Sharp to Develop 1 Gigawatt (per year) Thin Film (PV) Manufacturing Plant

[jpak]

http://www.solarbuzz.com/News/NewsASMA106.htm

Sharp Corporation has been engaged in the manufacture of energy-saving LCDs and energy-creating solar cells as the pillars of its business, with the goal of being an “environmentally advanced company.”

Now, the company has made the decision to build on the same site a new state-of-the-art LCD panel plant and solar cell plant for the mass production of thin-film solar cells in Sakai City, Osaka Prefecture. This project is being developed as a “manufacturing complex for the 21st century” that will incorporate relevant infrastructure and facilities, as well as attract material and production equipment manufacturers to construct plants on the same site.

In addition to infrastructure-related facilities and production equipment manufacturers, a number of leading material manufacturers such as glass substrate and color filter makers will be invited to set up plants adjacent to Sharp’s new LCD panel plant within this manufacturing complex. Shared infrastructure such as gas and electricity can provide for improved productivity. The aim is to achieve vertical integration that transcends the barriers between companies by pushing the vertically integrated business model created at the Kameyama Plant—from LCD panels to LCD TVs—further upstream in the supply chain.

<snip>

The solar cell plant will focus on mass production of thin-film solar cells and commence operations by March 2010. Plans call for a production volume of around 1,000 MW (1 million kW) per year for the thin-film solar cells to be manufactured at this facility. This level is expected to maximize economies of scale, and make this factory the largest solar cell plant in the world. Operations are slated to begin at same time as the LCD panel plant.

<more>

edit: this is the 3rd GW+ scale PV manufacturing plant under development (others in Germany and China).

[Dogmudgeon]

1. Beat the rush. Invest in Cadmium and Tellurium NOW.

--p!

[jpak]

2. This is NOT a CdTe plant - Sparp makes thin film Si

http://www.physorg.com/news5024.html

<snip>

Compared to crystalline silicon photovoltaic modules, thin-film solar cell (photovoltaic) modules can be manufactured using a tiny amount of silicon, and in addition, can be used in application products that offer attractive design features such as “illuminating solar panels (Lumiwall)” where they are combined with LEDs, and see-through type solar panels that permit natural light to pass through.

<snip>

[phantom power]

3. They're doping the Si with something. The question is what.

[jpak]

4. plutonium and smallpox virus

n/t

[NNadir]

8. Because the complex nature of the 5f orbitals plutonium exhibits many oxidation states.

For instance in nitric acid solution Pu(III) is oxidized to Pu{VI} a 3 electron process.

Uhquestionably this photolabile property suggest utility in the conversion of light to either chemical or electrical energy.

The chemistry of plutonium is some of the most exciting and interesting chemistry known.

As for the smallpox, maybe the cadmium will kill it off.

The external cost of solar is not recognized because it's hidden by the fact that solar technology is a trivial form of energy.

[eppur_se_muova]

7. Probably something really horrible like aluminum or phosphorus.

At, what, ppb levels? Dopants are used in minute quantities.

[Dogmudgeon]

5. Environmental Health And Safety (EHS) Issues In III-V Solar Cell Manufacturing

FYI for the uninitiated reader: "III-V" refers to elements from families III and V of the Periodic Table. (Yep, I had to look it up, too.)

I am pretty sure that is the technology Sharp uses for thin-film silicon PV. If it is not, let me know, and I'll look for the appropriate publication. ALL PV manufacturing processes are hazardous and produce toxic wastes that never decay.

Here's a place to start:

Environmental Health And Safety (EHS) Issues In III-V Solar Cell Manufacturing from Brookhaven National Laboratories

Yes, there are some major toxins involved, like arsine and phosphine, as well as a whole soup of organometallic poisons. (Lumiwall products also incorporate electroluminescent materials including gallium and arsenic.) Manufacturing collection devices for "Free and Clean" energy is not for the faint of heart (or sloppy of lab technique).

You can read this in one of two ways: as a gloat, or as a recognition that our energy problems won't be solved on the cheap, without major engineering challenges, and according to philosophical preference. My own support of nuclear energy is based strictly on its relative superiority to everything else we have. If that changes, so will my support.

--p!

[jpak]

6. Millions Dead - but where are the bodies????

:shrug:

[Dead_Parrot]

9. Pretty much everywhere

Because solar and wind are incapable of producing baseload power, it still comes from fossil fuels - which continue to kill one person every 15 seconds.

But you like to ignore that.

[Kolesar]

18. Deflection junction, what's your function??

[Dead_Parrot]

19. Hey, just saying.

More people will die from fossil fuels between now and Christmas that have died from atomic energy in any form - including the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, Navaho miners, Nevada downwinders and the Chernobyl disaster combined. It's possibly more than have ever died from hydro, although I'd have to check the figures for that. The bizarre insistence of some people that we should wait until there's some sort of super-grid (or no grid at all and some sort of super-storage - opinion seems to be divided) just adds more corpses to the pile: As in climate change, come to that.

