My good friend Joe McCabe recently wrote in another solar blog about new PV power cell plants being built in the USA using CdTe thin film technologies.
To put into perspective, in 2003, I bought a thin-film solar cell factory of about 3Megawatts of total capacity, located in Wales. Today, we are looking at companies in the thin-film space owning about 1000 times that amount of production. No wonder it had no possible legs to stand on by itself!
So one must wonder out loud…how does anyone build small thin-film PV plants and remain competitive? The answer is….very carefully! If perhaps you have an internal client (ie. self, partner, etc…), then you can make, so long as you don’t mind paying more to yourself than you could to others. If that formula includes carbon offsets, and other government incentives, then you may be able to make an economic argument for smaller size plants (ie. under 100MW).
Yet clearly the world of thin-film is radically changing from those days where I bought the Welsh factory. And clearly that must mean that strategies must change for the “perimetric” thin-film players of this world. Investing in production capacity in the thin film world is already challenged enough by the ever decreasing crystalline prices. To add the competitiveness of the plants against their peers is to create a serious hurdle against success.
If your company has internal solar module production needs, whether its a parent that requires solar energy for feed-in-tariff programs or wishes to use them for carbon offsets, then consider yourself lucky…for now. It takes a skilled team to have a successful thin-film plant. Yield issues abound. The key is to have plant management with a proven record of successfully delivering high yields within a narrow “bell curve” of output ratings. Localization is therefore the only true advantage of a smaller entity. Its flexibility and local nature provide hope that the “universe” model of putting down smaller factories can offset the high cost of transport in places where it makes sense fiscally and from an operational perspective.
Thin-film continues to increase its market share. It will continue to do so as the lowest cost manufacturing process that has been scaled on decent size production levels to date. I am watching developments at Nanosolar to see how they fare with their printing press technology.
No matter who wins the cost per watt race, the consumers and industrial users will be the winners in the end, and by extension, so will my dream that one day the energy we consume is brought to us by the very natural elements we were provided with in the first place…
Sass
Sass