Twin Creeks, an American solar power startup company has just announced this week the successful development of a new PV-silicon module manufacturing process that may very well change the business terrain of the solar industry.
Current main-stream PV-modules use very thin wafers of crystallized silicon to collect sunlight. However, competition with integrated circuit manufacturers and high-end electronics producers that also need high-grade silicon has traditionally pushed the cost of solar modules out of the range of practicality for the average person for nearly two decades. During the wafer-cutting phase of preparing the silicon, much of the crystalline material is wasted and unused, much like the sawdust in a lumber mill. This step has always been one of the bottlenecks in making solar panels. Making the cells thinner would cause them to break too easily and the relative amount of silicon that would be ground off as dust from the saw would be too outrageous to justify the cost.
That is until now. By taking an entirely different approach to manufacturing, Twin Creeks has been able to create silicon wafers that are ten times as thin as conventional PV-cells, while at the same time eliminating the waste silicon lost as saw dust. The resultant PV-cells are just as efficient and capable as conventional silicon PV-cells, just much thinner, lighter, and also cheaper.
So what makes this process different? Rather than using a saw to create the wafers from silicon ingots, a 3-inch “puck” of silicon is placed into an industrial particle accelerator. Within this device, hydrogen atoms are fired into the top of the silicon puck, embedding themselves a few micrometers below the puck’s surface. Once infused with these new hydrogen gas atoms, the puck is then heated. This heat causes the hydrogen gas to expand quickly, forcing the thin layer of atoms above the hydrogen to separate from the rest of the crystal, creating an ultra-thin and incredibly fragile silicon wafer. This wafer is then melded to a metallic back-plate, which acts as both the structural support and the electrode of the PV-cell.
The reason this process is so groundbreaking is actually not the fact that a particle accelerator is used, but rather the fact that with this process, solar modules can produce the same amount of electricity, using one-tenth the amount of silicon as before. Since Twin Creeks is located in San Jose, California, this development has the potential to rocket the United States back to the forefront of solar-power development.
Currently, China subsidizes so much of the cost of their solar modules that the price of silicon-modules has dropped to 40% of what they were five years ago. This sudden emphasis on government-paid solar has hamstrung the American-based solar module producers, as they have typically relied on thin-film technology to make up the availability difference. Without some means of combating the slanted subsidy market in the module-manufacturing portion of the industry, it’s not impossible to see that the U.S. solar companies were on their way out. Twin Creek’s development has the potential to reverse that trend.
If the claims of Twin Creeks are correct, then they will potentially be able to produce modules at roughly 40% of the costs of contemporary Chinese silicon modules. This means that if Twin Creeks is correct, the cost of installing solar modules is about to undergo another price-drop, finally placing it below the costs of nuclear, coal, natural gas, and even wind energy.
