A Palo Alto company, Nanosolar Inc., has decided to build the world’s largest factory for making solar power cells.
The estimated total annual cell output, once fully built, will be 430MW, or approximately 200 million cells per year, and an advanced panel assembly factory will be designed to produce more than one million solar panels per year.
Nanosolar has already started ordering volume production equipment. The first cell fab will be located in the San Francisco Bay area and its first panel fab is expected to be located in Berlin, Germany.
Seed-financed by the founders of Google, the company’s team started pursuing its mission of making solar electricity vastly more affordable in 2002. After four years of intense commercial research and development, including two years of manufacturing process development and engineering, the company has now delivered on its ambition to produce a fundamentally less expensive, mass-manufacturable solar cell.
“Thin-film printing overcomes the complexity, high cost, and yield and scalability limitations associated with vacuum-based processes. Nanosolar’s technology enables low-cost, high-yield production previously unattainable,” said Chris Eberspacher, Nanosolar’s head of technology, noting further: “This allows us to produce cells very inexpensively and assemble them into panels that are comparable in efficiency to that of high-volume silicon based PV panels.”
Added Werner Dumanski, Nanosolar’s head of manufacturing and a storage-disk industry manufacturing veteran: “Given the square meter economics of solar, high-throughput high-yield processes have to be used to succeed in this industry. With Nanosolar’s printing process, the fully-loaded cell cost – including materials, consumables, energy, labor, facility, and capital – is less than the depreciation expense alone that vacuum thin-film companies have to pay for the equipment that produces their cells.”
Regarding the scale of the factory, Dumanski points out: “A factory of this capacity would cost more than one billion dollars to build if one used conventional solar technology. Given the distinctly superior capital efficiency of our unique process technology, we can achieve this scale with a lot less capital and as a startup company.”
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