Moser Baer to Build Worlds Largest Thin Film Fab

Moser Baer India Ltd (Bombay: 517140.BO) announced that it would set up the world's largest thin-film solar fab to achieve new cost benchmarks. It has entered into a technology partnership with the US-based Applied Materials, Inc, the global leader in nano manufacturing technology solutions for the electronics industry.

"The company will start with a capacity of 40 MW, which will be increased to 200 MW by 2009. With this initial capacity, we are expecting a turnover of 100 million dollar annually," company's CFO Y B Mathur said.

The modules will use glass panels that are four times bigger than today's largest solar panel substrates, driving down panel production and solar electricity costs.

The unit for making thin films would be commercially operational by March 2008 and the construction will begin next week, Managing Director Deepak Puri said.

"According to market figures, the thin film based solar modules market is expected to reach a size of five billion dollars globally by 2010 with a demand of 2 GW," Puri said.

In its announcement of the project Applied Materials, Inc. (Nasdaq: AMAT) said that it has been selected by Moser Baer India Limited to develop and install in New Delhi, India, the world's first Generation (Gen) 8.5 Thin Film Solar Module Production Line. This first Gen 8.5 line will manufacture photovoltaic solar modules using ultra-large 5.7m² substrates (2.2m x 2.6m). These glass panels, which are four times bigger than today's largest solar panel substrates, are expected to drive down panel production costs and help reduce the overall cost of solar electricity.

Applied’s Thin Film Solar Module Production Line is expected to be delivered in the second half of calendar 2007. Applied’s contract with Moser Baer is for a fully-integrated production line including chemical vapor deposition, physical vapor deposition , laser scribing, factory software, automation and other supporting technologies required to establish a solar panel manufacturing facility with a rated initial capacity of 40 megawatts per year. Applied's Gen 8.5 Line is designed for flexibility because production output can be configured for final product sizes from 1.4m² to 5.7m². Current thin film production lines are configured for panel sizes limited to dimensions less than 1.5m².

Baer said it plans to invest over $250 million in thin film technology over the next three years.

In a May 2006 post in the Cleantech blog Neil Dikemen reported that Baer had announced it was planning on a 80 MW CdTe photovoltaic market entry, targeted in 2007.

Dikerman went on to say that CdTe, a thin film solar process whose largest proponent currently is First Solar, has the theoretical advantage of being significantly lower cost than most solar processes. However, like many thin film processes, it has proven very tricky to do in volume while maintaining product quality, and does make not a particularly high efficiency cell. As most of the main issues in CdTe boil down to control and process consistency, areas where AMAT is particularly good, it would be interesting to see if AMAT were doing work in this area. That could be big news for the solar and cleantech industry.

Good sleuthing Neal. I would presume that Moser Baer is still pursuing the CdTe technology

[First Solar (Nasdaq: FSLR) recently announced the construction of a 100 MW CdTe manufacturing plant in Kedah, Malaysia with production planned to begin in the second half of 2008.  It currently operates a manufacturing plant in Ohio with 75MW nameplate capacity and is in the process of completing a manufacturing plant in Germany with 100MW nameplate capacity. On their site they cite the National Renewable Energy Laboratory as recognizing CdTe’s potential for achieving the lowest production costs among current thin film technologies. (Photon International, November 2004, page 50). CdTe module costs well below $1.00/Wp have been predicted by NEEL and others.]

Moser Baer Photo Voltaic Limited (MVP), a wholly-owned subsidiary of Moser Baer India Limited, is in the business of photovoltaic (PVC) cells and modules. MVP plans to manufacture solar cells and modules by straddling multiple technologies including crystalline silicon, concentration, Nani technology and thin films. It has equity stakes in St ion Corp (formerly Structures), a Silicon Valley-based Nanete startup focusing on solar photovoltaic and solar concentrator technology firms Solaria and Sol Focus.

