• Mitsubishi Chemical already produces materials for the solar industry but sees opportunity to produce the cells themselves
• Sanyo is an established producer of crystalline solar cells, but has opened an Advanced PV Development Center in Gifu, Japan to concentrate on developing thin film technology.

This is good news for solar energy advocates, as these companies have the capital and the knowledge base to ramp up production more rapidly than startups, while increasing efficiency and cost savings. According to Sanyo’s Makoto Tanaka:

“‘Our target date for volume production was 2012, but in order to move that up, we’ve decided to invest an additional US $14 million,’ said Tanaka, bringing total investment … to some US $70M through 2010. He noted that the production ramp should be eased because part of the new process is very similar to that already used in Sanyo’s mainstay heterojunction with intrinsic thin-layer (HIT) cells, which sandwich a single-crystal silicon substrate between layers of amorphous silicon thin films.”

Sadly, the United States is not one of the countries competing on this scale with Sanyo and Mitsubishi, who see their main competition coming from China and India. Though the U.S. company Nanosolar has been a leading innovator in thin film, and Open Energy is making big inroads in the production of Building Integrated Photovoltaic (BIPV) modules using thin film tech, they are still comparatively small players in the space, along with FirstSolar. Let’s hope that the U.S. steps up to provide the kind of legislative support that U.S. companies need to move forward at a faster pace in developing new solar technologies.

Image Credit: Ovonic.com

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