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."

Comments

The market corrects

[OrangeTide]

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.

Re:The market corrects

[Anonymous Coward]

You must be stupid or living under a rock for the past couple of decades.

Poly-silicon was very profitable before China tanked it in the mid 2000's.

https://www.wired.com/story/inside-story-of-the-great-silicon-heist/

Re:The market corrects

[Calydor]

It sounds like the factories were shut down for being too polluting.

In China.

Are you sure the processing can be done in a clean, let alone profitable, way?

Re:The market corrects

[Rei]

I bet Silicor really regrets not building their new Iceland plant (they backed out because the price of polysilicon just couldn't support it). They had a really cool technology; I wouldn't support the building of an old-fashioned silicon producer near me (we have a couple in the country; they're pretty terrible), but I supported them. Basically it's based around aluminum alloying; they dissolve impure silicon in aluminum, then cool it (settling it out as flakes, which they skim), then etching away residual aluminum from the flakes with hydrochloric acid. It's then re-melted one more time to separate out any residual aluminum. In addition to the silicon, the process byproducts are silicon-rich aluminum alloys (which are worth more than the original aluminum) and polyaluminum chloride (used in water treatment).

Re:The market corrects

[Applehu Akbar]

But at least you got a Costco instead.

Re:The market corrects

[Bruce Perens]

Your economics are false because they work if you only count the return on excess solar power production, rather than replacement of grid power. In general a solar system will reduce your daytime power cost. They do this at the full retail price the power company charges. If you can't sell power back to the grid AND you can't store power for night-time use economically, then you lose out on your night-time power costs. But not day-time.

Solar lease has poor economics where it is not possible to sell power to the grid, but that's because solar lease is an expensive way to get solar power. Ownership is better.

Re:The market corrects

[ShanghaiBill]

Are you sure the processing can be done in a clean, let alone profitable, way?

It can and is done cleanly. Polycrystalline silicon is manufactured worldwide, including in the US. Outside China it is mostly higher quality "electronics grade" rather than lower priced "solar grade", but it is routinely done with more stringent pollution controls than was previously acceptable in China.

Collecting the volatiles, and cleaning up and recycling the wastewater has a cost, but if everyone is required to do it, the cost can be pushed downstream to the panel manufacturers, and they will pass it on to their customers. This is not a solar showstopper, but it will make panels a bit more expensive.

Does anyone else think it is silly that something made in factories is called a "raw material"?

Re:The market corrects

[l0n3s0m3phr34k]

China has known about these pollution problems at least since 2008, probably even longer. But silicon tetrachloride is an environmental "show stopper" if not reprocessed...it's worse than the old Roman idea of "salting the land". Nothing grows, animals die, etc. ST can be used for other purposes (like making fiber optic cables) but that requires vertical planning in your manufacturing sectors.

Re:The market corrects

[ShanghaiBill]

IF you produce this stuff in an environmentally acceptable way it's more expensive, a lot more expensive.

Only if you go totally overboard, like say, California, where the wastewater is required to be significantly cleaner than the original tap water. That is one reason why silicon is no longer made in "Silicon Valley".

Re:The market corrects

[ShanghaiBill]

But silicon tetrachloride is an environmental "show stopper" if not reprocessed...it's worse than the old Roman idea of "salting the land". Nothing grows, animals die, etc.

Silicon tetrachloride is a volatile liquid, that quickly evaporates ... and it degrades in the presence of water to SO2 and HCl. So I am skeptical that it could stick around long enough to cause significant long term harm. Do you have a citation for its supposed Carthaginian properties?

Re:The market corrects

[guruevi]

It will indeed reduce your cost but you probably won't get back the investment at current rates.

After tax subsidies, a PV installation costs ~$10-15k after tax deductions (although the estimate I got for my property was $25k and I didn't qualify for the full tax rebate) and about $150/y in continuous maintenance costs. I pay on average about $75/month in electric (on your average 3000 sq.ft. house, partially electrically heated and AC cooling, well insulated).

Even if the PV were giving me all the energy necessary, it would take 10-15 years to pay itself back, realistically though it will be 15-25 years, beyond the life span and well beyond what I can plan for, I don't know many people that have owned and lived in the same home for 20 years. What I've noticed selling 3 houses in the last couple of years is that people are actually afraid of things that require maintenance, heat pumps, smart homes, hell even having a fire sprinkler system which is now mandated in my state for renovated properties has been a turn off for some buyers.

If you want people to invest, you should have a return rate that is beneficial to them relatively short term, 5 years or better. Planning for 15-25 years ahead, especially speculating on both real estate and energy costs, is a bad investment.

