Finlay Colville
Today, the solar photovoltaics (PV) industry is on the verge of being considered a mainstream energy source, with the annual production of PV modules rapidly approaching the terawatt level.
This comes some 70 years after the first reported construction of a practical solar PV substrate (cell), more than a century since the revolutionary concept of the light quanta was proposed to the luminaries of the scientific community (explaining the photoelectric effect and the fundamental nature of light), and nearly 200 years since the relationship between electricity and magnetism was supremely crafted.
Indeed, the history of solar PV is awash with scientific, technical and industrial innovations, with a direct line back to the mid-nineteenth century, including the activity at Bell Telephone Laboratories (New Jersey, U.S.) in the mid-1950s, the paper by Albert Einstein in 1905, and the publications from James Clerk Maxwell in the early-1860s. These three pivotal discoveries form key ingredients for what is referred to today simply as ‘The PV Industry’.
There has been no shortage of milestones achieved by the PV industry during the past few decades, once manufacturing became a mass-production phenomenon. However, reaching terawatt levels of annual PV solar production was often considered to be the point at which solar PV generation would finally be acknowledged as an established part of the overall energy mix globally.
Therefore, one cannot emphasise enough how important it will be when the solar PV industry hits and exceeds a terawatt of annual production from a manufacturing standpoint.
However, leading up to this landmark moment, nobody could have envisioned how torturous and turbulent a journey it would be for those engaged across research, technology and manufacturing over the past 30 to 40 years; from the first commercial production lines capable of making megawatt levels of product annually in the 1980s and 1990s in various advanced Western countries at the time, to the automated 10 to 50 gigawatt-scale integrated facilities located today within mainland China.
A global journey with more losers than winners
Global activities and investments have been pivotal to the 70-year journey of practical solar PV; for example, in the U.S., Japan, Germany, Taiwan, South Korea and India. Companies within these regions have often been leading proponents in manufacturing at different times, especially as the industry moved from lab-to-fab.
However, it is China’s involvement in the past 20 years that has been the game-changer and the main reason that the industry is on the threshold of annual terawatt production levels today (not to mention how the leading Chinese manufacturers have pushed forward product efficiency levels and lowered manufacturing costs).
Compared to some adjacent technology sectors (most notably semiconductors), PV manufacturing has a relatively low barrier-to-entry. If costs (and debt) can be kept under control, manufacturing generally offers (at best) high-single (or low-double) digit operating margins. Moreover, after adding in production (or operational) incentives, PV manufacturing can appear to be an attractive line of business.
Yet, in the past 50 years, more than nine-out-of-ten manufacturers in the sector have either gone bankrupt or had their PV operations forcibly shut down by controlling owners. To state that ‘there are more losers than winners’ would appear to be an understatement; at any given time, the sector is all-too-often comprised of a myriad of so-called zombie companies (ones that for all purposes are technically insolvent but seem to keep producing and selling products).
Despite this somewhat alarming track record, barely a week passes without a new PV manufacturing business plan being proposed by an organization or entity – across both new entrants and existing players – promising attractive, sustainable and low-risk returns to institutional investors, private shareholders, or venture capital backed funds.
Indeed, there rarely seems to be a let-up in global aspirations to move into solar PV manufacturing (as witnessed in China, India and the U.S. in recent years), with the proposals routinely having limited (if any) technology differentiation, and often being heavily reliant on foreign third-party entities for intellectual property (IP), know-how, and manufacturing equipment and materials (much of which now resides in China).
A colourful 70-year dress-rehearsal for the terawatt act
For over 50 years, the PV sector has captivated many. It has been the source of personal wealth and riches for a select few. Funding rounds for new and existing manufacturers have routinely secured billions in capital across Asia, Europe and the U.S. (while sadly often amassing mountains of debt).
Meanwhile, the PV technology graveyard has been frequented on many occasions. Technology roadmaps tend to be controlled somewhat in stealth mode today by a handful of companies in China. Yet often, unqualified technologies have been over-hyped and released to mass production too early, only to end up in tears and spooking investors that could otherwise have been brought into the sector at a more appropriate time.
Solar PV has generally been championed (but sometimes overlooked) by politicians the world over since the 1980s. Policies and incentives have routinely been implemented; at times with minimal impact, but often with game-changing consequences for domestic energy generation and distribution. The early days of solar PV incentives typically followed classic boom-and-bust cycles, with unimagined uptake leading to policy reversals or removal altogether.
Indeed, it is perhaps an indication of solar PV’s importance in the energy sector today that it is beset with political undertones and classic protectionism behaviour. Consequently, new terminology has become commonplace when buying and selling solar PV modules: manufacturing locations, traceability of components back to raw materials, supply-chains up and down the value-chain, equipment and materials suppliers, factory audits, supplier and parent entity bankability, warranty claims track-record, sustainability, foreign entity ownership, and so on.
However, I would suggest that all the activity, going back to the early 1950s, can be viewed merely as preparation for a time when the production and deployment of solar modules and systems is tracked in terawatt increments, driven by a select group of manufacturers able to run high-volume factories profitably, while selling products (through the manufacturing value-chain) at prices that would, just a few years ago, have seemed pure fantasy.
