There are many key metrics worth listing at the end of each year in the solar industry. In terms of the upstream/manufacturing side, two jump out as leading indicators for the year ahead.
The first is to rank the top-10 producers of the solar cells during the year.
New analysis by the in-house market research team at PV-Tech’s parent company Solar Media Ltd. can exclusively reveal that Hanwha Q-CELLS was the number 1 solar PV cell manufacturer in 2016, based on megawatts of cells produced in-house across the year.
Leading PV manufacturing equipment supplier Meyer Burger Technology has announced orders worth over US$146 million in the last four months, which includes a new order worth CHF 18 million (US$18.03 million) for its PERC cell technology and SiNA cell coating systems from two customers based in Asia.
Solar cells produced using p-type multi c-Si wafers retained their dominant market-share position in 2016, despite significant investments into p-type mono and advanced cell production, such as PERC. The transition to increased mono wafer use is now expected to be seen more clearly during 2017 and 2018, but depends still upon the relative end-market demand from the domestic Chinese market.
Indian state-owned electricity equipment supplier and PV project developer Bharat Heavy Electricals Ltd (BHEL) has officially opened its upgraded and extended PV module manufacturing operations in Bangalore, Karnataka state, India.
Capital expenditure (capex) for solar cell manufacturing is to see increased contributions in 2017 from Vietnam, India and Thailand, expanding the global footprint of cell manufacturing outside China across different countries in the Asia region.
Specialist PV manufacturing equipment supplier Amtech Systems has reported new solar orders since the end of September, 2016 have topped US$60 million, driven by PV manufacturers in China, Malaysia and Taiwan.
According to the ongoing analysis of global PV manufacturing capacity expansions by PV Tech, high-efficiency solar cell migrations, whether monocrystalline or multicrystalline with PERC (Passivated Emitter Rear Contact) and N-type mono heterojunction (HJ) have been gaining strong momentum since 2015.
Aurora Solar Technologies has introduced an enhanced version of its ‘Decima’ inline measurement system for quality control of bi-facial solar cells during production. ‘Decima Gemini’ consists of a specialized pair of Decima CD measurement heads that enables the sheet resistance of the wafers' back-surface field and emitter to be measured accurately and simultaneously.
PV manufacturing equipment specialist INDEOtec SA has been awarded a grant from the SWISS Commission for Technology and Innovation (CTI) to further develop its OCTOPUS deposition platform for heterojunction solar cells in partnership with Swiss research partner, CSEM.
