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Gigawatt Scale Thin Film Solar Fabs: Interpreting Recent Announcements

By Charles Annis, Vice President, Manufacturing Research

A gigawatt is a lot of electricity. A thin film solar cell fab with annual capacity to produce 109 watts worth of panels is on a scale multiple times that of any lines currently in mass production. Assuming the use of 1000 × 1400 mm substrates and power generation of 100W/m², simple calculations suggest that glass input capacity of about 600,000 substrates per month is required. Similarly, if 10 CVD reactors generate 20 MW/year, the fab will need 500 reactors. These sort of calculations will vary substantially depending on glass size, conversion efficiency and deposition rate assumptions, but any way you look at it, a gigawatt fab is big. Recent announcements by Sharp and Applied Materials make it clear that’s the direction the industry is moving, with the goal of lowering costs through economies of scale.

But trying to figure out how and when these newly announced mega solar fabs will actually reach the 1 GW level requires some imagination. Take Sharp’s plans, for example. In the summer of 2007, Sharp announced that it would spend about $1 billion to build a 1 GW thin film solar fab inside its Manufacturing Complex for the 21st Century in Sakai, Japan, next to the world’s first Gen 10 LCD factory, starting production by April 2010. For the past eight months, the supply chain has been busy wondering what glass size the company would use, how they would fit a gigawatt worth of equipment in the relatively small area reserved for solar, who would provide the tool set, why the fab cost projections were so low and how they could ramp to unprecedented scale in less than two years. On March 27, Sharp clarified its plans, but at the same time confirmed some of the skepticism about its original aggressive announcement and seemed to be spinning the story to some degree on how they will actually get to that lofty and prideful 1 GW number.

The company officially announced that it will spend ¥72 billion ($720 million) on the line, “…that is capable of boosting annual production up to a scale of 1 GW per year.” Production will begin by March 2010 at an initial capacity of 480 MW. The official press release also says, “Combined with the 160 MW capacity of the Katsuragi Plant (Nara Prefecture), this will expand Sharp’s global total production capacity for thin-film solar cells to 1 GW in April 2010.” The key equipment set will be produced by Tokyo Electron, and the glass size will be 1000 × 1400 mm. Sharp also indicated the Sakai line will become a model for other thin film solar plants to be developed around the world. The company implied that it would build an additional 360 megawatts of thin-film solar cell capacity in Europe by April 2010, though it hasn’t set locations or investment amounts.

In a different story, but on a similar topic, in an SEC 8-K filing on March 4, Applied Materials revealed it signed a contract with a non-US firm to supply equipment, install and warranty multiple solar factories using its SunFab thin film tandem junction production equipment. The combined output from the fabs will eventually reach 1 GW, and the total contract value is $1.9 billion. The SEC filing does not list the customer, but the Japanese press speculated that the buyer is India’s Moser Baer, which seems to add up.

Clearly, 1 GW thin film solar cell fabs are on their way to becoming reality, but there are still plenty of questions on when, how and where manufacturers will actually ramp to that level. DisplaySearch will be following these stories closely and are adjusting our forecasts as conditions change, but as shown in the table below, we are somewhat discounting even Sharp’s latest announcement and estimating that it won’t be until 2012 before any company will be able to claim the 1 GW in mass production title.

Table 1     Moser Baer & Sharp Forecast TF Solar Cell Capacity Expansion Plans

Source: upcoming DisplaySearch Solar Capacity Supply/Demand & Trends Report (Contact Arie Braun for more information about this upcoming report)

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