Re:The market corrects

[Bruce Perens]

Many people pay a lot more than $75/month for electricity. I paid $140 last month. Currently I have solar heating panels for my swimming pool on the roof. If I were to install solar, it would probably be my own installation with an electrician to wire in the inverter and sign off the rest. I could bring a 5000 watt system up for well below $10K.

Re:The market corrects

[Bruce Perens]

Here's an MSDS. This one says nothing about ecological impact. But I suppose it would form longer-lived organosilicates.

Re:The market corrects

[Solandri]

Power companies are reluctant to allow you to sell power back to the grid because then you aren't paying the distribution costs (construction and maintenance of the wires, transformers, infrastructure like switching and monitoring equipment, etc. which lets you sell back power to the grid). In the areas where these costs are taken into account, the sell-back price is usually around half the retail price, which dramatically lowers the economic viability of solar. Ignorant solar proponents cry foul at this, demanding they be paid full retail price as if all that wiring, maintenance, and power regulation is free.

If you can use all the power generated by your PV solar installation, or store the excess in batteries for use during night or bad weather, and you can get the economics of solar to work, then good for you. But if you're trying to use the power grid as your battery, then you can't run your cost/benefit analysis using retail electricity prices. Also note that the maintenance costs per house are fixed. Whether you need to draw power from the grid just one day out of the year, or every day out of the year, you still need the same wiring to your house. So we're not talking about a discount per kWh here. We're talking about a fixed cost per household. (Actually the electrical utilities should just separate out their bill into generation and transportation costs like water and gas companies do.) We're running into the same problem with EVs - they wear out the roads just like ICE cars, but they don't pay the fuel taxes to maintain the roads. California just enacted a tax on EVs to help pay for this road maintenance.

All that said, FWIW, in the cost analyses I've done, the local price of electricity is a much bigger factor than utilization. In places with high electricity prices (e.g. Hawaii) and good weather, the payback time for a PV solar installation can be as low as 5-7 years with subsidies, about 10-12 years without. (I should mention that the most cost-efficient energy system I found was geothermal heating and cooling. Where you run your heating and air conditioning with a heat pump using the ground as a heat sink instead of the air. For the desert region of Southern California, the payback time I calculated for that was as short as 3 years, and that's without subsidies.)

Re:The market corrects

[Anonymous Coward]

Fossil fuels are only cheaper if you keep the waste products off the books. Put all the emissions in there, the costs of smog, PM5 pollution, carbon, increased medical spending of people living downwind from coal plants, increased asthma rates, etc. and solar starts to look pretty god damn good.

Talk about subsidy - the coal industry gets a pretty damn good subsidy in the form of medicare payments paying for the damage they cause through normal operation, which doesn't even touch on the effects of carbon / climate change (if you're into that kind of thing).

Re:The market corrects

[MachineShedFred]

Just because these particular plants decided to make even more profit at the expense of being dirty as fuck, doesn't mean that it can't be done in a non-dirty-as-fuck manner and still turn (less) profit.

These assholes just decided to either take a bigger margin, or undercut competition with literally dirty business.

Re:The market corrects

[stabiesoft]

Depends on the power company. Austin energy no longer does net metering. They pay me I think 10.6c/KWH and I pay them their standard rates (which are greater than 10.6c/KWH when usage is above 500KWH for the month). They have reduced the 10.6c once (was 11.?) and I expect they will rinse and repeat. As long as you are tied to the grid, their rules. When I installed the system it was net metering. I was not happy with the unilateral change.

Re:The market corrects

[omnichad]

Does anyone else think it is silly that something made in factories is called a "raw material"?

Would you consider steel to be a raw material? Sure it's a refined output in one sense, but it's absolutely a raw material in another.

Re:The market corrects

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Are you sure the processing can be done in a clean, let alone profitable, way?

Yes, it can. Any other question?

Re:The market corrects

[K. S. Kyosuke]

What the *problem* here is, IF you produce this stuff in an environmentally acceptable way it's more expensive, a lot more expensive.

And this differs from any other industrial production...exactly how?

It's NEVER going to pay off without subsidies and it's an environmental nightmare to use when you look at the whole lifecycle of the equipment...

And you could say the same thing about coal or nuclear and we'd have no idea what source exactly you're actually talking about.

Re:The market corrects

[K. S. Kyosuke]

But silicon tetrachloride is an environmental "show stopper" if not reprocessed

Not reprocessing it is idiotic. Not only do you have to store it somehow if you don't reprocess it but you're also losing shitloads of extra silicon that you could sell from it.

Re:The market corrects

[Togden]

Does anyone else think it is silly that something made in factories is called a "raw material"?

