Champion Companies of Photovoltaics

[kristopher]

Champion Companies of Photovoltaics
By Pete Singer, Chief Editor, Photovoltaics World

The supply chain behind today's photovoltaics industry is vast, including materials suppliers, equipment manufacturers, cell and module manufacturers and balance-of-system providers. In this section, we recognize those companies that are playing a key role in developing the solar industry to date. These organizations are helping to make solar more broadly available, easier to adopt, more efficient or cost-effective, and develop new innovations.

Solar Frontier: Big-time CIS in Japan
Solar Frontier’s Kunitomi Plant is Japan’s largest solar module production facility, as well as the largest CIS factory in the world. With Solar Frontier’s existing plants, the company now has a total annual production capacity of around 1 gigawatt. The billion-dollar plant shipped its first commercial thin-film CIS solar modules in February, 2011, only 16 months after breaking ground.

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JinkoSolar: A quantum leap

JinkoSolar Holding Co., Ltd. recently announced commercial-scale production of its Q-1 Solar Modules, part of the Quantum Series. These modules are produced using pseudo-mono multi-crystalline cells, which combine the benefits of mono- and multi-crystalline cells to better align the crystalline structure and achieve a higher efficiency product, all while maintaining low production costs. The cells deployed currently perform at an 18.3% efficiency level. The Quantum-1 modules, with an array of 60 solar cells, can perform up to 250 Wp.

JinkoSolar has an integrated annual capacity of 900 MW each for silicon ingots, silicon wafers, solar cells and solar modules, and plans to expand its annual capacity to 1.5 GW each for silicon wafers, solar cells and solar modules by end of 2011....

more at: http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2011/12/champion-companies-of-photovoltaics?cmpid=WNL-Wednesday-December7-2011