Home Brewed Solar Silicon | Green Energy News

June 9, 2002 – Vol.7 No.11

HOME-BREWED SOLAR SILICON.

According to AstroPower, most silicon for silicon solar cells comes from scrap silicon from the semi-conductor industry. The relative scarcity of scrap silicon helps keep solar photovoltaic energy costs high as well as limits the growth of solar PV in the marketplace.

To change this situation AstroPower and Elkem of Norway, the world’s largest producer of silicon metal, are working together to create a proprietary process to manufacture solar-grade silicon. And success is near, as the two have announced the development of a commercial-quality silicon solar cell with silicon derived from their proprietary process known as Silicon-Film (tm).

A portion of the cost of manufacturing silicon solar cells is the cost of energy used to reprocess the scrap silicon. Intuitively, manufacturing silicon directly for the use in solar cells should eliminate some of that cost. Visit AstroPower at http://www.astropower.com/ , Elkem at http://www.elkem.no/ .