REC Silicon

CubicPV has halted its plans to build a US solar silicon wafer factory, as it has shifted its focus to producing perovskite tandem modules.

REC Advanced Silicon Material LLC is shutting down one of its two polysilicon production facilities in the United States. It says the decision is primarily due to regional structural imbalances in supply and demand for electricity.

REC Silicon says a cash injection from South Korea’s Hanwha will help it to resume fluidized bed reactor production at the Moses Lake polysilicon plant in the US state of Washington.

The German company’s decision to cede market share to Chinese companies producing the material for solar panels, in order to focus on semiconductor-ready, electronic grade product, has seen it slip behind its rivals in terms of production scale.

The investment made by the South Korean group should help REC Silicon restart polysilicon production at its US factory in Moses Lake in 2023.

The latest update to the Photovoltaics Report produced by research organization the Fraunhofer ISE has offered up the usual slew of interesting stats on the state of solar across the continent.

Imports from South Korea and the U.S. dwindled, year-on-year, ensuring Germany’s Wacker and the Malysian unit of Korean company OCI will supply the bulk of the world’s non-Chinese solar polysilicon this year.

The 275,000 metric tons of annual polysilicon production facilities pushed out of the industry by the expansion of big Chinese producers is more than double the capacity lost in the last great poly market shake-out, between 2010 and 2013.

The Norwegian polysilicon maker has been been frozen out of the Chinese solar market by political tensions between Beijing and the U.S. and mothballed its Washington State production line last year. However, two recent business agreements could change all that.

The Norwegian company mothballed its Washington State facility more than a year ago and is now reliant on semiconductor-grade poly and silane gas produced at its fab in Butte, Montana – a facility for which the business says it has received plenty of interest from potential purchasers.