Oerlikon debuts its first thin-film fab in China

Switzerland's Oerlikon Solar (VTX:OERL) said a customer has ramped the first Oerlikon thin-film solar production line in China, estimating the new facility will be able to produce 500,000 modules per year.

State-owned Baoding Tianwei Solarfilms installed the 46-megawatt fab ahead of schedule in six months. The plant uses Oerlikon's Amorph High Performance PV tech.

Oerlikon said the speed of installation was due, in part, to TÜV Rheinland's certification of the Amorph line late last year, which means that Oerlikon customers can begin production after a brief inspection, as opposed to a lengthy test- and approval-process. Oerlikon said TÜV certification for the Tianwei line is expected in September 2009.

Also last year, Oerlikon said it enacted changes to the line that improve module efficiency to 7 percent and increase module output, together increasing the fab's capacity by more than 50 percent (see Oerlikon sees 50% gains in thin-film fab).

Oerlikon said Tianwei wanted to get its products to market to take advantage of new solar incentives announced July 21. The central government established the "Golden Sun" program to subsidize half of the construction costs for on-grid solar power plants. The Ministry of Finance also plans to pay for up to 70 percent of off-grid installations and cover transmission costs where necessary (see A-Power enters the solar market with $50M acquisition).

The goal is to help China build 500 MW of solar power plants in the next three years. China has 80 MW of installed solar capacity, including 50 MW installed in 2008.

Oerlikon said the thin-film fab is one of the largest of its kind in China.

Oerlikon's main rival in the space is Applied Materials (NASDAQ:AMAT) of Santa Clara, Calif. In March, Chinese thin film developer ENN Solar Energy said it started production on a 60-MW thin-film line—Applied's first in China (see ENN Solar makes supersized thin film on first Applied line in China). ENN said that Applied's proprietary tandem-junction technology produces modules with energy-conversion efficiencies of more than 8 percent.

In April, Oerlikon announced layoffs because of a 40 percent decline in sales in the first quarter of 2009 (see Order delays lead to layoffs at Oerlikon Solar). At the time, Oerlikon attributed the slowdown to the difficulty that its customers were having in raising funds for expansion of production lines (see Record 2008 for cleantech with $8.4B in investments). The company expected conditions to improve in the second half of 2009.

In Oerlikon's production lines, zinc-oxide serves as the transparent conducting oxide (TCO) to collect the current. Many thin-film developers use commercially coated tin oxide glass.