That they effectively argue for two or three million deaths per year because "nuclear is too dangerous" is an irony that completely eludes them.

[jpak]

25. Nonsense - a diverse portfolio of renewable power sources, smart grids and storage devices

can meet any power demand...ad replace fossil and nuclear power plants.

No exotic technology required - it's all here today.

[jberryhill]

10. I read it not as a gloat, but as ignorance

The Sharp thin-film PV technology is amorphous Si, not III-V's.

Your irrelevant snippet including "Lumiwall products also incorporate electroluminescent materials including gallium and arsenic" demonstrates your ignorance that the most common III-V material is gallium arsenide.

a-Si cells are made by chemical vapor deposition using silane as a feed material.

That said, any semiconductor-based PV technology is likely to produce the wonderful results on groundwater that has been associated with EVERY large semiconductor facility.

[Nihil]

11. I think you've got that bit on its head ...

> Your irrelevant snippet including "Lumiwall products also incorporate
> electroluminescent materials including gallium and arsenic" demonstrates
> your ignorance that the most common III-V material is gallium arsenide.

I think it actually demonstrates not only his obvious knowledge that the
main material is gallium arsenide but also, by explaining that the Ga part
of GaAs is gallium and the As part of GaAs is arsenic, he anticipated his
post being read by someone who might not have realised how toxic the inputs
are.

> That said, any semiconductor-based PV technology is likely to produce
> the wonderful results on groundwater that has been associated with EVERY
> large semiconductor facility.

Agreed and, though I like PV systems, this point has to be borne in mind
whenever people start nit-picking about the preparation of *certain* fuels.

:hi:

(Edit for omission)

[jberryhill]

14. I see...

...and you further believe that the production of table salt (NaCl) involves "toxic inputs".

Gotcha.

Yes, semiconductor production is an industrial process that, like all industrial processes, involves hazardous materials.

But I do correctly now understand that the point was some sort of rhetorical grandstanding in the belief that behaving irrationally about X is the best response to people who are irrational about Y.

[Nihil]

21. Don't be an arsehole

"like all industrial processes, involves hazardous materials"

Well fuck me backwards ... we have a luddite on our hands.

> But I do correctly now understand that the point was some sort of rhetorical
> grandstanding in the belief that behaving irrationally about X is the best response
> to people who are irrational about Y.

No, you don't understand correctly. The point you tried to make was that a critic
of your post "didn't understand" that GaAs included arsenic and gallium.
I showed that you were talking bollocks. The person who posted the target of your
smart-ass response was more than capable of matching you on science and did so
admirably. You are apparently totally incapable of understanding the impact of
the materials of the technology that you support. No "grandstanding", just mere science.

Shove it sunshine. :P

Maybe when you grow up we can have a discussion. Until then, learn & live ...

[jberryhill]

22. What a bizarre answer...

Well fuck me backwards ... we have a luddite on our hands.

We seem to have something on our hands here, that's for certain. I happen to have a doctorate in electrical engineering, which is generally not a course of study pursued by luddites.

Again, please compare my name with the authors of, say, this paper:

http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1992SPIE.1582...71C

The person who posted the target of your
smart-ass response was more than capable of matching you on science and did so
admirably.

I see... so if one group of people acts like idiots relative to one technology, then acting like an idiot relative to another technology is the proper method of holding a discussion.

I didn't realize energy policy was the province of two year-olds.

Ciao.

[Dogmudgeon]

12. Yes. It's poisonous.

I've been making the point that semiconductor manufacture uses extremely toxic materials, and demands a similar level of diligence as the handling of nuclear material -- for maybe two years now. With the "uranium is worse than SATAN" rhetoric, I've increased that. But there is only so much materials engineering one can absorb within fifteen minutes of reading a pie-in-the-sky press release. Given a week, I am sure I could assemble all the properly relevant literature available online. But it would all say, in effect, "be careful with poisons".

Lumiwall has always been described in its PR literature as an application of existing LED technology, the bulk of which is GaAs-based. They are not benign chemicals to work with, especially arsenic. That is exactly the point I was making -- toxicity. Hardly irrelevant.

So why are you jumping up my ass?

:shrug:

--p!

[jberryhill]

13. The irrelevance is this

the bulk of which is GaAs-based.


Thank you for that information, which has no relevance to a-Si.

GaAs is a crystalline solid (as a co-inventor of a patent on the subject, I have heard of it before http://www.wikipatents.com/5144377.html ).

Your going on about arsenic in GaAs is like going on about the "deadly chlorine" in NaCl - table salt.

But I see your point. The response to people making unquantified hyperbolic claims is to make unquantified hyperbolic claims, and this will contribute to the general understanding.

Got it.

[phantom power]

15. Are you saying that GaAs is a benign ionic compound?

I probably don't have to remind you that even table salt is plenty poisonous if you dump enough of it into the environment. Even if it's chlorine is ionic and not covalent.

