Your daily dose of photovoltaic technology developments and solar news

Mitsubishi Chemical has selected and successfully installed a sun simulator from Pasan, a division of Meyer Berger. This is the first sale to a Japanese customer for the company, which will use the equipment for testing of very large a-Si thin film solar modules and is part of MCC’s move into the BIPV market.

Applied Materials announced last week that it has opened the newly expanded Tainan Manufacturing Center in southern Taiwan, a nearly 15,000 square-meter facility that the company says will enhance its capability to serve thin-film solar photovoltaic and flat-panel display (FPD) customers in Asia. The center employs approximately 150 people and is expected to build and ship about 100 new plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition (PECVD) and physical vapor deposition (PVD) production systems this year

PV Technologies India Limited (PVTIL), a subsidiary of Moser Baer India Ltd. (MBIL), has successfully completed the testing and validation of a process that will enhance the stable efficiency of its single-junction amorphous-silicon thin-film module from 6% to 7.3%.

Groundbreaking on a new, initial 100MW a-Si/SiGe thin-film plant in Henan Province, China, took place on March 2 by a joint-venture start-up. Henan Gogreen Energy has contracted with Apollo Precision and GS-Solar for the turnkey module production equipment at a cost of approximately US$95.4 million. The joint venture was formed by China Gogreen Assets Investment and  Zhengzhou High-Tech Start-up Investment, which is controlled by the Zhengzhou Municipal People’s Government, Henan Province, China. The company is confident that its initial a-Si/SiGe thin-film modules will have a conversion efficiency of 8%.

Portland General Electric is expanding its solar energy resources with a new 2.4MW rooftop project. Once complete, this will be the largest rooftop solar project in the Pacific Northwest. PGE will partner with the U.S. Bank, ProLogis, and several Oregon companies on the project.

Sustainable Energy Technologies and Bosch Solar Energy have agreed to jointly market Bosch thin-film PV modules in combination with Sustainable Energy’s Sunergy inverter for the Ontario market. Under a memorandum of understanding, Bosch Solar will be the preferred supplier of high-efficiency micromorph-silicon thin-film PV modules for Paralex systems distributed by Sustainable Energy in the province.

Following-on from securing Advanced Green Technologies as a distributor of its rooftop CIGS technology, Solyndra has now tapped another Uni-Solar distributor in the name of California-based firm DC Power Systems. As with the AGT deal, no commercial details were provided by Solyndra.

Citing an industrywide conversion efficiency average of 5-6% for amorphous silicon (a-Si) thin film modules, Anwell Technologies has claimed that it has reached efficiencies of 8.58% at its 40MW thin film plant in Henan, China. The results were said to have verified by the National Laboratory of China and tested according to the IEC61646 standard. The company has not announced if its modules use a tandem cell structure, which has been typically claimed to have efficiencies of between 7 and 9%.

A program that started at the beginning of the year and headed by Energy Research Centre of the Netherlands (ECN), hopes to develop a new amorphous and microcrystalline silicon thin film cell using plastics as the substrate foil. The three-year ‘Silicon-Light’ programme is subsidized by the European Commission in the framework of the thematic research programme Energy in FP7. The R&D consortium includes EPFL, University of Copenhagen, University of Valencia, JiaoTong University of Shanghai, Umicore and VHF Technologies (Flexcell), the hopeful commercial end-user of the programme. Flexcell is a subsidiary of Q-Cells.

Silicon thin-film equipment supplier BudaSolar Technologies has secured a contract with China City Investments Limited, a project company set up by Chinese investors to supply an 85MW turnkey a-Si thin-film line. The agreement is the first phase of the Dalian City Industrial Park Project targeting the development of a vertically integrated production complex that will include a glass factory set-up by Harcon Co. of Hungary. The plans call for a cumulative PV production capacity of 1GW, ramped in 10 phases. The construction of the complex is set to begin in the second quarter of 2010, with initial production starting in the second half of 2011.