Featured in Potential for dark days ahead – 10-2018

What dreams may come …

Longi Green Energy Technology Co., Ltd has big plans. In the near future, it wants to manufacture 400 GW of monocrystalline silicon ingots and 200 GW of wafers per year. To get to those numbers – four times bigger than the whole solar industry today – the company partly wants to build factories in the deserts of Saudi Arabia. These manufacturing facilities will be powered by solar, and fed with ocean water and desert sand as inputs – with solar modules and desalinated water as output.

By

John Fitzgerald Weaver

09 Oct 2018

Longi_Solar_cell_Module_Production_Manufacturing

Cells after soldering at a Longi production facility. The company has already shipped more than 4 GW of solar modules in the first half of 2018, and is now the third largest solar module manufacturer globally. | Image: Longi Solar

If you’re going to dream, dream big: Longi sees potential for itself in a solar industry that has scaled to 1 terawatt per year. Today, one can only imagine a solar industry this size – 10 times today’s industry that already employs more than 3.4 million people. At that volume installed per year, even if the global average …

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