1366 Technologies, Bedford, Mass., announces plans to build a state-of-the-art, commercial solar wafer manufacturing facility in Genesee County, New York, strategically located between Buffalo and Rochester. It will eventually scale to 3 GW, house 400 Direct Wafer furnaces, and produce more than 600 million high-performance silicon wafers per year – enough to power 360,000 American homes.
1366 Technologies is implementing a series of proprietary manufacturing innovations aimed at producing high efficiency multi-crystalline wafers at a fraction of today’s cost. All of these inventions revolutionize current manufacturing processes while building on the existing silicon PV supply chain.
According to the company, Direct Wafer is a one-step, kerfless wafer-making process that has the potential to revolutionize wafer manufacturing. By delivering higher quality “drop-in” replacement multicrystalline wafers with unique surface features, 1366’s Direct Wafer technology forms a standard, 156-mm multi-crystalline wafer directly from molten silicon. The semi-continuous, high-throughput process eliminates silicon waste, resulting in a more powerful, low-cost wafer.
Direct Wafer produces one wafer at a time, so that each wafer sees identical processing conditions, enabling more spatially uniform wafers with lower dislocation densities and impurities. This unique feature offers a roadmap for cell efficiencies above those offered by the conventional ingot casting and sawing wafer process.
1366 Technologies will first construct a 250 MW facility that will produce more than 50 million standard silicon wafers per year. The facility will quickly ramp to 1 GW of production capacity and employ 300 people.
Construction of the 130,000 square-foot facility is slated to begin no later than Q2 of 2016 and is expected to be completed in 2017.