Its raw within the context of the process.

Re:The market corrects

[MachineShedFred]

The pollution per panel, at worst, is still a static figure. The pollution from fossil fuels just keeps growing the longer you operate it. Are solar panels the utopia of green that some people like to think? No - but they are still a damn sight better than lopping off the tops of mountains and burning it.

I don't understand the shilling for fossil fuels on this supposedly enlightened site. Can't we all agree that essentially turning mountains into toxic slurry, aerosol particulate, fly ash ponds, and carbon dioxide / sulfur dioxide is bad?

Re:The market corrects

[MachineShedFred]

You don't have to store it if you're just dumping it somewhere... which is exactly what these plants were doing (apparently)

Re:The market corrects

[necro81]

If you want people to invest, you should have a return rate that is beneficial to them relatively short term, 5 years or better.

Soooooo...what you're saying is that it's time that the price of electricity took into account all the externalities that it has been avoiding all this time? Things like the true cost of pollution, laying waste to entire landscapes, exploiting workers and local populations, etc.

PV has done its part to improve the payback period by reducing costs from tens of dollar per watt back in the 1980s to less than $1/W today. It's time for the other side of the equation to rise as well.

And even if the payback period is, say, 20 years, that is still within the useful life of the panels. It's not like the calendar rolls around to 20 years and the panels suddenly poof into a cloud of silicon dust. They are still usable, just not at their nameplate value. And even then, you'll have been able to know exactly what the cost of your electricity is during that whole time. You could consider purchasing PV as a hedge against future price increases. There are additional benefits that I could go on about, but really, for most homeowners whose homes are well sited, PV does make sense.

Re: The market corrects

[Izuzan]

Must be nice.

My house is 1400swft, heated with natural gas, and my monthly payments for electricity is $180 a month. Whole house is led and compact fluorescent.

But im also in ontario canada. One of the highest electricity cost provinces in canada.

Re:The market corrects

[MobyDisk]

...as if all that wiring, maintenance, and power regulation is free.

Much of this problem could be solved by billing correctly. Here in Maryland, you see the charge for your power separate from the charge for the power company maintenance. Transparency in billing is important. This is like when phone companies were adding hidden surcharges in but not disclosing them, or when they were charging a monthly fee for the leasing of your cell phone, even after the lease was paid off.

Re:The market corrects

[b0bby]

We're running into the same problem with EVs - they wear out the roads just like ICE cars, but they don't pay the fuel taxes to maintain the roads. California just enacted a tax on EVs to help pay for this road maintenance.

Of course, most road wear is from trucks; road damage rises with the fourth power of weight. The California EV tax seems excessive, since it's basically making an EV pay the equivalent of an ICE vehicle getting 20mpg and driving 16,000 miles a year, but I guess $100 a year is not too onerous.

Re:The market corrects

[AmiMoJo]

You are getting fleeced. Around here you can go to somewhere like IKEA, buy a system for about $8,000 and see a return in about 10 years after costs. You can easily get it cheaper than that, or increase the savings by adjusting other parts of your system to make better use of solar energy (heating, car etc.)

But even taking your shitty deal, the problem is clear. Solar will pay for itself in the absolutely worst case, likely save you a lot of money or even give a nice tax-free ROI, but the up-front cost is the issue. That's why all the effort goes into reducing that up-front cost.

Re: The market corrects

[magarity]

Whole house is led and compact fluorescent..

Incandescent bulbs would help heat.

Re:The market corrects

[Gr8Apes]

You must live in one of the fairy tale climate areas. Most of us don't. My lowest electric bill I've had in 20 years was more than $100. My highest has been somewhere around $600. This is across multiple properties in several non-adjacent states. I've also paid as much as $0.15 kW/h, hence the high bill, which happens to coincide with multiple 100+ degree days in summer. Solar would definitely make a dent, but various things, such as moving or planning to move, have prevented me from spending the 30K or so to install solar (a mostly off-grid solution) I could do partial for around 12K and have a less than 8 year ROI. But that involves an 8 year commitment.

Re:The market corrects

[K. S. Kyosuke]

But then you're ditching a valuable byproduct. It can only be worth doing in pathological business/legal/economic environments such as China. And only if nobody is watching. Anywhere else it's the stupidest idea ever.

Re: The market corrects

[skids]

Resistive electric heating is not as efficient nor cost effective nor yet ecologically sounder than either direct conversion of chemical energy or electrically driven heat pumps. Now, if you do want to turn high quality energy like electricity into heat, doing something else with it like running compute resources may help offset that deficit.

