Project description

The project highSol aims at the transformation of innovative manufacturing concepts on a laboratory scale into the full industrial scale. The result will be the demonstration of technologies which will enable the mass manufacturing of photovoltaic products with a serious reduction of manufacturing costs. The objectives are:

Demonstrating the automated manufacturing of photovoltaic products based on thin wafers with a thickness of 150µm.
Increasing and maintaining the overall yield with the implementation of in-process quality control and feedback systems.
Demonstrating the manufacturing integration with the implementation of interfaces which will serve for future standards.

The conducted work and the expected results will have a serious impact in the short- and medium term. It will heavily contribute to the saving of feedstock allowing a guaranteed life-time of 35 years with respect to photovoltaic products. Furthermore, it will enable the building up of large manufacturing facilities based on standardized high automation. Europe has not only contributed to reduce hazardous exhaustions by 8% until 2010 but also to increase the share of renewable energy to 22%. The project's results will contribute to these targets by enabling the establishment of 4.5 GWp photovoltaic energy capacities from the current level of 1GWp.