A report by the Australian Photovoltaic Institute (APVI) titled ‘Silicon 2 Solar’ has offered an industry road map for domestic solar photo-voltaic (PV) manufacturing in Australia.
The roadmap, which was developed with the aid of several industry stakeholders, including The Australian Centre for Advanced Photovoltaics (ACAP), AGL, Aspiradac, Energus, Siemens, SunDrive, Tindo Solar and 5B, outlines a pathway for Australia to build domestic solar panel supply chains from raw processing to module manufacturing.
The roadmap defines four key stages in the supply chain – from production of polysilicon through to manufacturing ingots and wafers, and finally fabricating solar cells and modules.
While building out each step of the chain will present challenges, the roadmap has laid out a clear capacity for Australia to participate in each stage of the solar panel supply chain.
Clear technological capacity
“Australia has already demonstrated its capacity to manufacture advanced technology in other sectors,” Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) CEO Darren Miller said.
“Solar PV represents an enormous opportunity to apply our skills to a sector that will play a critical role in Australia’s clean energy economy.
“A number of Australian companies have already stated their ambitions to develop local manufacturing of solar PV at scale, and ‘Silicon 2 Solar’ illuminates the policy and investment pathway to make these bold plans a reality.”
Australia is one of the biggest PV markets in the world and contributes greatly to research and development in the sector, but does not have any domestic manufacturing capability whatsoever, remaining reliant on overseas markets for components and modules.
Several resource and mining companies are already targeting the PV market for their silica sand products, which are currently shipped overseas to be manufactured into PV-grade silicon.
With solar now the cheapest form of renewable energy, using the abundant energy to power other forms of industry to enable technologies like green hydrogen and green steel.
Dramatic fall in price
The price of solar has fallen dramatically even in just the last decade – in 2016 the cost of solar energy was between A$140 and A$178 per Megawatt hour (MWh) but today is as cheap as A$50/ MWh, with investment and innovation expanding the use case and driving down the costs of solar every year.
ARENA recently released its white paper on what it described as “the incredible potential of ultra low-cost solar for Australia and the world”.
The white paper lays out ARENA’s 30-30-30 vision for ultra low-cost solar in Australia – in essence they aim to achieve, 30% module efficiency, at 30 cents per watt, by 2030.
As ARENA writes in a statement, Australia’s access to high levels of solar irradiance and our cutting-edge technological and R&D abilities position us to take full advantage of ultra-low-cost solar, with potentially massive long term economic benefits for both industry and ordinary Australians.