US solar manufacturer CubicPV has received US$103 million in equity financing to support its plans to develop a US silicon wafer production base.
The first, US$33 million tranche of the investment will be released immediately, with the second US$70 million tranche subject to specific project milestones. SCG Cleanergy (a wholly owned subsidiary of SCG) spearheaded the funding, with contributions from Hunt Energy Enterprises and Breakthrough Energy Ventures, all of which are part of CubicPV’s shareholder base.
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In January, PV Tech Premium spoke with Cubic’s CEO about its plans for a 10GW mono silicon wafer factory, which this funding is intended to support. The company said that it has narrowed its site selection for the facility down to two and is in the process of completing detailed designs.
CubicPV also said that this capital will support its research into perovskite-silicon tandem technology. Efforts to scale perovskite technologies and harness their efficiency advantage over silicon are gathering pace. The US Department of Energy released funding for research into commercially viable perovskites earlier this year, and PV Tech’s coverage of the SNEC conference in China found that perovskite products were building momentum among manufacturers.
“Today’s announcement underscores the considerable progress we’ve made, the depth of our engineering competence and the strength of our technologies to deliver a more powerful solar future,” said Frank van Mierlo, CEO of CubicPV. “We thank SCG Cleanergy for their confidence in our manufacturing goals and product roadmap.”
Tim McCaffery, global investment director of SCG said: “With its deep experience in silicon wafer production and ownership of highly innovative proprietary technologies, Cubic is ideally positioned to play a key role in the world’s embrace of solar powered electricity generation. We continued to be impressed with the strength of the team, their progress against plan and their commitment to manufacturing and innovation excellence.”
Currently, whilst it is focusing on building out a domestic module manufacturing base, upstream solar production is more-or-less absent in the US. Domestic content adders included in the Inflation Reduction Act which could provide a significant boon to solar PV manufacturers and developers will require upstream production to become widely adopted, particularly focused on cells according to a PV Tech editor’s blog this week.
So far- along with Korean-owned Qcells – CubicPV is one of the major players making noise about upstream domestic manufacturing in the US.