SunPower has said that after talks with its various Japanese-based suppliers, none have sustained major damage to their facilities, though “certain operations are currently disrupted due to infrastructure issues,” the company stated.
Recurrent Energy entered into an 180MW supply agreement with Celestica for the delivery of its crystalline-silicon PV modules to 19 of Recurrent’s Ontario-based solar power projects. The solar projects are part of the Ontario FIT program and will have the Celestica-manufactured solar panels delivered under a multiyear agreement. No financial details were revealed, although full production is expected by this summer.
JinkoSolar and Saint-Gobain Building Distribution Deutschland have signed a contract in which the Chinese PV manufacturer will supply the German company with 54MW of crystalline-silicon solar modules. The deal calls for Jinko to ship 4MW of panels to SGBDD this year, with the remaining 50MW to be supplied in 2011.
XeroCoat has chosen Air Liquide Electronics U.S. to supply the precision chemical delivery systems for XeroCoat’s turnkey antireflective coating platform for glassmakers and end-users in the solar manufacturing industry.
Hoku Materials has signed a silicon metal supply agreement with Polymet Alloys. The wholly owned subsidiary of Hoku Scientific said it plans to use the metallurgical-grade silicon for the production of trichlorosilane, a critical raw material in the manufacture of solar-grade polysilicon.
Canadian Solar (CSI) and GCL Silicon Technology have signed new long-term supply agreements, in which GCL will provide 510 metric tons of high-purity polysilicon feedstock over the next two years and approximately 1.8 GW of solar wafers to CSI from 2010-2015.
Linde has signed a long-term contract with Sodiff Advanced Materials for the supply of electronic-grade silane. The agreement, the duration and cost of which were not specified in the announcement, will see the delivery of the silane from Sodiff’s facility at Youngju, Korea, which comes on line in the second half of 2009. This contract will account for a large proportion of Sodiff’s 2,000-tonne silane production output.
In the third part of this week’s series exploring the US solar supply chain, we track how quickly announced manufacturing capacity is translating into real production.
