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Solar Companies Are Scrambling to Find a Critical Raw Material (bloomberg.com)
Solar manufacturers are being battered by higher costs and smaller margins, after an unexpected shortage of a critical raw material. From a report, shared by an anonymous reader: Prices of polysilicon, the main component of photovoltaic cells, spiked as much as 35 percent in the past four months after environmental regulators in China shut down several factories. That's driving up production costs as panel prices continue to decline, and dragging down earnings for manufacturers in China, the world's biggest supplier. "There's just not enough polysilicon in China," said Carter Driscoll, an analyst who covers solar companies for FBR & Co. "If prices don't come down, it will crush margins."
If the processing becomes profitable enough then factories will open up, perhaps outside of China. The finance situation has made poly-Si briefly (and artificially) cheap. If there is demand then people will pay more and investment can start again. Right now it's just too cheap to bother investing in a factory.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Higher prices mean local manufacturers have a reason to start making the material.
The absolute MURDER of the environment by Chinese industry to make cheap toasters (solar cells this time around) has finally caught up with the market in a negative fashion. Who would have thought eventually they would care about all the dead children?
Skimming the article, it looks like the country painted itself into a corner.
How horrific does the pollution from a plant have to be before regulators in China shut it down? It really makes you wonder how much pollution from this process was being overlooked.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
6 years back I was working on a project for a polysilicon plant in the USA, it got shelved and the plant never built when the Chinese started flooding the market with cheap silicon. If this new development keeps up I wonder if the company that was going to build that plant will attempt to restart the project where it left off as most of the engineering design was already done.
I'm pretty sure the surviving ones are able to produce within even more stringent regulations.
Mexico.
Cheap labor, and if there are any environmental concerns, a coupe pesos in the right pockets makes it all good...
Lets not forget a couple things here.
Firstly, the raw material needed to produce semiconductor grade polysilicon (and monocrystalline silicon) is just quartzite (aka silicon dioxide, aka sand), one of the most abundant materials in the earth's crust. So with that in mind, this isn't a situation like the rare-earth metals where china is literally sitting on the needed raw ore to produce the higher quality materials. We have the raw material in excess (as most countries do) and all we really need are the companies to set up production facilities.
The second thing not to forget is that only as recently as 2008 prices for pure polysilicon were astronomical, around 450 USD/kg. A spike of 35% is not very significant and could probably be accounted for by the ramping up of photovoltaic production. A simple reaction of the market to increased demand, which will eventually be satiated by increased production (domestically and abroad) of the needed polysilicon.
I really don't see this being any more than a tiny bump in the road, nothing to worry about over the long-term. Certainly this isn't something China can laud over the west to gain an economical advantage like they could possibly do with rare-earth metals.
Because they were polluting too damn much and their owners were not willing to make the change appropriate to install proper filters.
China finally did something, toward lowering their pollution problem. This is the first step. When your citizens have to wear masks nearly at all time and there's actual "air in a can" that you can buy, you have a pollution problem.
If that material is really important and has a huge demand, more factories will open with the proper filtration system to avoid having unfiltered dark smoke emanating from the chimneys. Because it is entirely possible to catch a huge part of that pollution and prevent it from reaching the outside.
China has environmental police.
In the absence of artificial scarcity (diamonds) or collusion or import/export limits (supply), the market will establish a reasonable price level.
I wouldn't worry.
The problem is mostly for the profit margins of the suppliers and intermediaries.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
is not a raw material.
how bout here?
Sounds like Perovskite solar cells where invented right on time.
Grant Country, in central Washington, built their own damn along the Columbia River and offers the cheapest commercial power on the planet. This resulted in REC Semibuilding a polysilicon factory there. REC has a Silane Gas plant (SiH4) in Butte, MT. Real short supply chain for the Semi industry. I see additional containerized Silane tanks going down I-90 to the port of Seattle with big warning signs, "NOT FOR TRANSPORT IN EUROTUNNEL." Make me fear my commune even more.
No reason it couldn't be done in Silicon Valley.
Only problem is California likes to shift its pollution to other countries and states so they can maintain the illusion of being green.
We just ignore the fact that it REALLY runs on coal powered electricity from Utah and solar cells from China.
US companies obeying labor and environmental laws is xenophobic? The shame!
love is just extroverted narcissism
When your providing "competitive products at lower prices" via huge government subsidies and total destruction of your local environment, then yes that is a "bad thing". Not only are you poisoning your own population, China is also suppressing any better technologies from emerging that would normally happen in a "free market" with massive subsidies, near-slave labor, etc.
Great news for thin film companies like First Solar (a US company). The cost of their panels is schedule to hit 20 to 25 cents in 2018 vs current wholesale prices of 32 cents. First solar's solar panel efficiency is 17% which is pretty good for thin film. More solar basic research should help bring down costs further and improve inefficiencies.
somehow make poly silicon from coal.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
RECSilicon, Wacker, and Hemlock would be very pleased to sell the Chinese polysilicon. All the Chinese need to do is drop the 59% tariff they put on it.