Re:The market corrects

[ai4px]

In the US, the tax credits make solar work. My system was $47000, but I get 55% off and a $16500 check from the utility company itself making my payback time 2.8 years. If you could the excess $600 a year, my payback time is 6 months sooner. WIthout the tax credits the payback was 20 years, with only the utility company's "rebate" the payback would have been 13.2 years. I must be honest when I say the tax credits make solar viable. But which is better for the country as a whole? The incentive to go solar is better.

Re:The market corrects

[skids]

In "terms of art" it probably isn't considered a "raw material" but a "manufactured material" or "natural manufactured material"

Re: The market corrects

[Izuzan]

wouldn't help with the energy bill.

Re:The market corrects

[guruevi]

$8000 barely pays for the worker cost. The panels are relatively cheap, but half or more of the cost is actually spent on contractors, linemen and licenses.

Re:The market corrects

[guruevi]

We use primarily hydro-power and local townships have bought out a bunch of hydro power through long term contracts. In my neck of the woods, dealing with electric inspectors is a pain though and nobody local would ever sign off on an install they have not installed or overseen fully themselves.

I've tried during the renovation to get an electrician to come out to review my work and they all refused, I just had to have the electrical inspector come twice. I don't think any electrician wants to lose their license or talk to their insurance company over a shoddy hidden wire. I've looked into doing PV myself but I would have to study and apply for an electrician's license because you can't DIY any type of generator on the net according to local code.

Re:The market corrects

[guruevi]

Who is paying the cost right now for these "externalities"? How about the "externalities" of making PV panels in China by practical slave labor under horrendous health conditions.

So essentially....

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:So essentially....

[swb]

I think Uncle Xi is really serious about corruption and pollution, and my guess is where you have excess pollution you also have corruption.

Xi may be willing to take on some polluters at the cost of higher product prices if he can push those costs onto foreign consumers due to lack of competition. This externalizes the costs of cleaner production. Busting local officials taking bribes in exchange for allowing the pollution helps his image and further solidifies his power.

Self inflicted.

[Fly Swatter]

Skimming the article, it looks like the country painted itself into a corner.

Re:Self inflicted.

[UnknowingFool]

Indeed. It's not really a raw materials problem as an intermediate materials problem. What the industry lacks is domestic polysilicon. They could buy from the US and South Korea if their trade policies didn't make those sources so expensive.

"environmental regulators in China"

[SuperKendall]

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.

Re:"environmental regulators in China"

[Anonymous Coward]

China has been cracking down and cleaning up since the late 2000's. You're expecting pristine lakes that turned to a pool of black sludge to turn back to a pristine lake over night and the policies to catch up that fast as well?

Re:"environmental regulators in China"

[SuperKendall]

More like, I wasn't expecting China to be doing any real cracking down at all so the closures come as a bit of a surprise to me (though a sign that perhaps the efforts are getting more real).

Re:"environmental regulators in China"

[Anonymous Coward]

No they have been cleaning up for the last five years because that was part of their last five-year-plan. Now there is a new one whose full details have yet to be released.

Don't lie. Educate yourself.

#simplethings

Re:"environmental regulators in China"

[thegarbz]

How horrific does the pollution from a plant have to be before regulators in China shut it down?

Don't bring 2000 era daft bias into the conversation. Every society has followed the same path, from the USA to Germany, Japanese, and now Chinese. There were borderline uninhabitable places in major US cities due to pollution from lack of environmental regulation. Where are they now? Cleaned up as the economy evolved and the country transitioned.

China is going through much of the same. Major investment in green technologies, major incentives to stop polluting, major incentives and regulations to clean up cities. Right now they are battling with the laggard problem of major corruption which is why factories are being closed to force the issue of non-compliance.

Fun side anecdote: My company was going to build a new coal fired steam boiler at one of our Chinese plants, as horrifying as that thought was. It was the government that said no we'd lose out license to operate if we didn't fire it with nat gas from the new pipeline they were building down to the chemical park. Oh and all the other companies down there were then given a 5 year deadline to switch to natgas away from coal / oil.

Welcome to the new China. The oid China is now sitting in the Whitehouse saying that coal gets washed into "clean coal" which is then environmentally friendly to burn.

The Chinese Killed The Market In The First Place

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Looks good for US and EU factories

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm pretty sure the surviving ones are able to produce within even more stringent regulations.

Sounds like a perfec fir for

[bobstreo]

Mexico.

Cheap labor, and if there are any environmental concerns, a coupe pesos in the right pockets makes it all good...

Re:Sounds like a perfec fir for

[l0n3s0m3phr34k]

Not really, we REALLY don't want silicon tetrachloride pollution in the Gulf of Mexico.

