SCHOTT & Wacker Lay Cornerstone For New Solar Wafer Production Plant In Jena

SCHOTT and Wacker Chemie AG officially laid the cornerstone for a new silicon solar wafer manufacturing facility of their joint venture WACKER SCHOTT Solar in Jena, Germany. By April 2008, both partners will be completing stage one of their joint wafer production facility in Jena with total capital expenditures of approximately €50 million.

This move will result in the initial creation of 140 new jobs at the site. Production capacity is estimated to reach around 100MW per year already by the end of 2008. Wafer fabrication in the new facility will rely on conventional technology, thus individual wafers are sawed from multicrystalline silicon ingots. Manufacturing equipment will be installed in a two-story building with a floorspace of over 7,500m2.

Only a few weeks ago, SCHOTT Solar, a 100% subsidiary of SCHOTT, and Wacker Chemie AG set up two joint ventures to produce and market silicon wafers to the solar industry. Over the next few years, SCHOTT and WACKER plan to invest a combined total of approximately €370 million at the sites in Jena (Thuringia) and Alzenau (Bavaria), thereby creating at least 700 new jobs. Solar wafer production is set to expand in stages, reaching about one gigawatt per year by 2012. This will make the joint venture one of the world’s five largest manufacturers of solar wafers.

WACKER will supply SCHOTT WACKER Solar GmbH with the hyperpure polycrystalline silicon needed to produce wafers. The major part of the joint venture’s wafers will be used by SCHOTT Solar to make solar cells. At the same time, solar wafers will also be sold to other solar cell manufacturers in order to capitalize on growth opportunities and related economies of scale. To this end, SCHOTT and WACKER have established a separate sales joint venture, WACKER SCHOTT Solar Vertriebs GmbH.

SCHOTT and WACKER each hold a 50% equity stake in the production joint venture, SCHOTT WACKER Solar GmbH, while WACKER holds 51 and SCHOTT 49% in the sales joint venture. Besides the new wafer facility in Jena, the manufacturing joint venture also comprises the existing SCHOTT facilities for producing solar wafers in Alzenau, as well as those for producing multicrystalline silicon ingots in Jena.

At the SmartSolarFab® in Alzenau, wafers are manufactured using the advanced EFG process (Edge defined Film-fed Growth). This method differs from the conventional approach, where silicon wafers are sawn from an ingot. Instead, a silicon film in the form of an octagonal hollow tube is pulled directly from the silicon melt. A laser then cuts out the wafers.