Geared up for giga-demand
- To do piece-work: Immense demand for PV production equipment.
The solar industry is on track to massive growth. Its component suppliers are well prepared with new factory concepts and high-tech production equipment for the imminent construction boom.
By Sascha Rentzing
Chinese market analyst Dylen Liu had some interesting things to report about his country at this year’s Semicon semiconductor fair in Stuttgart, Germany. He said China is doing its utmost to expand its position as the nation making the most solar cells. He said so far this year 2.5 gigawatts (GW) have been produced and in coming years output would quadruple. Silicon, the material fundamental to that growth, is to be locally produced. Already in 2010, said Liu, with a capacity of 67,000 tonnes a year an estimated 30,000 tonnes of the “grey gold” would be produced, enough for five GW.
Not just Chinese solar firms are pursuing such ambitious growth plans. In the next three years global cell production capacities are to be expanded to 18 GW; 14 GW are planned in wafer-based PV, four GW in thin-film. The industry is in a hurry because solar power is still much too expensive and far short of competitiveness with other energy sources. Mass production and technical improvements are to bring fast change.
However, the ambitious intentions of the firms are raising questions. Will there be enough silicon to go round? Who is to buy the 18 GW? In 2006 only two GW of solar power capacity were installed. But the most fundamental of all questions is whether the PV component suppliers are able to put in place gigantic high-tech production fast enough. Standard factory sizes are now 80 to 100 megawatts (MW). The future demand will be for plants with more than a GW, i.e. factories as large as car plants.
Factories as large as car plants
Semicon highlighted how the PV component supplier sector, including factory planners and manufacturers of production equipment, has grown into a strong and efficient industry in recent years. That doesn’t just mean the ability to construct large factories, but also to offer ever better production machinery. Craig Hunter of the US production equipment maker Applied Materials suggests that the main focus of the enterprises in developing production processes and equipment is on the lowest possible production costs with the highest possible cell and module efficiencies.
The Californians are themselves innovation leaders. In the near future they plan to have the ninth generation of their thin-film production lines on the market. Their “SunFab” is claimed to be the first fully integrated module production line processing glass panels of 5.7 square metres. These substrates are on average four times the size of panels now being used on solar production lines. Hunter claims that SunFab can cut a fifth off production costs. Applied Materials regard the line as the new standard in the industry.
But it’s not just the established players like Applied Materials that are innovating, but smaller specialised firms are also shaping the young sector. They offer detailed solutions for optimising various process phases. One such firm is Sonosys Ultraschallsysteme, which offers ultrasound equipment for cleansing microstructures.
For PV the enterprise has developed a device that can be used in doping wafers with phosphorus. In the doping, that is the surface treatment of silicon slices, the electrical properties of the solar cell are set. This treatment is necessary for the cells to produce voltage. “Megasonic” works like this: The system incites water with high frequency sound waves which is run through special nozzles onto diluted phosphoric acid. This nebulises it. The very homogeneous phosphorus-water spray then deposits on the wafers run through the phosphorus doper on a transport line.
But before specialists like Sonosys get to work, the factory planners and builders have to. They put up the building’s shell and install the technical infrastructure. One of the biggest supplier in this segment is the Stuttgart engineering company M+W Zander. They have organised themselves optimally for the needs of the PV industry. To meet the demand for ever greater manufacturing facilities they have developed the GigaFab concept, with the first gigawatt factories due to supply solar cells to the market from 2009. The idea is for such plants, which will ideally consist of two or three sub-units, to encompass the entire production chain from wafer to module.
An impression of what the future factory will look like is provided by the fully integrated solar works of Conergy AG in Frankfurt (Oder) in east Germany. In the EUR 250 million plant built by M+W Zander 300 MW of wafers, 275 MW of cells and 250 MW of modules a year are to be rolled out from 2008.
Hardly any delays despite high demand
Although the new super factories will need big investments, the Managing Director of M+W Zander, Robert Gattereder, points to “various saving possibilities” in planning and building, which is likely to please a PV industry keen to cut costs substantially. For example, in a PV factory with about a GW annual capacity, millions of euros could be saved just by recycling process chemicals and pure water. Skilful energy management could cut costs further.
The solar manufacturers appear to be sold on the M+W Zanders factory system. “We have a number of firm inquiries and we’ve done several studies for various customers,” says Gattereder. Despite the big demand for M+W Zander solutions – EUR 150 million have already been turned over in the PV sector – customers did not have to put up with long delays, he says. “We have enough resources,” emphasises Gattereder’s business development colleague, Philipp Neff. He explains that long supply times for the production machinery are to blame for it taking up to 16 months from receipt of the order to the start-up of a plant. “The bottleneck is not on the facility side,” says Neff.
IB Vogt Process Engineering + Project Management GmbH can’t complain about lacking orders, either. “We’ve got a decent workload,” says managing director Dagmar Vogt. The Berlin-based factory builder and planner doubled its workforce within a year to 160. Revenues also grew strongly. According to Vogt it was EUR 8 million in 2006 and is likely to touch EUR 16 million this year. Vogt says the good result is partly due to growing export business. “We’re getting more and more inquiries from southern Europe, the United States and Asia.” The company is implementing its first project in Spain, a 45-MW production facility for thin-film modules based on amorphous silicon. Moreover, she notes, demand for modernisation and optimisation services is increasing. Which is not surprising because line improvement can also make substantial savings.
