September 2011 - I-Micronews

S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 1 I S S U E N ° 1 3
HCPV supply chain - Positioning of the HCPV players: three scenarios
(Yole Développement, 2011, HCPV report)
“HCPV systems
makers are largely
outsourcing
production of their
custom component
designs to
optics makers,
tracker makers
and electronics
contract
assemblers,”
says Milan Rosina,
Yole Développement
are largely outsourcing production of their custom
component designs to optics makers, tracker makers
and electronics contract assemblers. But it is difficult
for the system makers to best optimize the system
cost and performance without knowing exactly how
design choices will impact manufacturing costs at
the supplier, or how one component can best be
optimized to work with another component made
by someone else. Optimizing the system requires
careful balancing of all the parts, trading off more
complicated and expensive optical systems for less
accurate trackers or vice versa, or adjusting the
characteristics of the primary optic to those of the
secondary optic, and that’s hard to do by separate
players.
The fragmented sector is equally a problem from the
supplier side. Suppliers argue that the components
could be better designed for efficient low cost
manufacture if the designer knew something about
the manufacturing process, and that components
could be better optimized to work together if they
were designed together. Tracker makers complain
that they have no visibility into if the market is big
enough to support development of custom trackers
for modules of entirely different size, weight, and need
for accuracy. Designing custom components for each
separate system maker’s kilowatt-scale projects is a
very low volume business, with volumes sometimes
only in the hundreds of units, often too small a
business to be of much interest for the supplier, and
too small for efficient volume production.
Much depends on the successful performance of the
early megawatt-scale HCPV projects now coming
on line to build credibility for the technology. But
building the first larger 10s and 100s of megawattscale
installations will also require business
models that enable optimized system design and
foster a viable supply chain to support volume
manufacturing.
www.yole.fr
Milan Rosina is analyst at Yole Développement for
photovoltaic market & technologies. He received
his Ph. D. in 2002 from the INPG in France. He
gained experience as a research scientist in several
renowned R&D institutions & industrial companies
where he worked in the field of microelectronics, PV,
LED & nanotechnology.
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