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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."
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 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).
The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not âEureka!â(TM), but
is not a raw material.
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.
Bruce Perens.
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"?
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).