REC can make polysilicon for less than $11/kg. Take the tariff off and they could restart the other half the plant in 3 or4 months. Currently itâ(TM)s shut down due to oversupply outside of China, which is caused by the Chinese tariffs. 80% of the demand is in China, but less than 80% of the polysilicon production is in China.
By the way, this particular trade war trade war was started by Obama.
P.S. RECâ(TM)s quarterly report has more information on the trade war. You can browse the old ones to see how it developed over the years.
Yeah, clearly that company should have continued investing into a money-losing venture because you say so.
Who's thinking backwards again?
Try again, and explain how China is somehow bad as the low cost producer?
Yeah, keep shilling for big fossil fuel. I'm sure they'll appreciate your efforts any time now. Huge drain of environmental resources, caustic and hazardous waste products? Sounds like you are describing coal and oil extraction to me.
You do know that even if solar panels are as polluting as you say they are, the amount of pollution they create is fixed at the time of manufacture, where your precious fossil fuel generators will just keep spewing pollution as a condition of normal operation as long as they stay in business, right? And if you want to talk about government subsidies, start doing the math on how much of the Medicare budget goes to paying for asthma inhalers and lung cancer surgeries and chemotherapy bags for people living downwind from coal generating stations.
Don't be a fucking shill. Even if you don't accept the idea of climate change, it's still pretty clear that fossil fuels cost much more than the price of fuel.
Ill bet we can find all the rare elements and more on the moon. Maybe even some things that will deliver us new tech. :)
[($)]
Who needs silicon when you can use proteins engineered from plants or cyanobacteria to generate electricity?
After installation of my PV system, the fair value of my house increased (as evidenced by appraisals directly before and after installation).
My lovely state of Texas has a law that if your current loan balance to market fair value is 80% or less, you can request to have your PMI (private mortgage insurance) removed with your lender. My PMI monthly payment to cover the lender's rear end in the event of my default = monthly solar loan payment.
I basically traded paying money to the bank for the privilege of not putting 20% down at closing for solar panels. Any decrease cost of electricity use and doing something 'green' are side perks that didn't play much into my buy-solar decision. My payback period is now less than 6 years after tax credits.
I do run the risk of trouble with resale in the future.
Captcha: exempt
I stacked some silver used to produce polysilicon so when things gets bad I will support you guys with my stockpile.
My lovely state of Texas has a law that if your current loan balance to market fair value is 80% or less, you can request to have your PMI (private mortgage insurance) removed with your lender.
I believe you can request to cancel PMI once you have paid down mortgage to at least 80% in "every" state, not only in Texas. However, you can't simply get rid of FHA insurance if you are on FHA unless you refinance.
Can Solydra restart and pay back that half a billion they lost?
I was thinking of Solyndra. I remember driving by when the Feds raided the joint.
global warming ie: climate change is made up, you are just to blinded by "Algore" types to believe the truth. You think man is responsible for everything. You have no idea how and why the climate changes. For one thing, the undersea volcanoes can heat up and melt ice. But, the MAIN component to our ever changing climate structure comes from a tiny object about 300,000 km from our blue speck. It's called THE SUN. Why don't you look up the sunspot cycles from the past 300-400 years and plot the temperature graphs like I found on NASA climate sites and you can see the parallels in the sunspots (or lack of sunspots) and the global temperatures. I know of one such story, attempting to prove man made global warming, in the 90's, the melting ice around the greenland or scandinavian areas, uncovered a few abandoned settlements that dated to the 1300-1400 era. Now, if this was WAY before the industrial revolution, what allowed the earth to be warm enough, to support a settlement? If you overlay the sunspot cycle of the period, it shows an increase in sunspot activity in that era. When the sunspot cycles are high, massive CME's puke out of the sun, then, impact the magnetic bubble around our tiny rock. A disruption of the magnetic bubble causes the weather patterns to shift. In the 1700's, about the time of the American revolution, we were in a sunspot minimum pattern, and it lead to the Potomac river to ice over, along with about the same time period the Thames in London freezing over. If you look at the current sunspot cycle (24) and the recently ended "modern maximum" we are heading to another period of low sunspot activity. The sun disk has been very devoid of sunspots the past 12 months (ask anyone that is a ham radio operator like me!). There is also new evidence that the positions of the two giant planets, Saturn & Jupiter, in relation to the sun can also impact the geo-stabilization of the sun. Currently, the positions of Jupiter & Saturn are opposite of each other, creating a slight magnetic pull with the sun, which theories suggest also cause a lack of geo-magnetic activity on the sun. So basically, do a little research before you spout out the 30 second liberal talking points. You'll look MORE informed!