Indeed, a world deploying multi-terawatts of solar PV annually will be different to anything seen so far in the PV industry. Therefore, it seems an opportune time to reboot and think about what the terawatt PV production era will look like, and what subjects should feature on the new Terawatt PV Research website going forward.
Tales of terawatt technology trials & tribulations
I got introduced to PV manufacturing more than twenty years ago during an ad-hoc business meeting with a UK company involved in one of BP Solar’s European research projects called ‘Alpinism’. No longer a divisional entity, BP Solar’s pivotal role in the industry’s early growth phase merits a dedicated chapter in any book reviewing the history of solar PV manufacturing – something I will expand upon in more detail soon.
The Alpinism project was funded (in part by the UK’s then-government-structured Department of Trade & Industry) to explore the feasibility of an advanced silicon solar cell process (laser grooved buried contacts, or LGBC) from the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Australia, and as the basis for a new pilot production line at BP Solar’s cell fab at Tres Cantos in Spain, under license from UNSW.
While many fossil-fuel players somewhat toyed with solar PV technology in the 1970s and 1980s, BP Solar was the exception that embraced solar PV from a research and production standpoint, building manufacturing sites globally (in the U.S., Europe and India).
To show how enthusiastic BP Solar was about PV technology twenty years ago, here is a sentence from an official press release back in March 2007, to announce increasing the annual cell capacity at Tres Cantos from 55 MW to 300 MW:
The new cell technologies we are using, our intellectual property in casting with Mono2 and the contracts we have signed to secure preferential access to metallurgical grade silicon are all important steps towards our goal of offering customers PV-generated electricity on a par with the cost of conventional grid-supplied electricity.
BP Solar named the LGBC technology (and module product lines) ‘Saturn’, a stellar reference that would be borrowed some years later when an early Chinese PV manufacturing entrant, Suntech Power, licenced another UNSW concept (laser doped selective emitters) into its ‘Pluto’ production lines at Wuxi in China.
These activities were taking place as the gigawatt (not terawatt) annual PV production era was getting underway, and Japan had become the first country to unfold a consortium-led manufacturing vision that was intended to drive new domestic and overseas revenue streams in what was then a nascent technology sector.
Potentially the blueprint for what was to unfold later across Taiwan, South Korea and China, the dominant members of Japan’s solar PV manufacturing consortium included some of the most influential electronics and industrial enterprises of the twentieth century, including Sharp, Sanyo, Mitsubishi Electric and Kyocera.
In doing some background reading ahead of completing this piece, I came across an article I wrote for Renewable Energy World in June 2009: Supply-demand dynamics call ‘time’ on legacy cell production technology. Here is some of the closing text from this article:
When looking at the various schemes being considered today, it is indeed a testimony to the endeavours of the UNSW researchers and BP Solar technologists that many of the efficiency-enhancement steps pursued within the current crop of HE [high-efficiency] cell candidates share so many of the concepts inherent to the original LGBC cell… Only now, production technology has matured somewhat, there exists a buoyant equipment supply-chain eager to participate, and the timing for higher finesse variants being introduced to the market is just right!
Subsequently, I wrote several features based on similar themes during the PV manufacturing downturn of 2012 to 2014 (mono PERC being the higher finesse variant of the day then), and through the current manufacturing downturn (which is certain to usher in the mainstream dominance of the highest-finesse single-junction silicon architecture possible, the back-contact cell).
Establishing the terawatt-driven metrics that matter
The journey of the solar PV industry to reach terawatt status will certainly be a key focus for the blogs, features and general commentary on the Terawatt PV Research platform. I’m hoping this will allow for deep dives into some of the companies, people, policies and technologies that have shaped the current industry landscape.
New perspectives will also be presented, specific to existing manufacturing and technology trends, and how these are expected to evolve as the industry reaches and exceeds the annual terawatt production mark.
Over the past twenty years, different metrics and types of analysis have often been called for, driven by what is most important to the key stakeholders (e.g. materials suppliers, institutional investors or the financial community) at any given time. It will be interesting to see what kind of questions people are asking in the terawatt era, and this will no doubt call for new metrics to be established, from potential raw materials bottlenecks through to manufacturing leadership criteria.
Finally, involvement with various not-for-profit charities and bodies, that are active in promoting and developing solar energy globally, will be featured prominently on the website, allowing me to promote some of the excellent work going on behind the scenes today in the industry. While solar PV has evolved into an industrialized machine, with every penny counted in the manufacturing process to maximize profits, it is important to remember that solar PV is an enabler for much of the world living well below the poverty line.
Indeed, this seems like an ideal theme to close out the introduction to the new Terawatt PV Research portal, as it highlights another goal for the content to be featured.
Coverage of the terawatt PV era should not be dominated by industry activities that are largely motivated by personal financial gains or corporate shareholder returns: rather, it should be a phase that celebrates solar PV as a major technological triumph of the twentieth (and early twenty-first) century and one of the most important practical applications that exists because light from the sun is quantized in nature (consists of photons).
Therefore, explaining the journey from photons to terawatts will be my first major challenge in launching the new Terawatt PV Research portal.
