Lack of Local Skills Prompt Filipino Silicon Wafer Firm to Move to Singapore

For lack of local expertise, First Philec Solar Corp., the only Filipino-owned company making silicon wafers for solar power, will base its R&D laboratory in Singapore.

While there is the desire to set up the research and development lab in the Philippines, there are very few PhDs and post-graduate scientists and engineers able to do solar energy R&D, said Dr. Dan Lachica, First Philec president and CEO.

“The end goal is to develop local R&D capability, but I need PhD talents in the Philippines now,” Lachica added.

Array of solar panels in Sevilla, Spain. Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/61555653@N00/

He is working on collaborating with Philippine universities to develop home-grown talent with post-graduate degrees in solar power technology.

Meanwhile, Philec will have to do its basic research in Singapore, Lachica said.

First Philec Solar of the Lopez Group of Companies is the first large-scale silicon wafer slicing company in the country. It aims to produce 240 million wafers annually, which will support approximately 750 megawatts of solar energy. At full capacity, it will be one of the biggest of its kind in Southeast Asia.

The company converts silicon ingots into wafers that are thinner than 160 microns and is the primary supplier of solar-grade silicon wafers to SunPower, the world leader in high-efficiency mono-crystalline silicon solar cell production.

For all that, the Philippines has abundant potential for solar power but very little know-how to harness it.

This is the assessment of Dr. Danilo B. Romero, a Filipino physicist at the University of Maryland Laboratory for Physical Sciences.

“There is no local expertise,” he said. “There is local capability to fabricate but technology measurement and characterization of photovoltaic technology, for example, is lacking.”

In the best case scenario, the know-how is within Metro Manila universities. The situation “gets worse” outside the metropolis, said Romero, a Balik Scientist of the Department of Science and Technology (DOST).

Solar power R&D is getting a “quantum jump” at the University of the Philippines Diliman, Ateneo de Manila University and De La Salle University, “but it is not as widespread as it should be,” said Romero who specializes on next-generation solar power technology.

He has just wrapped up his stint at the UP National Institute of Physics. While here, he helped fine tune the academic capacity at UP, Ateneo and La Salle to do solar power R&D.

He also helped draft a proposed study on solar energy devices based on nanotechnology that was submitted by these universities to the DOST.

Romero described the state of solar power R&D in the Philippines as first generation, involving silicon-based technology. Second generation technologies include plastic solar cells which are soluble to make them thinner than human hair.

“It’s like silk screen, and malleable enough to put on, say, clothes. It’s not as efficient as silicon but potentially a lot cheaper,” he said.

Third generation solar power, he said, is almost in the realm of “science fiction.” While investment risks are very high, power generation is very efficient and cheap.

Solar power is still expensive to generate, he said, and it will still be years before it is put to mass use.

Power from a solar panel now costs $3 per watt, Romero said.

The si-called Balance of Systems Cost – the amount it takes to convert from Direct Current to Alternating Current, plus the battery to store power, and so on – means an additional $2.50 per watt.

In pesos, the total is roughly P5 to P10 per kilowatt hour (kWh). “This is not cheap,” Romero told Malaya Business Insight.

It costs around $30,000 to power a 200-square-meter house with the usual refrigerator, television, entertainment systems and lights. In pesos, this amounts to about P1.5 million.

“The cost has been going down fast in recent years, from $80 per kWh in the 1980s to about $3 now, but it’s still a very expensive technology,” said Romero. “This is because of the expensive materials used to fabricate solar panels that collect the sun’s energy.”

“We need not wait for 20 to 25 years to lower the cost further, that’s too long. So there’s a big push in the United States with massive investments on R&D to bring down the cost to the equivalent of about P1 per kWh. Whether we can achieve this or not, we don’t know,” he said.

Romero’s research at the University of Maryland involves plastic photovoltaic, instead of the conventional silicon-based technology. It is not as efficient as silicon in collecting the sun’s energy, but if successful will significantly lower the cost of solar power.

Source: Malaya

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