Japanese copper indium diselenide (CIS) module developer Showa Shell has announced plans to spend 160 billion ($1.7 billion) over the next five years in the hopes of ramping up capacity from 80 MW to a jaw-dropping 1 GW. (Showa Shell President Jun Arai also said it aims for a 10% market share in solar by 2014, but it’ll have to be even bolder to hit that target – we project the solar market will reach 18.5 GW in 2013 – see the report “Finding the Solar Market’s Nadir” and this post). Showa Shell also recently purchased a Hitachi plasma television plant with eyes to transform it into a solar module facility (see the April 9, 2009 LRSJ), the likely vessel for its ambitions.
We caught up with Kazuyuki Kamimura of Solar Frontier (Showa Shell’s solar brand for overseas sales) at Intersolar in Munich this week and pressed him on the seeming illogic of expanding over tenfold in the teeth of the current module oversupply. Kazuyuki explained that Showa Shell believes that its CIS technology simply isn’t economically viable without the large scale, so its only alternative to pressing forward with scale-up is to get out of the business altogether. He did, however, allow that its next stage of expansion, scheduled to break ground in 2010, “might be less” than 1 GW.
CIGS/CIS has the potential to match First Solar’s industry-low manufacturing costs with higher efficiencies – Showa Shell is at 10% to 11% today, according to Kazuyuki, and hopes to reach 13% by 2010 – so if it can pull off the trick of bringing costs down while pushing efficiencies steadily northward, Showa Shell is positioned to win big. There are likely to be bumps along the way – a 20% to 30% leap in efficiency in a year is a bit much to swallow, for instance – and of course it remains to be seen if the firm will follow through on these ambitious plans. But its willingness to push its chips to the center of the table here suggests it’s feeling confident in its CIS approach, and could become the breakaway leader that field has been pining for.
