Q-Cells and the Future of Solar Photovoltaics

The solar industry is booming. According to this article, "sometime in the next two years, more raw silicon will be going to solar panels than to electronics chips." And according to a report recently released by BCC, the market for solar PV cells will reach $32 B/year in 2013. Good news, but there's one catch: supplies of polysilicon, one of the key ingredients in many solar PV panels, are growing tight. The bottleneck isn't the raw material (sand), but rather the production capacity for refining sand into polysilicon.

This means two things: (1) a scramble among polysilicon PV cell manufacturers for supply, and (2) a move towards thin-film technologies, such as CIGS, which don't use silicon or use much less of it.

One company that's moved to address both of these issues is Q-Cells out of Germany. They've signed a long-term supply agreement with China's LDK Solar, locking in a supply of 43,000 tons of silicon wafers through 2018. And EverQ, their joint venture with Evergreen Solar and Norway's REC, has locked in supplies of up to 2,100 tons of polysilicon per year through 2015. That translates to enough silicon for an output of roughly 6,600 megawatt peak.

A quick back-of-the-envelope analysis shows that this translates to securing access to enough raw materials to convert into $16 billion of revenue, using the revenue per MW of PV cell in 2013 from the BCC report I mentioned above. So the polysilicon shortage shouldn't dent their growth:



Meanwhile, their subsidiary companies are ramping up thin-film technologies. Calyxo makes cadmium telluride PV cells and Brilliant 234 produces thin-film silicon modules. Solibro GmbH, a joint venture with Solibro AB, is a CIGS (cadmium indium gallium selenide) manufacturer.

This is an impressive company that seems to have all the bases covered. I'd keep an eye on them.