Fab & Facilities

Whether in the USA as a part of a manufacturing resurgence or elsewhere in the world, solar producers need to be smarter than ever about where they choose to locate new operation centres. Solar manufacturing site selection demands analytical rigour. The intent of this article is to share strategies and tools that can help owners make the best informed choices about where to locate new manufacturing operations.

Economics will always play a crucial role in the way PV technology advances. However, the current generation of products is facing substantial business challenges in the attempt to scale the product technologies. This paper is the fifth in a series covering business analysis for PV processes. The methods applied in these papers fall into two categories: cost of ownership (COO) modelling and cost and resource modelling. Both methods examine the business considerations associated with the adoption of new processes, tools or materials. This is more critical than ever. Nearterm issues – in some cases the survival of the business – heavily influence today's decision processes. This paper tries to identify the areas that it is thought will produce the largest near-term paybacks. The areas identified are n-type wafers, Al2O3 passivation and copper metallization.

Production equipment is the backbone of the PV industry, but the equipment sector is suffering because of overcapacity. The 2012 global capacity utilization is at 55% for crystalline silicon (x-Si) module production, 70% for cadmium telluride (CdTe) and 80% for copper indium gallium (di)selenide (CIGS). Under these market conditions, there are almost no expected capacity expansions in the near term. The overcapacity has driven the average selling price (ASP) for modules significantly lower, resulting in hyper-competition in the PV industry, where almost all PV companies recognize the importance of product differentiation while still reducing costs. These market conditions present an opportunity for equipment manufacturers to differentiate their offerings through enabling lower production costs and higher efficiency of cells and modules.

The cleaning performance of three different fluorine-containing precursors – sulphur hexafluoride (SF6), nitrogen trifluoride (NF3) and molecular fluorine (F2) – is compared from theoretical, experimental and commercial points of view. Experiments were performed using an Oerlikon Solar KAI Gen 5 (1300mm x 1100mm) R&D platform. For the experiments with F2, an ‘on-site/on-demand’ generator from The Linde Group was installed at the Oerlikon Solar facility in Trübbach, Switzerland. The SF6-based cleaning process was found to be up to 75% less efficient than the corresponding NF3 or F2 process. A comparison between NF3 and F2 indicates that a significantly larger process window is available for reactor cleaning when F2 is used in place of NF3. This leads to both time and gas mass savings, improving productivity and bringing down the cost of ownership of the reactor cleaning process. As a direct consequence, Oerlikon Solar has decided to transfer the process to their production KAI MT plasma-enhanced chemical vapour deposition (PECVD) platforms.

What does an industry need for sustainable, long-term success? A market, customers and suppliers, and – most certainly – excellent products that can be sold. When looking at various different mature industries there is one thing they all have in common – they have industry-initiated roadmaps! With SEMI’s experience in the semiconductor industry over the last 40 years, the example of the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS) has proved that pre-competitive industry collaboration among the supply chain and among competitors leads to a reduction in costs, a better time to market and an increased efficiency. Moreover, it helps all players to benefit from jointly solved manufacturing challenges.

Although the different roadmaps for PV vary somewhat from each other, the bottom line always remains the same: exponential growth is predicted over the next 5 –10 years. The latest cell technologies meet the demand for grid parity even in central Europe and PV will therefore continue to be the most popular source of renewable energy. In consequence, the whole PV industry has developed from a niche product towards mass production. Every player along the entire value chain is now faced with the need to stay profitable while meeting the ever-increasing demands of the market. Implementing suitable automation can improve competitiveness and thus pave the way to becoming or remaining successful in this turbulent market.

Several PV module producers have performed a carbon footprint analysis and published a sustainability report as part of their corporate social responsibility policy. Comparison of carbon footprint results is difficult because several international standards and life cycle assessment (LCA) databases are used. No product footprint category rules (PFCR) or product category rules (PCRs) for photovoltaics exist, so LCAs are performed with varying underlying assumptions. Furthermore, a fair comparison can only be made when all environmental footprints of a product are taken into account.

As a relative newcomer to the industrial world compared to more mature manufacturing sectors, the PV industry has not yet been subject to consistent environmental regulatory standards internationally. Like all industries that have preceded it, PV manufacturing is seeing its regulatory future evolve as PV producers migrate to different regions of the world. With this global expansion come significantly different levels of regulatory stringency, reflective of local conditions and cultures.

How much carbon is emitted in producing a solar PV module and launching it on the market? This could be an important question which project developers, installers, investors, government agencies and end customers might ask solar PV manufacturers in the future. To answer it, producers need to know the direct emissions from the manufacturing process, as well as those generated from the activities of manufacturers in the upstream supply chain (including raw material acquisition, upstream energy use, packaging, transportation and procurement), and also those arising from module usage and eventual recycling. This paper, written in a cooperation between EuPD Research and Deutsches CleanTech Institut (DCTI), presents an overview of PV’s carbon footprint.

For a vertically integrated solar cell production starting with purification of silicon feedstock and ending with the production of solar cells, it is necessary to have control over all possible parameters that may affect yield, efficiency and product quality. This paper presents an approach for tracking products with minimal effort using a contactless technique. The method allows wafers to be virtually reconstructed into bricks and ingots, as well as recognizing the precursor wafer for each solar cell.