From 2GreenEnergy Super-Supporter Gary Tulie: Is 1366 Technologies in Elon Musk’s Sights?
Here’s an interesting post on a new manufacturing process for solar PV cells. I note that I ran across a similar approach at the Solar Power International show a couple of weeks ago, under development at NREL (the US Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Lab), where a spokesperson told me about their work with perovskites, especially calcium titanium oxide, CaTiO3. Gary writes:
1366 Technologies is a company with a novel, lower cost and cleaner manufacturing process for solar wafers.
Rather than use the traditional method of first growing a large silicon ingot, then cutting it into thin slices with a diamond saw, the process makes wafers directly from molten silicon without the need for any cutting.
This new process eliminates the waste inherent in sawing silicon ingots allowing all the silicon to be used for wafers rather than turning half the silicon into dust, eliminates several stages of the manufacturing process, dramatically cuts energy consumption, and allows the formation of consistently top quality wafers with high surface uniformity, and no microscopic cracks. As such, the wafers are ideal for processing into premium quality high efficiency solar cells and modules.
Cost may well be half or less the cost of manufacturing silicon wafers by traditional methods.
In the last few days, 1366 Technologies has announced that its first commercial production facility will be in Genesee County New York – not too far from Buffalo where Solar City are building their 1GW per annum high efficiency solar panel factory. Initial capacity for 1366 Technologies is planned to be 250MW per annum with subsequent phases expanding this to 3GW per annum.
Could it be that Solar City is in discussions behind the scenes about utilising a substantial proportion of the output of the Genesee factory?
Solar City’s 22% efficient solar panels are already projecting a manufacturing cost of $0.55 per watt, imagine how much more attractive they would be if lower cost wafer manufacturing reduced this by a further $0.08 to $0.10 per watt! It looks to me as if we will be hearing much more about a possible tie up, investment, or supply contract between Solar City and 1366 Technologies in the near future.
