At a two day event held in Atlantis, Palm Jumeirah, Dubai, Mr. Sultan bin Sulayem, Chairman of Dubai World (pictured), announced the establishment of a photovoltaics manufacturing company, dubbed Solar Technologies FZE, which will build an operate a 130MW production plant in Dubai’s Technopark. Future plans include establishing manufacturing facilities in China, Mexico and Bulgaria, which will increase the total production capacity to 1GW by 2015.
“The potential of solar energy is unbelievable. The energy from sunlight striking the earth for 40 minutes is equivalent to the global energy consumption for a whole year,” commented Mr. Dilip Rahulan, Chairman and CEO, Solar Technologies FZE. “The mission of Solar Technologies is to accelerate the adoption of solar photo voltaic by rapidly expanding manufacturing capacity and significantly reducing the cost of solar modules through innovations and manufacturing excellence. We intend to become one of the largest solar photo voltaic module manufacturing units in the world over a period of time.”
The Dubai news follows that of Masdar PV in May 2008 to invest initially $600 million in two separate ‘SunFab’ turnkey module production lines supplied by Applied Materials in Erfurt, Germany and in Abu Dhabi.
Like Masdar PV, Solar Technologies FZE is planning to use Applied Materials ‘SunFab’ thin film technology, as well as becoming a global player. The 130MW plant planned equates to two SunFab lines and will be operational by the end of 2010.