Red Herring has an article telling of SolarWorld forming a joint venture to "turn dirty metallurgical-grade silicon into high-purity solar-grade silicon." They also report that: "According to SolarWorld, the joint venture will develop and build a manufacturing plant to produce, initially, 1,000 tons (per year?) of solar-grade silicon from metallurgical-grade silicon."
They also report on other recent entries into the solar silicon market and quote Jesse Pichel, a vice president and senior research analyst of technology at Piper Jaffray as saying“There’s no reason to go to metallurgical silicon,”
The article goes on to question this statement.
From all that I have read, the silicon shortage will not go away in a couple of years as some say, but will continue as long as sales of solar modules continue to grow at 25% to 35% a year. This rate of growth is necessary for an extended period if silicon PV solar is to continue to be the major source of PV modules and PV solar becomes the alternative energy source of choice. The only fly in the ointment is if CIGS and/or CIS technology develops as proponents say and it becomes the low cost source. I have no knowledge of the merits of metallugical silicon.
The silicon market is difficult to analyze because of both solar PV demand and microchip demand. uC silicon is higher grad than PV silicon, and the microchip industry is willing to pay more for very high grade silicon because it's a much smaller fraction of their manufacturing cost compared to solar, but, if the uC industry is running slow, the uC silicon manufacturers dump silicon onto the solar market. Fun fun.
Mike
Posted by: Mike@HCVN | December 11, 2006 at 03:28 PM
Classic black swan problem. We can't predict if the CGIS technology is going to be really disruptive. But if it is, it's a big problem to the polysilicon people.
Posted by: tim | December 11, 2006 at 07:05 PM
Until someone with access to capital wakes up to the fact that huge profits can be made by using solar furnace technology to produce silicon based PV cells. That's how long the shortage will last.
Then capital will pile into this technology.
Posted by: amazingdrx | December 12, 2006 at 10:49 AM
How many suppliers are there in the United States? Does anyone know? Where are they and how do you get in touch with them?
Posted by: Larry Pearlman | April 06, 2007 at 01:54 PM
If you would convince others, you seem open to conviction yourself. What do you think?
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He was such a good analyst.
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