How Solar Panels are manufactured

[gotwind2]

A nice youtube video on solar panel manufacture.

Bit basic, but of interest.

Fast connection ideally and Flash plugin required.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYeynLy6pj8

Ben

[fungus]

Looks pretty interesting and informative, especially the part with doing the connections properly etc..

[ghurd]

No wonder PVs are in short supply!

He states "Six of them are made here, everyday."

[richhagen]

I wondered about that too.  Seems like a lot of equipment for 6 a day.  Presumably the capital equipments capacity would be the limiting factor.  The assembly doesn't seem that equipment intensive provided that adequate supplies are available.  The oven might be the limiting factor, and it seems like it would accept 3 panels, and with 15 minutes baking, you should be able to load it up three times an hour.  I would try to run that oven continuously with three panels a batch.  That would give me about 216 panels a day if I could keep it operating 24/7 If I can keep it up an average of 5 days a week all year, that would give me over 56000 panels a year.  Of course I'd have to have adequate supplies of the cells, ribon tabs, connectors, solder, EVA sheets, aluminum extrusions, ect to make it happen.  Idle tools and idle space won't pay the bills.  That would be over 11 million in revenue if I only got $200  a panel wholesale.  I wonder what the capital costs are, and the material and labor costs per panel?  Maybe Hurd Solar Product will put in an assembly line.  Rich

[ghurd]

I was told the labor is nearly the same for a 95W or 20W cryst. PV.

Same number of solder joints, same number of corners to be finished, same number of cuts to be made, same testing, etc.  That's why small PVs are so expensive per watt.

Also why so many campanies went to only larger PVs.

Assembly line implies 'more than' 2 people.  But I only saw the 1 guy?

The other things I noticed were he called a cell a module, and how he pronounced solder.

G-

[craig110]

Nice video!  Not all panels are manually soldered at a 6-per-day rate, though.  I've seen another video (sorry, wish I still had the pointer so I could post it) that showed the machines that another company uses to automate the soldering.  Zip, zip, zip, panel soldered.  What amazed me the most was how rapidly these machines could handle something as fragile as solar cells and still not break them.

[DanG]

Many eBay PV cells in the bonus box the vendor stuck me with had rows of nifty little divots snapped clean through them from automated equipment collisions, or twenty in a row with the exact same fracture from a handling process mis-calibration - I was told the panel assembly line had to be cleared of all cells before restarting, wholly good cells tossed over the liability of human-hand handling!