Rethinking Manufacturing for the Gigawatt-Scale Solar Plant
Paula Doe, SEMI, San Jose, www.semi.org -- Semiconductor International, 5/4/2007
Now that Applied Materials has jumped into the large-scale solar tool business, it notes the opportunities for the rest of the infrastructure to come along too.
Applied has projected it will see some $200M in contracts
for integrated solar production lines this year, centered on versions of its
generation 8.5 (2.2 × 2.6 m) physical vapor deposition (PVD) and plasma-enhanced
chemical vapor deposition (PECVD) LCD tools, modified to make amorphous and
microcrystalline silicon films on glass for thin-film solar cells. Moving to the
large substrates — on tools whose development was paid for by the people who
make televisions — is the single biggest lever to bring down the cost per watt,
said Charlie Gay, corporate vice president and general manager of Applied’s
solar business group. Applied has said that the large substrates could
potentially bring solar costs down by 25%. But Gay sees a whole continuum of
further cost reductions to come from other suppliers scaling up near big
thin-film solar plants as well, from the makers of clear solar soda lime glass
to the gas suppliers providing the silane and hydrogen precursors, to those
making the environmental control and packaging equipment. “It’s all about
economies of scale,” he noted. Gay will talk about the issues of going to
gigawatt-scale manufacturing for solar cells to accelerate cost reduction at SEMICON West
on Thursday, July 19, 2007, at the Emerging Technologies and Markets TechXPOT at 10:30 a.m. in the Moscone Center, West Hall, Level 2.
“There’s a wider range of opportunities supplying the solar industry with the same equipment and materials as the semiconductor industry,” Gay said, “because it’s earlier on in the maturation of the industry. It’s like the IC industry years ago when the makers were doing a lot of their own equipment design. But now the industry is growing so fast, there’s no longer time to do it all in house.”
Seemingly targeting local infrastructure are projects such as the 40-60 MW thin-film cell lines Applied sold to Sunfilm in Germany, T-Solar Global in Spain, and Moser Baer in India, slated to start production between late 2007 and 2009. Though the thin-film market is growing faster than that for the more established crystalline silicon solar cells, the crystalline cells are likely to continue to dominate. “Compared to the IC industry, the technology half-life in the solar industry is quite long — about a decade,” Gay noted. And crystalline silicon cell makers are also scaling up their production, such as Germany’s Solar World’s $400M 0.5 GW plant planned by 2009 in the old Komatsu silicon facility in Hillsboro, Ore. Market leader Sharp plans to increase its production to 0.72 GW this year, and Germany’s Q-cells will increase to 1 GW by 2010, according to press reports.
The global solar industry spent some $2.8B on plants and equipment in 2006, according to Solarbuzz’s 2007 Marketbuzz report, as it added 548 MW, for a 33% jump in capacity to a worldwide total of 2204 MW. Solar sales reached $10.6B last year, and will likely grow to somewhere between $18B-$31B by 2011.
Though the $200M in solar sales Applied has projected remains a very tiny fraction of the company’s expected $9B total revenues for 2007, Banc of America analyst Mark FitzGerald thinks Applied Materials sales of solar equipment could actually be as much as $1B-$2B by 2010. And with each dollar in additional revenue typically adding about $13 to a company’s market value, even $600M in solar sector sales for 2008 could give an $8B boost to the company’s $26B market value, leading him to upgrade the stock.
Visit www.semiconwest.org for more information, and to register for SEMICON West, held July 16-20, 2007, in San Francisco.
