By Tom Cheyney
One of the busiest of the couple-dozen solar manufacturing factory floors I’ve seen this year belonged to ECD Uni-Solar, at its Auburn Hills 2 (AH2) facility just up the road from the Palace where the NBA’s Detroit Pistons play hoops. When I toured the plant in late July, the three production areas – cell
deposition, cell finishing, and module stringing/lamination/final assembly – were humming, as the 1.5-milelong rolls of flexible stainless-steel starting material were transformed into triplejunction amorphous-silicon thin-film PV laminates. The company’s latest quarterly results confirm those observations at the factory, as production output grew some 58% over the previous period – from 21.2MW to 33.6MW – pushing capacity utilization to about 90%.
