A major obstacle to harnessing the sun’s power, however, has been that the production costs associated with creating solar modules have prevented solar from competing with other forms of energy generation.
Abound Solar’s proprietary manufacturing process is dry, in-line, continuous, and fully automated. Glass enters our semiconductor chamber and in less than two hours, a complete product device emerges from the end of the line.
The single, in–line semiconductor deposition tool creates significant improvements in PV film quality, device efficiency, device stability, and product yield. Because the semiconductor layers are applied in one piece of equipment, capital equipment costs, factory space, and manufacturing costs are all reduced. In addition, the fast cycle time increases product volume per capital dollars invested.
As a result, we have achieved a significant reduction in cost per watt per solar panel.
Other advantages of our manufacturing process include:
- Low capital costs — Based upon our simple manufacturing process and high throughputs, we have very low capital requirements. In addition, our equipment is proprietary, and designed and built in-house.
- Scalability — We have the ability to scale rapidly and efficiently based upon our robust, industrial process and low capital requirements.
- High throughput — Our manufacturing line has been designed for extremely high throughputs. It takes us less than 2 hours to build one of our modules from start to finish.
- Low waste — Our processing chambers are specially designed to minimize material waste. This not only cuts our processing costs and minimizes recycling, it also allows us to run our equipment continually with minimal downtime.
- High yield — Due to our tightly controlled process parameters and ability to ensure highly uniform thin-films, we can achieve very high yields.