Kyocera announced a plan to double their Solar Panel production by 2011.  The $250 Million investment will increase annual capacity from 240 megawatts of panels annually to 500 million megawatts in the next three years.  Eventhough the plant ran at 75% of capacity due to a shortage of of silicon wafers, used to manufature photovoltaices and as the bases for chips.  This shortage is expect to end in 2008.

The increase in production in the next couple of years has been widely anticipated for a couple of years as a result of expansion by silcon wafer suppliers to meet rapidly increasing demand. While it’s clear that the sales of panels will increase, it’ unclear if the increased supply will help reduce the street price. It’s my opinion, that demand will outstrip capacity until the majority of buildings worldwide are outfitted with panels.  The question isn’t whether to use solar panels, the only question is when is energy payback rate is high enough

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 19th, 2007 at 12:09 pm and is filed under Solar Commerce, Solar Electricity. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.