I have been waiting for Applied Materials to unveil the solar technology that they have been developing since they acquired Applied Films for their physical vapor deposition technology in May 2006. In this presentation (slide 16) they predict the cost per watt to scale with fab size. In another presentation (currently not online) they predicted costs at $1.25/watt for a 25 MW fab, $1.00/watt at 600 MW and $0.71 per watt at 1 GW. According to this report they have forecast that by 2010 there will be a number of solar manufacturers running plants with 10 production lines, with each production line capable of producing 100 megawatts of solar cells a year.

Moser Baer entering the CdTe market, along with First Solar should create some competition for CIGS and CIS technology.  Perhaps a few brief paragraphs would help to understand where their technology fits in with the other thin film technologies.

The Baer press release did not refer to efficiency, but I found references in the literature to CdTe efficiencies as high as 16.5%, not to say this could be reproduced on a production scale. 

Nanosolar is building a CIGS production facility in California with a capacity of 430 MW when completed. Nanosolar has a thin-film technology that it claims is 10 times as cost-efficient as traditional cells, and a printing-based manufacturing technique that it says will bring the price down to less than a dollar per watt, competitive with natural gas and peak electricity prices.

Accoring to this story Miasole has a CIGS cell in its laboratory that has delivered 19.5 percent efficiency. That would translate to about 15 percent efficiency in high volume manufacturing, said CEO David Pearce. By the end of 2007, the company hopes to have 200 megawatts of capacity.

Shell is working on another thin film technology, CIS, which promises relatively high efficiencies. According to this story, in 1999 the  National Renewable Energy Laboratory developed a CIS photovoltaic cell with 18.8 percent efficiency, and at that time Siemans was marketing CIS cells with 12.1% efficiency, so this technology has potential to have relatively high efficiency. Shell has plans to open up a 20 MW plant in Germany in 2008.

Comments

[Greg Woulf]

Is there any way to find what the payback time limit is?

Whenever I see a quote for cost/watt I wonder what the payback period is, cause if you set it at 10 years and the average life was 20 years then there's a back end bonus that I feel should be reported. Conversely if you set it at 20 years and they only last 10 then they're underestimating cost.

[Kit P.]

Greg, the payback period is longer than the design life of the components. Unless you can design, build, and maintain your system; you will only lose money. This is called a hobby.

When I see solar panels or BMWs, I think bad logic.

[*_*]

Kit, Greg, the payback period is not by definition longer than the component life. It is true that the current price of PV has a payback period longer than the design life, without subsidies. With the largest subsidies (certain states like NJ and CA) you can make a profit after 10 years or so.

All PV panels have at least a 25-year manufacturer warranty within a reasonable range of degradation of output. The lifetime is expected to be at least 30 years.

While it is true that unsubsidized, there is not a return on investment on PV currently, the prices that are being discussed in the article above represent real return on investments. $0.75/W (this price must be the manufacturing cost not the resell cost) could be competitive with utilities with the balance of system components and other costs. A site like findsolar.com will allow you to play with the residential finance #s of PV.

[*_*]

Jim @ Energy Blog,

Could you re-link "this presentation" link, it doesn't seem to work.

Production-line CdTe from First Solar are around 9-10% efficient. They are constantly trying to improve the efficiency toward what has been achieved in the lab.

I would also like to remind everyone that efficiency only has meaning when dealing with surface area constraints. A 20% panel costing $800/m^2 (i.e. ~$4/Wp) is much more expensive than a 5% panel costing $100/m^2 (i.e. ~$2/Wp). The 5% panel will of course take up 4x the surface area of the 20% one.

[Sky King]

I agree it's all about surface area. There's a company offering thin film panels for $3/Watt but they have no frame, just four tabs on the back and bare wires (no MC). By the time you add mounting options and MC connectors, you are up to $4.00/Watt anyway. And, they are the same size as a 200W panel and only produce 42W. So, instead of the 15 across the top of my roof, I'd need 68 which would more than cover my entire roof. It's all about improving the efficiency of thin film to reduce surface area.

[Jim from The Energy Blog]

*_* The link I was refering to in the post is no longer active. I found another presentation, but it is 6 months older, has less detailed information and does not give costs on the gen 8.5. technology that Baer bought. The post has been revised to reflect these changes. I would gather from this data that Baer's cost of production could be in the range of $2.00 per watt assuming a single production line of 40 MW.