Solar Companies Are Scrambling to Find a Critical Raw Material (bloomberg.com) 134
Solar manufacturers are being battered by higher costs and smaller margins, after an unexpected shortage of a critical raw material. From a report, shared by an anonymous reader: Prices of polysilicon, the main component of photovoltaic cells, spiked as much as 35 percent in the past four months after environmental regulators in China shut down several factories. That's driving up production costs as panel prices continue to decline, and dragging down earnings for manufacturers in China, the world's biggest supplier. "There's just not enough polysilicon in China," said Carter Driscoll, an analyst who covers solar companies for FBR & Co. "If prices don't come down, it will crush margins."
The market corrects (Score:4, Informative)
If the processing becomes profitable enough then factories will open up, perhaps outside of China. The finance situation has made poly-Si briefly (and artificially) cheap. If there is demand then people will pay more and investment can start again. Right now it's just too cheap to bother investing in a factory.
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It sounds like the factories were shut down for being too polluting.
In China.
Are you sure the processing can be done in a clean, let alone profitable, way?
Re:The market corrects (Score:5, Informative)
Are you sure the processing can be done in a clean, let alone profitable, way?
It can and is done cleanly. Polycrystalline silicon is manufactured worldwide, including in the US. Outside China it is mostly higher quality "electronics grade" rather than lower priced "solar grade", but it is routinely done with more stringent pollution controls than was previously acceptable in China.
Collecting the volatiles, and cleaning up and recycling the wastewater has a cost, but if everyone is required to do it, the cost can be pushed downstream to the panel manufacturers, and they will pass it on to their customers. This is not a solar showstopper, but it will make panels a bit more expensive.
Does anyone else think it is silly that something made in factories is called a "raw material"?
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IF you produce this stuff in an environmentally acceptable way it's more expensive, a lot more expensive.
Only if you go totally overboard, like say, California, where the wastewater is required to be significantly cleaner than the original tap water. That is one reason why silicon is no longer made in "Silicon Valley".
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What the *problem* here is, IF you produce this stuff in an environmentally acceptable way it's more expensive, a lot more expensive.
And this differs from any other industrial production...exactly how?
It's NEVER going to pay off without subsidies and it's an environmental nightmare to use when you look at the whole lifecycle of the equipment...
And you could say the same thing about coal or nuclear and we'd have no idea what source exactly you're actually talking about.
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Does anyone else think it is silly that something made in factories is called a "raw material"?
Would you consider steel to be a raw material? Sure it's a refined output in one sense, but it's absolutely a raw material in another.
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In "terms of art" it probably isn't considered a "raw material" but a "manufactured material" or "natural manufactured material"
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Does anyone else think it is silly that something made in factories is called a "raw material"?
Its raw within the context of the process.
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But silicon tetrachloride is an environmental "show stopper" if not reprocessed...it's worse than the old Roman idea of "salting the land". Nothing grows, animals die, etc.
Silicon tetrachloride is a volatile liquid, that quickly evaporates ... and it degrades in the presence of water to SO2 and HCl. So I am skeptical that it could stick around long enough to cause significant long term harm. Do you have a citation for its supposed Carthaginian properties?
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Here's an MSDS [airgas.com]. This one says nothing about ecological impact. But I suppose it would form longer-lived organosilicates.
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But silicon tetrachloride is an environmental "show stopper" if not reprocessed
Not reprocessing it is idiotic. Not only do you have to store it somehow if you don't reprocess it but you're also losing shitloads of extra silicon that you could sell from it.
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You don't have to store it if you're just dumping it somewhere... which is exactly what these plants were doing (apparently)
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Just because these particular plants decided to make even more profit at the expense of being dirty as fuck, doesn't mean that it can't be done in a non-dirty-as-fuck manner and still turn (less) profit.
These assholes just decided to either take a bigger margin, or undercut competition with literally dirty business.
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Are you sure the processing can be done in a clean, let alone profitable, way?
Yes, it can. [chemicals-technology.com] Any other question?
Re:The market corrects (Score:5, Interesting)
I bet Silicor really regrets not building their new Iceland plant (they backed out because the price of polysilicon just couldn't support it). They had a really cool technology; I wouldn't support the building of an old-fashioned silicon producer near me (we have a couple in the country; they're pretty terrible), but I supported them. Basically it's based around aluminum alloying; they dissolve impure silicon in aluminum, then cool it (settling it out as flakes, which they skim), then etching away residual aluminum from the flakes with hydrochloric acid. It's then re-melted one more time to separate out any residual aluminum. In addition to the silicon, the process byproducts are silicon-rich aluminum alloys (which are worth more than the original aluminum) and polyaluminum chloride (used in water treatment).
