin-film leader, First Solar. Yet, First Solar isn't as reliant on others to produce its technology.
While I don't have any answers, the viability of turnkey solar factories is a very interesting phenomenon. Will it be the dominant model in the future?
Regardless, amongst these three players, isn't consolidation inevitable?
Labels: green investing, solar power
posted by Dahcredyns @ 9:37 AM
2 comments
2 Comments:
Thought that you might want to see this. Came accross it on Semiconductor international:
http://www.semiconductor.net/article/CA6612546.html?nid=3572&rid=1898799982
Applied Materials has successfully developed ... PECVD processes for the absorber layer deposition for both SJ and TJ cells [that have] demonstrated excellent uniformity (<5% variations for cell I-V characteristics) on a substrate size of 2.2 × 2.6 m. a-Si:H SJ modules and a-Si:H/µc-Si:H TJ modules with 6.6% and 9.3% stabilized efficiencies, respectively, have been produced.
One should make a clear disctinction between lab results, as Applied has acheived, versus real world, scale manufacturing results as deomstracted by Oerlikon and its customers. When evaluating data, the understanding the number of modules that have been produced with those characteristics is crucial. The cost per watt targets needed by the industry to acheive grid parity are going to be enabled by solutions that ensure predictable, repeatable mass production results. Lab data is great, but what Oerlikon has achieved is in a different league.
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