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Do politicians in the U.S. have yet to wake up? Or are they just constrained by all the work that’s gone into these incentive programs to date?
I think their hearts are in the right place. But they’ve spent years and years fighting for these subsidy systems, and now they don’t want to give up their achievements. They don’t want to acknowledge they made a mistake and the real way to do it is a feed in law.
This is really the impression I have personally. In retrospect, it’s so obvious that the feed in law is the way to go, because it gives each individual person the economic incentive. Nothing is stronger. Socialism failed because socialism didn’t provide an economic incentive.
Now that you mention it, solar subsidies are kind of un-American, aren’t they?
What the U.S. is trying to do with all these subsidies is to go the communist way, instead of saying, “People you can earn money! The more PV you install, the more you earn!”
The feed-in law, as implemented in Europe, is actually more American than America’s policies.
Let’s change tracks. You put a lot of emphasis in your work on the use of metallurgical-grade silicon for PV in the future.
There’s no shortage of silicon in the world. All of our beaches are made of silicon dioxide. A million tons of this is turned into metallurgical silicon, which is used for the aluminum industry, the steel industry, for silicone sealants, etc. A tiny fraction of this, only 30,000 tonnes–a tiny, tiny fraction–is turned into high purity silicon for the semiconductor industry. The PV industry has come to use this high purity silicon, which has been a tragic mistake, in my opinion.
Our research has shown you don’t need this level of purity. You need pure silicon, but not the hyper-pure silicon that’s used by the Intels of the world. We’ve shown that you can use silicon that’s 1,000 times less pure as today and still make good solar cells out of it. Sometimes we call this ‘dirty silicon,’ but it’s still extremely clean material, just not as clean as the semiconductor industry needs it.
This material is easier to produce and costs less. And you can more easily double your production volumes, or increase them ten-fold. This is what we need to do if we want PV to make a dent in the electricity market.
It’s important to remember we’re talking about purified, cleaned metallurgical silicon. We cannot just use today’s metallurgical grade silicon. It has to be improved, but it doesn’t have to be improved all the way to semiconductor grade.
We’re anticipating commercial cells on the market based on dirty silicon within the next 12-18 months, and are targeting efficiencies between 13 and 15 per cent. Companies are lining up to work with us to commercialize these cells. No decisions have been made yet, but we anticipate working with both small companies and large companies.
What other technologies should we be watching, and why?
The real question in the next five years will be the race between the thin film technologies and the crystal silicon technologies. In my view, because we’re talking about a rapidly expanding market, there will be a place for all technologies. Every technology will be sold and make its mark.
Yet in terms of market share, 10 years from now my personal expectation is that thin film will still not have more than 10, maybe 15 per cent. I believe the majority of the market will still be crystalline silicon. And it will, of course, be a much larger market than it is today.
