How to turn an old fab into a solar plant

WHAT DO YOU do with an old shuttered fab that no one wants anymore? Easy, convert into a solar plant that is in high demand.

That is what Dockweiler Solar did to the old Communicant .13µ fab near Frankfurt, Germany. It took less than six month to convert it to a solar fab for Conergy, a solar production company. It will now produce wafers and modules in one building, saving time and transport costs.

The end result took a two-storey fab with a lot of columns and ended up with a three-storey building with a column-free clean room on the top floor. In the end, there were 42,500 square metres of floor space and 250MW of panel production capacity.

Don't ptretend you have never wanted to try this!

Solar production requires less height than electronics, so the decision was made to spit the two floors into three. This meant jackhammering out the middle floor and adding two more. Then you remove the columns from the top, and move in equipment. The end result looks like this:

One floor, 70M Euros

The idea is simple, you make the cells on the big, open and column-free top floor then move them downstairs to package them into modules. The middle floor distributes power, gases, liquids and consumables, so everything is tidy and convenient. Things that don't need to be in clean areas are not, things that do, are. Quite simple and nice if done right.

Dockweiler was a part of this because the firm makes tubing systems, and has a rather interesting crimp-fit system that takes two pipes, a converted drill, and a crimpable connector.

Since solar panel production does not need many of the exotic chemicals that silicon does, they can get away with much cheaper and easier to manufacture infrastructure.

Every geek needs one

Solar manufacture is also a fairly well-known technology. There is little R&D to be done at this point in the factories. This means you set up the line, work the bugs out, and crank out panels. If there is new technology, it is researched elsewhere and put in place when it is ready for volume.

Another thing to think about is that many solar factories are pilots for plants that will be built in the third world, the idea being to make panels where they are needed and used. This means the simpler the construction techniques and materials used, the better. That is one reason Dockweiler is in the solar game, an untrained person with a hand tool costs a lot less than an orbital welding machine and operator.

In the end, turning the old Communicant fab into the Conergy solar fab took less than five months, in the middle of a German winter, measured from start to equipment move-in date. From there, it was another six weeks until final completion. The building went from 29K wafers per month to 250MW of solar capacity in about half a year.

The campus has room for more fabs, and there are three more planned for a total of about a GW of capacity. The total budget for the Conergy fab was about 200 million Euros, including equipment and all the cell lines. Construction and building related portions of this took about 70 million Euros. µ