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But at least you got a Costco instead.
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You must be stupid or living under a rock for the past couple of decades.
Poly-silicon was very profitable before China tanked it in the mid 2000's.
https://www.wired.com/story/inside-story-of-the-great-silicon-heist/
Re:The market corrects (Score:5, Informative)
Your economics are false because they work if you only count the return on excess solar power production, rather than replacement of grid power. In general a solar system will reduce your daytime power cost. They do this at the full retail price the power company charges. If you can't sell power back to the grid AND you can't store power for night-time use economically, then you lose out on your night-time power costs. But not day-time.
Solar lease has poor economics where it is not possible to sell power to the grid, but that's because solar lease is an expensive way to get solar power. Ownership is better.
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It will indeed reduce your cost but you probably won't get back the investment at current rates.
After tax subsidies, a PV installation costs ~$10-15k after tax deductions (although the estimate I got for my property was $25k and I didn't qualify for the full tax rebate) and about $150/y in continuous maintenance costs. I pay on average about $75/month in electric (on your average 3000 sq.ft. house, partially electrically heated and AC cooling, well insulated).
Even if the PV were giving me all the energy nec
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Many people pay a lot more than $75/month for electricity. I paid $140 last month. Currently I have solar heating panels for my swimming pool on the roof. If I were to install solar, it would probably be my own installation with an electrician to wire in the inverter and sign off the rest. I could bring a 5000 watt system up for well below $10K.
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We use primarily hydro-power and local townships have bought out a bunch of hydro power through long term contracts. In my neck of the woods, dealing with electric inspectors is a pain though and nobody local would ever sign off on an install they have not installed or overseen fully themselves.
I've tried during the renovation to get an electrician to come out to review my work and they all refused, I just had to have the electrical inspector come twice. I don't think any electrician wants to lose their lic
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Soooooo...what you're saying is that it's time that the price of electricity took into account all the externalities that it has been avoiding all this time? Things like the true cost of pollution, laying waste to entire landscapes, exploiting workers and local populations, etc.
PV has done its part to improve the payback period by reducing costs from tens of dollar per watt
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Who is paying the cost right now for these "externalities"? How about the "externalities" of making PV panels in China by practical slave labor under horrendous health conditions.
Re: The market corrects (Score:2)
Must be nice.
My house is 1400swft, heated with natural gas, and my monthly payments for electricity is $180 a month. Whole house is led and compact fluorescent.
But im also in ontario canada. One of the highest electricity cost provinces in canada.
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Whole house is led and compact fluorescent..
Incandescent bulbs would help heat.
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Resistive electric heating is not as efficient nor cost effective nor yet ecologically sounder than either direct conversion of chemical energy or electrically driven heat pumps. Now, if you do want to turn high quality energy like electricity into heat, doing something else with it like running compute resources may help offset that deficit.
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wouldn't help with the energy bill.
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You are getting fleeced. Around here you can go to somewhere like IKEA, buy a system for about $8,000 and see a return in about 10 years after costs. You can easily get it cheaper than that, or increase the savings by adjusting other parts of your system to make better use of solar energy (heating, car etc.)
But even taking your shitty deal, the problem is clear. Solar will pay for itself in the absolutely worst case, likely save you a lot of money or even give a nice tax-free ROI, but the up-front cost is t
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$8000 barely pays for the worker cost. The panels are relatively cheap, but half or more of the cost is actually spent on contractors, linemen and licenses.
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Re:The market corrects (Score:4, Insightful)
If you can use all the power generated by your PV solar installation, or store the excess in batteries for use during night or bad weather, and you can get the economics of solar to work, then good for you. But if you're trying to use the power grid as your battery, then you can't run your cost/benefit analysis using retail electricity prices. Also note that the maintenance costs per house are fixed. Whether you need to draw power from the grid just one day out of the year, or every day out of the year, you still need the same wiring to your house. So we're not talking about a discount per kWh here. We're talking about a fixed cost per household. (Actually the electrical utilities should just separate out their bill into generation and transportation costs like water and gas companies do.) We're running into the same problem with EVs - they wear out the roads just like ICE cars, but they don't pay the fuel taxes to maintain the roads. California just enacted a tax on EVs to help pay for this road maintenance.
