Q&A: Global Solar VPs Dish Thin-Film Details

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http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/qa-global-solar-vps-dish-thin-film-details-718.html

Q&A: Global Solar VPs Dish Thin-Film Details

Thin-film solar VPs Jeffrey Britt and Tim Teich discuss the challenges, the competition and why they're confident they'll succeed, in spite of thin film's troubled past.

by: Jennifer Kho
March 21, 2008

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Q: Many thin-film companies with technologies that have worked at small scales have run into unexpected difficulties when they’ve tried to build larger facilities. Are you concerned you might also discover that parts of your process might not scale up easily?
Britt: We have an established technology, having operated this 4.2-megawatt plant here for the last three years, making product. We have a lot of experience that really differentiates us from anybody else in this particular area of the market right now. And the new tools that we have in our plant are based on really an evolutionary process -- it’s not a revolutionary redesign of what we have here -- so we are very confident.

Q: Because most of your competitors make thin-film panels, they give panel capacity numbers for their plants. Do 35 megawatts of strings actually make 35 megawatts of panels?
B: It’s very close. You end up with maybe 98 percent of that in a glass module. You have a little bit of an optical absorption in a piece of glass, and that accounts for the difference.

Q: Do you already have sales contracts for your production this year?
Teich: Yes. We are being selective in the customer base because there seems to be quite a bit of demand. This is the advantage of having a transportable thin-film solar cell that, in effect, will plug into any and every area of the market.... So we do have customers for all of 2008 -- we’re sold out -- and if I let it, it would be the same in 2009, but we are holding back some capacity to develop either alternate markets or other customers. The majority of the strings shipping in ’08 and ’09 will go into power field modules.

Q: Can you talk about any of your customers?
T: We would prefer not to. We are pretty close to the vest.... I can only say that the few customers we are dealing with for the are very large companies. Dominant players.

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