Light at end of silicon-shortage tunnel?
Reuters has this story from the SolarWorld conference in Germany, where some industry executives are saying the silicon shortage slowing growth in the solar industry will be over by the end of 2008. Peter Woditsch, CEO of Deutsche Solar, said for this reason his company and other traditionalists in the sector are not wasting time and money on technologies that reduce dependence on silicon, such as thin-film technologies. “Silicon is available in 25 per cent of the earth’s crust, so there is no need for a silicon shotrage,” he said.
It’s a question I’ve pondered for some time. It’s one thing to develop technologies for lowering the cost and improving the efficiency of solar cells, through, for example, better manufacturing and design. But if the silicon shortage issue is temporary, why the rush to wean ourselves off of it, particularly when most of the non-silicon innovations won’t hit the market until after the silicon bottleneck is over? Just because a solar PV technology doesn’t use silicon doesn’t mean it’s superior or has some kind of edge over silicon-based technologies in the long term. The key is better manufacturing processes and more efficient design.
Tyler Hamilton is senior energy reporter and columnist for the Toronto Star, Canada's largest daily newspaper. In addition to this Clean Break blog, Tyler writes a weekly column of the same name that discusses trends, happenings and innovators in the cleantech market. This blog is a personal project started in April 2005. It is not an official blog of the newspaper. Tyler can be reached at tyler@cleanbreak.ca