[jpak]

16. Silicon PV cells are >95% of the global PV market. GaAs cells represent an insignificant fraction

of the global PV market and are not used in utility-grade or residential PV modules.

CdTe module production is ~3 MW/year compared to the ~2200 MW of Si-based PV cells and modules produced last year.

Where are the all these nasty PV toxins "dumped" anyway?????

Be specific

[jberryhill]

17. No...

I'm saying it is not in the solar cells referenced in the OP.

[phantom power]

20. I see. Can you summarize how these other cells are made?

(or post a link to an explaination?)

[phantom power]

23. One interesting consequence of all this new mass-produced PV...

is that we will have an opportunity to learn more about 2 topics:

1) What is the asymptotic "mass-produced" price of PV. The PV industry has been making various claims about the eventual cheapness of PV due to eventual mass production for at least as long as I've been alive. Now that the industry is making these things in giant factories, by the nameplate gigawatt, I think we can now legitimately say that we have mass-produced PV. And so we should now be able to learn with confidence what the mass-produced price is.

2) We will now have even better data to gauge the externalized cost of PV. I imagine the ExternE folks will be able to take advantage of that.

[jberryhill]

24. Other issues often overlooked is this one....

Typically with a-Si based PV, and what you virtually never hear from the press releases, is that there is a significant long-term degradation problem. I'm a little out of date on these, but in the early 90's it was on the order of reducing efficiency by a factor of 2 over a period of about ten years. That was something the a-Si folks were working on, but I don't know how far they've gotten.

Then, you run into a world of issues when you put this stuff on, say, residential rooftops. Houses catch fire. While a-Si alone isn't that much of a problem, other "wonder materials" like HgCdTe-based systems, basically turn a house fire into a toxic waste zone.

What I don't get, and having been wildly misunderstood elsewhere on the thread, is the level of contentiousness. Every energy technology has advantages and disadvantages, and the expectation that engineers are going to pull one rabbit out of the hat that is going to contribute to the future energy mix should be long dead by now.

In general, I am not aware of a single semiconductor fab operation, and that's what this is, that has not produced serious environmental consequences. The main problems are not so much the materials used in the cells per se, but organic solvents that are by necessity used in the various fabrication processes, and which inevitably get into the groundwater.

The PV industry has been making various claims about the eventual cheapness of PV due to eventual mass production for at least as long as I've been alive.

I'm going to guess I've been alive longer but, yes, this stuff was supposed to be rolling out in reams back in the late 70's.

Less talk and more action from the PV industry would go a long way.

[jpak]

26. Not really...

http://www.pv.bnl.gov/cdte.htm

Could CdTe PV Modules Pollute the Environment?

SUMMARY

As CdTe PV modules reached commercialization, vocal opposition emerged based on concerns about potential emissions of cadmium from them. In this short article I discuss the pertinent technical issues and conclude that CdTe PV modules do not present any risks to health and the environment during their use, and recycling the modules at the end of their useful life completely resolves any environmental issues.

<more>

[phantom power]

27. You have waded into a multi-year food fight, regarding nuclear power.

Broadly speaking, there are two contingents.

The first (to which I belong) essentially is arguing that we need nuclear power as a major tool for fossil fuel displacement. Most especially, for displacing coal, as they are both baseload power technologies. Nuclear power has a remarkably low externalized cost per unit of energy delivered, even when major accidents like Chernobyl are accounted for. And that energy is very good quality for an electric grid, with high up-time, etc. Other things we tend to point out, are that the biggest renewable technologies are intermittent, and so would require redundant installations and grid storage to provide reliable power to a grid, and so these sources actually cost rather a lot when you account for all of that.

The other contingent essentially considers nuclear power to be unacceptably dangerous, and that various renewable sources, combined with some combination of conservation and a "smarter grid," will be sufficient.

Interestingly, the opinions (among that fraction who has an opinion) seem to be nearly equally weighted, between pro-nuke and anti-nuke. There appears to be a slight majority in favor of no-nukes in the polls I've conducted.

You will see some of us pro-nukers taking pot shots at renewables, because we like to remind everybody that renewables have some serious issues, mostly having to do with cost and power quality. In many cases the technologies are hypothetical, or work but have not been commercialized. Their manufacture also has significant effects on the environment, which are in no way negligable compared to the effects of the nuclear industry.

[jberryhill]

28. Well that's just silly

You will see some of us pro-nukers taking pot shots at renewables, because we like to remind everybody that renewables have some serious issues

There is not a technology in existence that doesn't have serious issues.

I doubt exchanging spitballs advances the understanding of the issues on either "side" (of which I did not realize there were "contingents").

I've got a pretty thick skin, and prior to this thread only had accumulated something on the order of two "ignores". But I've never seen anyone start spouting obscenities in response to a minor technical point in such a fashion.

[phantom power]

29. It's too late for me. Run, run while you still can.

[bananas]

30. Oh it gets much worse

Waxman described it pretty well: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=115x88649