New solar panel plants planned for the US

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First Solar plans plant for Alabama.

First Solar said Wednesday that it has selected Alabama as the site for its fourth U.S. panel factory.

The company will spend more than $1 billion on the new site, which it said will be producing by 2025.

CEO Mark Widmar previously said the recently passed climate bill was a key catalyst for the new facility.

First Solar CEO Mark Widmar previously told CNBC that the Inflation Reduction Act was the key catalyst that led First Solar to choose the U.S. for its latest factory.

The new facility will produce 3.5 gigawatts of solar modules annually by 2025. The company said the site will create more than 700 new jobs.

Enel North America intends to build one of the largest solar photovoltaic (PV) manufacturing facilities in the US, expected to initially produce at least 3 GW and scale up to 6 GW of high-performance bifacial PV modules and cells annually. The proposed facility will be among the first in the United States to produce PV cells, the key building blocks that make up solar panels.

The facility is expected to create up to 1,500 new clean energy jobs, while also supporting the creation of a domestic solar PV supply chain to accelerate the growth of US generated energy and add to the country's domestic solar cell and panel manufacturing capacity.

Construction of the proposed factory is expected to begin in the first half of 2023, and it's anticipated that the first panel will be produced and available to the market by the end of 2024.

The proposed US factory will be Enel's second solar PV manufacturing facility globally. The company previously announced the expansion of its 3Sun Gigafactory in Catania, Sicily, increasing its production capacity from 200 MW to 3 GW.

[eppur_se_muova]

1. link? nt

[mahatmakanejeeves]

2. Enel to Build Massive Solar Panel Factory in U.S.

WSJ NEWS EXCLUSIVE | BUSINESS

Enel to Build Massive Solar Panel Factory in U.S.

The planned factory would also make solar cells, a key part of the supply chain not currently produced in the U.S.

By Phred Dvorak
https://twitter.com/Phred_Dvorak
[e-mail]
Nov. 17, 2022 6:00 am ET

Italian energy giant Enel SpA is readying a massive solar-manufacturing push in the U.S., including plans for a factory that will make solar cells, a key part of the supply chain that currently doesn’t exist here.

Enel said it is planning a factory that can initially produce 3 gigawatts—and ultimately as much as 6 gigawatts—of solar panels. That is a scale that would make Enel’s factory one of the largest such ventures in the U.S., at a cost that could approach or top a billion dollars, according to Journal estimates.

{paywall}

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5. Info about their technology

3Sun is already a market leader in producing high-efficiency cells, breaking a record in 2020 by achieving 24.63% efficiency. Through an ambitious R&D program, the PV panels will be further developed to also incorporate a tandem structure, which utilizes two stacked cells that allows for more light to be captured compared to single-cell structures, yielding higher overall cell efficiency. The combination of bifacial PV panels and tandem cell structure offers significant efficiency improvements, which will enable PV modules to exceed 30% efficiency, securing higher average energy production. The technology's lower degradation ensures a longer useful life for modules, and the cells' high density is conducive to a variety of applications, including land-constrained utility-scale installations or rooftops.

BTW first line of the press release >>> Enel North America, through its affiliate 3Sun USA, LLC,

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/enel-announces-intentions-to-build-solar-pv-cell--panel-manufacturing-facility-in-us-301681394.html

[NNadir]

3. Wow, we're saved!!!!!!

One would need to have a sense of scale, and to avoid the inherent dishonesty when using the unit of peak power (GW) to describe an unreliable system rather than units of energy (GJ) to understand exactly how trivial this plant is.

To spend a billion dollars on junk that will be able to put out as much energy as a small gas plant, and still require the building of a gas plant to back it up, is obscene.

Even if, as the anti-nuke "solar will save us" cults were able to prevent the existence of "night" as they like to assume in their now 50 year old game of pretend they've played at the expense of all future generations, 3.5 GW, for a plant operating 100% of the time - no night, no snow, no clouds, no dust storms - would produce 0.11 EJ per year, this on a planet now consuming 624 EJ per year (and rising). In reality, since this future electronic waste will operate (at best) at 25% capacity utilization - spare me the fraudulent three card monte game about batteries - it's more like 0.028 EJ per year.

After 20-25 years, the plant will simply be able to replace the solar cells produced 20-25 years before (if not sooner) the earlier produced cells now having become landfill, for a net result of 0 EJ.

As of the week beginning November 13, 2022, the concentration of the dangerous fossil fuel waste in the planetary as measured at the Mauna Loa Observatory was 417.29 ppm, 2.49 ppm higher than it was 1 year ago.

This comes after half a century of delusional representations of about the growth of the solar industry, which claims it will serve the world with all of its energy needs, but as of 2021 was producing just 5 EJ of the 624 EJ that humanity consumed last year, this with two billion people more or less, living in dire poverty that couldn't matter less to people prattling on about Elon Musk's Powerwalls for the deliberately oblivious bourgeoisie.

Have a pleasant Sunday evening.

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6. Hey DQIIIIIIII, did you not understand

that the 3GW was the yearly production of PV panels? That is also the initial capacity - the plant will be capable of being expanded to 6GW yearly.

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4. Link to First Solar build plans

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/16/first-solar-selects-alabama-for-new-factory-as-ira-prompots-boom.html