BONN, Germany, March 7, 2007.
SolarWorld Group is building an integrated solar silicon wafer and solar cell production facility that will be the largest in the United States when completed in 2009.
The 500 MW factory is being built in Hillsboro, Oregon, at a cost of Euro 30 million following a recent investment of Euro 600 million by the Komatsu Group of Japan. The site is near the Intel chip manufacturing facilities but Komatsu did not commission the plant and SolarWorld will invest an additional Euro 300 million.
SolarWorld will receive funding from Oregon from a global warming program and will also shift its solar crystallization activities from Vancouver (Washington state) for production to start this summer. The Vancouver business had been operated by Siemens Solar Industries before it was acquired by Shell Solar. The sale by Shell to SolarWorld was finalized last February.
The 95 employees in Vancouver will be transferred to Hillsboro, where staffing will grow to between 600 and 1,000. SolarWorld employs 1,300 in Germany, Sweden, South Africa, the U.S. and Asia.
In the first stage of expansion, capacities will be increased to 100 MW and it will also double capacity at its specialized solar module factory in Camarillo, California to 100 MW.
“The new investment in Oregon constitutes an exceptional opportunity,” explains Frank Asbeck of SolarWorld AG. “The takeover of such a high-tech production facility at a price of only Euro 30 million is an excellent deal.”
With the new U.S. production, SolarWorld will expand its position as a provider and producer of solar power technology in the growing U.S. market. Combined with an expansion of silicon wafer production to 500 MW at its facility in Freiberg, Germany, the group will have a total global production in excess of 1,000 MW by 2010.
The new wafer and cell factory in Oregon will produce mono-crystalline solar silicon products while production in Freiberg is based on multi-crystalline silicon.
“The new U.S. production will be designed in line with the latest results of our ongoing inter-group research work,” explains Boris Klebensberger. “In this process, the technological know-how from the mono-crystalline technology taken over from the former Shell companies will be employed for the first time. With our new U.S. production, we are thus consistently living up to our claim of being the technology leader in this market.”
In 2006, SolarWorld surpassed its own forecast with sales of Euro 515 million and profits of Euro 130 million, an increase of 45% over 2005. It went public in 1999.