IB Vogt also intends to offer significantly larger plants. “We won’t be able to avoid the gigawatt factory,” Vogt says. Presently the enterprise is working on a concept for a “green giga fab”. Depending on what these factories are to produce – wafer-based PV technology or thin-film panels – Vogt says the plants can comprise two or three lines or a cluster of 10 lines. “Integrated logistics and transport concepts will make the fabs especially energy-efficient,” says Vogt. Resource consumption could be cut by recycling water and materials. In two to three years IB Vogt could be offering the “green giga fab”, says the boss.
As clearly outlined as the objectives of the factory planners and builders may be, they will reveal nothing more specific about their projects and cooperation partners. At that level secrecy is the order of the day. Pity, because knowing who the customers are could provide detailed knowledge about the solar industry – who’s planning what, where? Are the manufacturers really serious with their announcement to build up some 18 GW of solar power capacities by 2010?
Trend toward turnkey solutions
The makers of production equipment, i.e. the firms equipping the factories with production machinery, are also holding back with information about their customers. But a trend is starting to appear among the machinery makers. The number of customers ordering turnkey lines, that is production facilities run up to a certain contract-defined standard by the supplier, has risen significantly. That is due to the very marked security thinking of the wafer, cell and module producers, but also to ever more venture capital firms moving into PV who don’t have a clue about production technology and are totally dependent on outside knowhow. But anyone assembling their own machinery park and starting it up is fully responsible themselves.
To meet the growing demand for package solutions the machine makers ever more often have to organise division of labour. The Freudenstadt firm Gebrüder Schmid GmbH, for example, banks on strategic cooperations. The family enterprise leads a consortium of firms including the US maker of diffusion furnaces, Sierratherm Production Furnaces, and the Swiss builder of laminating lines, 3S Swiss Solar Systems. The component suppliers complement each other’s ranges of products. Whereas Schmid’s core competencies are in wet chemistry processes of cell production, 3S Swiss is module specialist.
Such cooperations benefit the customers and the companies. Take the Schmid example. Because the consortium can cover the whole spectrum of products, the Black Forest enterprise can present itself on the market as a supplier of complete production lines. And that is obviously working very well. This year the firm is on track to see an estimated EUR 300 million in revenues, the most ever in this segment.
The other members of the cooperative profit from the far-flung international distribution channels of Gebrüder Schmid. The firm has for years supplied the semiconductor and monitor screen industry around the world and among others has branches in China and India, where PV is slowly picking up pace. Anyone making a good name for themselves now will have good cards when bigger capacities are built there.
A no less successful turnkey player is the Swiss company, Oerlikon Solar. It offers production machinery for thin-film modules and just in the past quarter booked orders for 300 MW. Customers so far have included the likes of Schott Solar GmbH and Ersol Solar Energy AG, to whom the Swiss supplied machines for producing modules from amorphous silicon with two capacities of 20 MW each in December 2006. And Jeannine Seargent, in charge of the solar division, sees the good demand continuing. In 2006 services and equipment worth EUR 60 million were sold and for this year Oerlikon expects sales of about EUR 180 million; for 2009 they’re targeting EUR 600 million.
China the market of the future
That self-confident optimism doesn’t come out of thin air. “We have an excellent research and development department,” says Seargent. The company recently introduced the micromorphous tandem technology. Modules of this type achieve nine per cent efficiency, while the panels of amorphous silicon technology Oerlikon used previously deliver only about six per cent. Seargent believes the new development will help to cut costs drastically. “In the gigawatt factories we’ll see from 2010, the tandem modules can be produced for 70 US cents per Watt.” In the now usual 20-MW factories the costs are still around USD 1.50 per Watt.
Although the trend in the component supplier sector is towards turnkey business and there is an unmistakeable urge among firms to cooperate, there are also still specialists with unique selling points that are well placed in the race. One such is Meyer Burger Technology AG, which offers cutting and sawing machines for wafer production. In the first half of this year the order book of the firm based in Thun, Switzerland, grew by a phenomenal 391 per cent to the equivalent of EUR 232 million (1st half of 2006: EUR 47 million). “We are really well placed,” comments company spokesman, Werner Buchholz. On the one hand, that is probably due to the fact that there is not much competition in the wafer processing sector yet. On the other hand, the company has a perfectly harmonised product portfolio of the most modern band saws, wire saws and dicing saws.
Meyer Burger has received one order for them from Chinese PV producer Trina Solar worth EUR 108 million. The deliveries are to continue until 2010. That keeps China as the strongest sales market in Asia of the Swiss firm. “With Trina Solar we were able to plant another important marker in the market,” says Buchholz.
What’s already reality for Meyer Burger could also happen for many other component suppliers: Chinese PV manufacturers becoming the main customers of European factory builders and machinery makers. Dylen Liu presented the vision at the Semicon in Stuttgart: More than a handful of solar firms are to climb over the Chinese gigawatt wall by the year 2010. That could cast Chinese firms in a completely different role. No longer would they be mere exporters of cheap PV modules profiting from the German Renewable Energy Sources Act (EEG) and other feed-in payment regimes, but locomotives of the global solar industry and guarantors of substantial cost and price drops.
The making of a module
It takes several processing steps to turn a silicon wafer into a module. First the wafer have to be sawn and cleaned, then they are doped, coated, screen printed with contacts and finally checked. Wet processing lines such as offered by Gebrüder Schmid are one of the key technologies. In them wafers run fully automatically through chemical dips to remove damage caused by sawing and to produce a surface that will capture light highly efficiently. In a further important process step the electric properties of the silicon are set. That happens in diffusion furnaces. Then anti-refection and passivation layers are applied. They facilitate light penetration and absorption. Module production is less complicated than cell making. Important in this is the laminator, the machine in which the cells are fused together at high temperatures and in a vacuum.