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The Wanxiang Group may be a familiar name to those in the automotive parts supply business, but the multibillion-dollar Chinese conglomerate has stayed off—or at least on the screen-edge of—most solar PV observers’ radar. Yet the company is one of the largest solar silicon ingot and wafer producers in China. It also started a cell and module business in 2005, with plans to get to 300MW of capacity in the next year or so. Wanxiang has been operating in the U.S. for awhile, with more than 4000 employees, but had not dipped its toe in the Stateside solar pond until recently.
With the help of more than $2 million in Illinois state grants and incentives as well as the turnkey technical expertise of Spire Solar, Wanxiang Solar has opened a crystalline-silicon module line in the Chicago suburb of Rockford. But that’s not all: the new division, benefiting from another $4 million in state funds, has joined with New Generation Power to form Rockford Solar Partners, with plans to build a prodigious 62MW PV power-generation plant in Illinois.
On the heels of the ribbon-cutting ceremony at the $12.5 million, 40,000 sq ft module plant (attended by Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn and other muckedy-mucks), Wanxiang Solar’s Daniel Li provided a few more details via email about the new assembly operation.
The initial production capacity of the Rockford moduling line is 12MW, according to Li, with the potential to expand to 100MW or more, depending on the market. The factory became operational and started producing modules in April, employing 15 workers across two shifts.
The building itself was purpose-built from the ground up, not a repurposed/renovated facility like many of the module factories springing up in North America. Ground-breaking occurred in September 2009, with equipment installation taking place in March 2010.
The fully automated turnkey line, which was provided and installed by Spire, will produce both poly- and monocrystalline modules with power ratings ranging from 160W to 290W. The processed silicon slices getting strung up and laid out in the panels come from a “major solar cell maker in Taiwan,” he said.
The UL-certified modules rolling off the Rockford line are intended primarily for the U.S. market and are essentially the same design as those being produced in Wanxiang’s assembly facilities in Huangzhou, explained Li.
A photo (shown at left, bottom) that he sent me showed a few tree-like ground-mounted PV arrays just outside the parking lot, so I asked the project manager about them. He told me that there are a total of four arrays, each with a dozen 230W panels, adding up to 11KW of installed capacity.
Spire VP Mark Willingham said, in a separate email, that from his company’s perspective, “we see this new factory as a great example of several things: the U.S. market is growing and needs more local production; modules are large and getting larger, cheap and getting cheaper, and both [trends] will continue. As this happens the model of centralized manufacturing will not serve this product as well as regional or distributed manufacturing; Spire works very well with companies who want to enter the US market,” which can “either be experienced players like Wanxiang or newcomers like Solartech Renewables.”
Mark’s boss, perpetual-motion man and distributed-manufacturing cheerleader Roger Little, added his two Lincoln pennies’ worth in yet another email. “We’re very happy with the relationship. Not only do we expect them to expand in the U.S., but we have an opportunity to help them expand at their main factory in China as well. Also, we will be purchasing modules from them for our PV systems operations.”
Does this mean that Spire has struck a deal with Wanxiang Solar for modules to supply its in-house project pipeline?
“This is a unique thing for equipment makers as it allows us to potentially be a customer of our customer’s products,” noted Willingham. “We made an agreement in principle but need a project that matches our module needs with their specific ones, and this has not happened yet but will.”
One project that will feature tens of thousands of U.S.-made Wanxiang modules is the Rockford Solar Project, of which Gov. Quinn also made green hay as part of the ribbon-cutting photo opp. All this flaring up of solar activity on the state chief exec’s part had a legislative angle. He had signed HB6202 earlier that morning, a bill “which establishes interim solar targets to help Illinois successfully scale up to reach the state's solar renewable portfolio standard of 6% by 2015,” according to the PR.
Although Wanxiang’s Li could not go into any detail about the proposed solar farm—its precise location (apparently some place called “Freedom Field” in the Rockford area), construction phases and overall timeline, EPC component, etc.—some information about the 62MW project has emerged.
The Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity grant of $4.025 million (facilitated by the U.S. Recovery Act’s Community Renewable Energy Program) is apparently equivalent to 1.26% of the total cost of the project, according to the press release. With a little back-of-the-envelope calculation, that extrapolates to $319.424 million, or about $5.125 million per megawatt installed. The PR also says that 68% of the total (about $217.208 million) “will be financed by nongovernmental sources.”
The New Generation Power website says that the power plant will generate more than 113 million KWh per year. The site also claims that the “Rockford Solar Project has met the major developmental and preconstruction milestones and is on schedule for a 2011 completion of the 62MW facility.”
“The RSP solar facility can fulfill the entire Illinois mandate required by HB6202 in 2012” and that the company “will generate renewable energy credits from the facility’s operations…and the venture “will produce and deliver electricity from the Rockford solar power generating facility to our customer base comprised of utilities, resellers and end-users,” according to the site.
In addition to the usual stats about how much energy will be generated annually by the PV power station (enough for >10,000 homes) and how much less carbon dioxide and ultrafine particulate contaminants will be emitted per year (113,000tn and 51tn, respectively), New Generation’s Rockford files include a welcome addition to the benefit list: the estimated amount of fresh water to be conserved. Unlike natural gas, coal, or nuke power plants, solar PV farms require very little water to operate. In RSP's case, the company foresees a gallon of H2O saved for every kilowatt-hour, equivalent to 113 million gallons on an annual basis.
As more incentives help lure solar companies to the state and global players like Wanxiang set up shop, the Land of Lincoln seems to finally be following the path blazed by its photovoltaically inclined fellow Midwesterners in Ohio and Michigan.
PHOTOS COURTESY OF WANXIANG SOLAR