All that said, FWIW, in the cost analyses I've done, the local price of electricity is a much bigger factor than utilization. In places with high electricity prices (e.g. Hawaii) and good weather, the payback time for a PV solar installation can be as low as 5-7 years with subsidies, about 10-12 years without. (I should mention that the most cost-efficient energy system I found was geothermal heating and cooling [wikipedia.org]. Where you run your heating and air conditioning with a heat pump using the ground as a heat sink instead of the air. For the desert region of Southern California, the payback time I calculated for that was as short as 3 years, and that's without subsidies.)
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...as if all that wiring, maintenance, and power regulation is free.
Much of this problem could be solved by billing correctly. Here in Maryland, you see the charge for your power separate from the charge for the power company maintenance. Transparency in billing is important. This is like when phone companies were adding hidden surcharges in but not disclosing them, or when they were charging a monthly fee for the leasing of your cell phone, even after the lease was paid off.
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We're running into the same problem with EVs - they wear out the roads just like ICE cars, but they don't pay the fuel taxes to maintain the roads. California just enacted a tax on EVs to help pay for this road maintenance.
Of course, most road wear is from trucks; road damage rises with the fourth power of weight. The California EV tax seems excessive, since it's basically making an EV pay the equivalent of an ICE vehicle getting 20mpg and driving 16,000 miles a year, but I guess $100 a year is not too onerous.
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Depends on the power company. Austin energy no longer does net metering. They pay me I think 10.6c/KWH and I pay them their standard rates (which are greater than 10.6c/KWH when usage is above 500KWH for the month). They have reduced the 10.6c once (was 11.?) and I expect they will rinse and repeat. As long as you are tied to the grid, their rules. When I installed the system it was net metering. I was not happy with the unilateral change.
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In the US, the tax credits make solar work. My system was $47000, but I get 55% off and a $16500 check from the utility company itself making my payback time 2.8 years. If you could the excess $600 a year, my payback time is 6 months sooner. WIthout the tax credits the payback was 20 years, with only the utility company's "rebate" the payback would have been 13.2 years. I must be honest when I say the tax credits make solar viable. But which is better for the country as a whole? The incentive to go s
Re:The market corrects (Score:4, Insightful)
Fossil fuels are only cheaper if you keep the waste products off the books. Put all the emissions in there, the costs of smog, PM5 pollution, carbon, increased medical spending of people living downwind from coal plants, increased asthma rates, etc. and solar starts to look pretty god damn good.
Talk about subsidy - the coal industry gets a pretty damn good subsidy in the form of medicare payments paying for the damage they cause through normal operation, which doesn't even touch on the effects of carbon / climate change (if you're into that kind of thing).
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Fossil fuels are only cheaper if you keep the waste products off the books.
The same is true for PV and wind farms too. Really, this very story is about the cost of the PV industry waste.
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The pollution per panel, at worst, is still a static figure. The pollution from fossil fuels just keeps growing the longer you operate it. Are solar panels the utopia of green that some people like to think? No - but they are still a damn sight better than lopping off the tops of mountains and burning it.
I don't understand the shilling for fossil fuels on this supposedly enlightened site. Can't we all agree that essentially turning mountains into toxic slurry, aerosol particulate, fly ash ponds, and car
So essentially.... (Score:1)
The absolute MURDER of the environment by Chinese industry to make cheap toasters (solar cells this time around) has finally caught up with the market in a negative fashion. Who would have thought eventually they would care about all the dead children?
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I think Uncle Xi is really serious about corruption and pollution, and my guess is where you have excess pollution you also have corruption.
Xi may be willing to take on some polluters at the cost of higher product prices if he can push those costs onto foreign consumers due to lack of competition. This externalizes the costs of cleaner production. Busting local officials taking bribes in exchange for allowing the pollution helps his image and further solidifies his power.
Self inflicted. (Score:2)
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"environmental regulators in China" (Score:5, Interesting)
How horrific does the pollution from a plant have to be before regulators in China shut it down? It really makes you wonder how much pollution from this process was being overlooked.
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China has been cracking down and cleaning up since the late 2000's. You're expecting pristine lakes that turned to a pool of black sludge to turn back to a pristine lake over night and the policies to catch up that fast as well?
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More like, I wasn't expecting China to be doing any real cracking down at all so the closures come as a bit of a surprise to me (though a sign that perhaps the efforts are getting more real).
