The CEO of Hevel Group, Igor Shakhray, will leave the company to become CEO of Unigreen Energy, a silicon wafer and cell manufacturer, which is owned by Hevel majority shareholder Ream Management LLC.
Shakhray will leave Hevel after eight years at the helm, in which he has been credited with making the company one of the leading heterojunction (HJT) cell producers globally by volume.
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During Shakhray’s tenure, Hevel landed a deal to supply Russia’s largest solar farm with its HJT solar panels and has secured development deals in states across central Asia and eastern Europe, as well as completing the first off-grid hybrid solar project in the Russian arctic.
“Holding the position of CEO at Hevel Group since 2015 Shakhray led the switch of the plant to heterojunction technology and capacity extension from 130MW to 350MW,” a Unigreen company statement said.
He will now move to Unigreen, which has recently broken ground on a new facility in Russia’s Kaliningrad region with capacity of 1.3GW of silicon n-type monocrystalline ingots and wafers as well as 1GW of HJT solar cells. The factory is scheduled to come online in 2022. Ream Management, among Europe’s early movers in HJT, is behind the plans.
Finlay Colville, head of research at PV Tech’s parent company Solar Media, said at the time: “Currently, Hevel Solar is the leading producer of heterojunction solar cells globally, and the new site in Kaliningrad has the scope to move Russian PV manufacturing to levels not seen before.”
