Thin-Film

A European Commission-backed project has been launched to scale up Europe’s PV manufacturing industry and capture the continent’s “booming demand” for solar equipment.

Panasonic has announced plans to withdraw from manufacturing heterojunction (HJT) cells and modules with the closure of its manufacturing plants in Malaysia and Shimane Prefecture, Japan.

PV-Tech’s flagship PV ModuleTech conference returns, through an online platform, on 9-11 March 2021, with a focus on providing utility-scale site developers and investors a comprehensive understanding of the new module formats being sold to the market today.

‘Solar Module Super League’ (SMSL) member First Solar has sold a large part of its PV project business to Leeward Renewable Energy totalling around 10GW.

LPKF Laser & Electronics has secured its first laser solar scribing system order from a CIGS (copper indium gallium selenide) thin film customer worth around US$12.2 million.

With module suppliers currently seeking to hit annual shipment volume guidance for 2020, and many announcing ambitious expansion plans for 2021 and beyond, the sector is seeing a shift now in terms of module supply to global utility-scale sites.

‘Solar Module Super League’ (SMSL) member First Solar is undertaking capacity expansions at its two existing manufacturing plants in Ohio, while evaluating several new international locations to grow its global module sales business as initial Series 6 CdTe thin film module expansion plans come to an end, effectively becoming capacity constrained again from 2021, onwards.

US utility Vistra has selected First Solar’s Series 6 modules to power six new PV projects in Texas as it ramps up its renewable energy portfolio.

BayWa r.e., Enel Green Power and Solarcentury are among the 20 participants in a new European Union-funded project that aims to increase the performance and reliability of solar PV components and systems.

The rapid transition in the upstream manufacturing solar sector to significantly larger p-type and n-type monocrystalline wafers, cells and modules may be hailed as a new era for the industry in higher module performance and a leap in reducing PV power plants LCOE (Levelized Cost of Electricity) in a rapidly changing downstream market that becomes subsidy free, bidding orientated and targeting grid parity and beyond. But issues such as reliability lurk just below the surface.