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No they have been cleaning up for the last five years because that was part of their last five-year-plan. Now there is a new one whose full details have yet to be released.
Don't lie. Educate yourself.
#simplethings
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How horrific does the pollution from a plant have to be before regulators in China shut it down?
Don't bring 2000 era daft bias into the conversation. Every society has followed the same path, from the USA to Germany, Japanese, and now Chinese. There were borderline uninhabitable places in major US cities due to pollution from lack of environmental regulation. Where are they now? Cleaned up as the economy evolved and the country transitioned.
China is going through much of the same. Major investment in green technologies, major incentives to stop polluting, major incentives and regulations to clean up c
The Chinese Killed The Market In The First Place (Score:5, Interesting)
6 years back I was working on a project for a polysilicon plant in the USA, it got shelved and the plant never built when the Chinese started flooding the market with cheap silicon. If this new development keeps up I wonder if the company that was going to build that plant will attempt to restart the project where it left off as most of the engineering design was already done.
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Looks good for US and EU factories (Score:1)
I'm pretty sure the surviving ones are able to produce within even more stringent regulations.
Sounds like a perfec fir for (Score:2)
Mexico.
Cheap labor, and if there are any environmental concerns, a coupe pesos in the right pockets makes it all good...
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Save the Gulf for crude oil!
Minor deviations (Score:2, Interesting)
Firstly, the raw material needed to produce semiconductor grade polysilicon (and monocrystalline silicon) is just quartzite (aka silicon dioxide, aka sand), one of the most abundant materials in the earth's crust. So with that in mind, this isn't a situation like the rare-earth metals where china is literally sitting on the needed raw ore to produce the higher quality materials. We have the raw material in excess (as most countries do) and all we really need are the c
The Invisible Hand self-corrects (Score:1)
In the absence of artificial scarcity (diamonds) or collusion or import/export limits (supply), the market will establish a reasonable price level.
I wouldn't worry.
The problem is mostly for the profit margins of the suppliers and intermediaries.
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you are one stupid faggot
Alright. I apologize for that. I went and did a little research on smith and free markets and shit and now I have to eat my own fucking words and I hate that because it make me a flaming dickhead but your still stupid. so there.
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A highly purified material (Score:5, Informative)
In CHINA (Score:2)
So it's time for Perovskite solar cells? (Score:1)
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Washington State Polysilicon (Score:2)
trolling for solar (Score:2)
California Virtue Signaling (Score:4, Insightful)
No reason it couldn't be done in Silicon Valley.
Only problem is California likes to shift its pollution to other countries and states so they can maintain the illusion of being green.
We just ignore the fact that it REALLY runs on coal powered electricity from Utah and solar cells from China.
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Great news (Score:1)
Great news for thin film companies like First Solar (a US company). The cost of their panels is schedule to hit 20 to 25 cents in 2018 vs current wholesale prices of 32 cents. First solar's solar panel efficiency is 17% which is pretty good for thin film. More solar basic research should help bring down costs further and improve inefficiencies.
Kill two birds in one stone (Score:2)
59% tariff on US polysilicon (Score:4, Informative)
RECSilicon, Wacker, and Hemlock would be very pleased to sell the Chinese polysilicon. All the Chinese need to do is drop the 59% tariff they put on it.
REC can make polysilicon for less than $11/kg. Take the tariff off and they could restart the other half the plant in 3 or4 months. Currently itâ(TM)s shut down due to oversupply outside of China, which is caused by the Chinese tariffs. 80% of the demand is in China, but less than 80% of the polysilicon production is in China.
By the way, this particular trade war trade war was started by Obama.
P.S. RECâ(TM)s quarterly report has more information on the trade war. You can browse the old ones to see how it developed over the years.
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The moon (Score:1)
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Right, let's go to the moon so we can mine it. How do we get there though? Nuclear powered rockets!
That doesn't sound like a great idea any more.
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Where can I find out more about this business venture to import silicon from the moon?
I can tell you about it, but we want serious investors only so there's a $100K non-refundable investment required before I can give you details. And an NDA, of course.
If you're thinking this is silly because 15% of the Earth's mass (28% of the crust) is silicon, I'll just point out that the Earth's silicon is of a lower grade. The best silicon is extra-terrestrial and the moon has some of the highest-grade silicon in the solar system, and it's also (obviously) the nearest and most accessible source. Given
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Biophotovoltaics (Score:2)
silver (Score:1)