Re:Sounds like a perfec fir for

[PPH]

Save the Gulf for crude oil!

Minor deviations

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

The Invisible Hand self-corrects

[WillAffleckUW]

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.

Re:The Invisible Hand self-corrects

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no hand, that is a childs Randian fallacy. Information asymmetry prevents cooperation which is the very thing required to actually generate the comparative advantage that results in true lowest costs.

Re:The Invisible Hand self-corrects

[Anonymous Coward]

you are one stupid faggot

Alright. I apologize for that. I went and did a little research on smith and free markets and shit and now I have to eat my own fucking words and I hate that because it make me a flaming dickhead but your still stupid. so there.

Re:The Invisible Hand self-corrects

[Anne Thwacks]

If economics books will help, how come loads of academic research says "The more qualified an economist is, the less accurate his predictions"!

Re:The Invisible Hand self-corrects

[UnknowingFool]

The problem if you read the article is that China has tariffs on imported polysilicon so there is no "invisible hand" here. Worldwide polysilicon supply is not in danger. This is only a problem in China created by China.

A highly purified material

[thinkwaitfast]

is not a raw material.

In CHINA

[Ryanrule]

how bout here?

Washington State Polysilicon

[MountainLogic]

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.

California Virtue Signaling

[Zorro]

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.

Re:California Virtue Signaling

[CrybabiesArePeople]

wtf has "virtue signalling" to do with this? And what is "virtue signalling" anyways? I currently understand it as "anything that goes contrary to my right-wing opinions and that I in fact feel insecure about" but maybe I'm wrong and there is more to it. Please enlighten me.

Re:The Chinese Killed The Market In The First Plac

[avandesande]

US companies obeying labor and environmental laws is xenophobic? The shame!

Great news

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Kill two birds in one stone

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

somehow make poly silicon from coal.

59% tariff on US polysilicon

[Mspangler]

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.

Re:59% tariff on US polysilicon

[redmasq]

I heard it both ways. I suspect in practice that it depends upon the economic strength of the one doing the tariff vs the ones targeted by the tariff, who else are buyers, and political fudge factor. If the alternate sellers have either economic leverage to apply such as a tariff or legal restriction on market segments valuable to the original country, especially if the country originally targeted has internal sources or cheap alternatives vs the original country. The effect can be amplified if they have political and economic leverage against countries that are markets for the original. The US no longer has the same level of clout in which it previously had, such tactics probably will not be useful for a while unless something turns around. China, on the other hand, had built up both economic and political strength. I would weakly compare it to the 1%, more power you have, easier it is to make bold moves to protect that power.

The moon

[wolfheart111]

Ill bet we can find all the rare elements and more on the moon. Maybe even some things that will deliver us new tech. :)

Re:The moon

[blindseer]

Right, let's go to the moon so we can mine it. How do we get there though? Nuclear powered rockets!

That doesn't sound like a great idea any more.

Re:The moon

[avandesande]

Where can I find out more about this business venture to import silicon from the moon?

Re:The moon

[UnknowingFool]

The moon might have rare elements. Silicon is not a rare element as it is the most common element in the Earth's crust. The reason polysilicon is rare in China right now is that China imposed tariffs on imported polysilicon. The US and South Korea has plenty of polysilicon to sell to China; however, China made the tariff to import it from those countries high enough that it would not be profitable.

Re:The moon

[swillden]

Where can I find out more about this business venture to import silicon from the moon?

I can tell you about it, but we want serious investors only so there's a $100K non-refundable investment required before I can give you details. And an NDA, of course.

If you're thinking this is silly because 15% of the Earth's mass (28% of the crust) is silicon, I'll just point out that the Earth's silicon is of a lower grade. The best silicon is extra-terrestrial and the moon has some of the highest-grade silicon in the solar system, and it's also (obviously) the nearest and most accessible source. Given the growing demand for the highest quality silicon, this is the investment opportunity of several lifetimes. If you've got the cash, you don't want to miss out on this one.

And don't let anyone tell you that silicon is silicon, that any nucleus with 14 protons and a reasonable number of neutrons is as good as any other. The quality of those protons and neutrons matters.

Biophotovoltaics

[cashman73]

Who needs silicon when you can use proteins engineered from plants or cyanobacteria to generate electricity?

silver

[BabyAndTheButterfly]

I stacked some silver used to produce polysilicon so when things gets bad I will support you guys with my stockpile.

trolling for solar

[p51d007]

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!

Re:So it's time for Perovskite solar cells?

[ffkom]

I would really like to know why my above short, informative, very much on-topic and certainly not controversial posting was down-voted from score 2 to 1. Can you elaborate?