The United States Department of Energy (DOE) has selected over a dozen research and development projects on solar parts for $71 million in funding.
“The selected projects will address gaps in the domestic solar manufacturing capacity for supply chain including equipment, silicon ingots and wafers, and both silicon and thin-film solar cell manufacturing”, the DOE said in a press release. “The projects will also open new markets for solar technologies such as dual-use photovoltaic (PV) applications, including building-integrated PV and agrivoltaics”.
The offer includes the $27 million Silicon Solar Manufacturing and Dual-use Photovoltaics Incubator Funding Program, which seeks to help reduce solar energy costs and develop next-generation technologies.
Ten projects have been selected under the incubator program. Ubiquity Solar, which has the biggest amount of the provisional awards at $11.2 million, has been selected for the development of a continuous Czochralski (Ccz) method for the making of silicon ingots, a cheaper method compared to the standard Czochralski process. “The team has successfully demonstrated the CCz technology with smaller ingots, and this project aims to demonstrate the process with larger ingots and wafers used in today’s high-efficiency solar cell manufacturing processes”, the DOE said of the project in Hazelwood, Missouri.
For a project in Fort Mill, South Carolina, Silfab Solar Cells has been allotted a provisional $5 million to develop industrial back contact silicon solar cells with passivated contacts that have higher efficiency compared to PERC technology. “The team is developing innovations on a 300-megawatt pilot line, which will be co-located alongside the standard n-type cell manufacturing line, to enable rapid scale-up of back contact cell technology into high-volume manufacturing”, the DOE said. “Improvements to the solar cells will include surface doping, patterning and isolation, and advanced metallization to reduce the use of silver”.
The third highest awardee at $1.9 million, Re:Build Manufacturing, has been picked for a project in Merrimack, New Hampshire, to develop Czochralski ingot pullers.
Besides the incubator program for silicon and incubator solutions, the awards also include eight projects working on thin-film PV technologies.
Named for $15 million, First Solar is working to improve CdTe PV module efficiency using a three-dimensional design for electrical contacts in the PV cell, in a project in Perrysburg, Ohio.
Another First Solar project in Perrysburg “to design tandem perovskite and copper indium gallium diselenide (CIGS) PV modules with 27 percent efficiency” has been allocated $6 million.
Swift Solar is to receive $7 million for the development of “durable, high-efficiency, perovskite-silicon tandem PV modules where the perovskite layer is fabricated using vapor deposition, a promising method for high-volume manufacturing”. The project is located in San Carlos, California.
A DOE report 2022 said 84 percent of PV modules used in the U.S. were crystalline silicon while the remaining 16 percent were cadmium telluride, yet the country had no active production of crystalline silicon ingots, wafers or cells as of that year.
“About 75 percent of the silicon solar cells incorporated into modules installed in the United States are made by Chinese subsidiaries located in just three Southeast Asian countries: Vietnam, Malaysia, and Thailand”, stated the report published February 4, 2022.
From 2018 to 2020, over 85 percent of solar cells installed in the U.S. came from abroad, according to a report by the country’s International Trade Commission December 8, 2021.
“The Biden-Harris Administration is committed to building an American-made solar supply chain that boosts innovation, drives down costs for families, and delivers jobs across the nation”, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said in a statement about the new funding.
The project owners, which also chip in for project costs on top of the DOE assistance, need to undergo negotiations with the agency before their awards can be finalized.
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