PV solar manufacturer Toledo Solar said it would expand its domestic panel manufacturing capacity to reach 2.8 GW by 2027. The Ohio-based company said the move is in response to demand for solar products and the recently enacted Inflation Reduction Act.
The company said the federal law provides $430 billion in tax incentives to accelerate the country’s renewable energy transition, including enabling 7.5 million more homeowners to install rooftop solar panels and providing incentives to generate 950 million solar panels by 2030.
It said the ITC tax credit rose to 40% for solar panels manufactured in the U.S. Toledo Solar said it expects to create an additional 250 jobs by 2027.
The company manufactures Cadmium Telluride CdTe (“cad tell”) thin film solar panels and systems, with a supply chain sourced from North America.
Typical cross section of a CdTe cell: Credit: DOE The Energy Department’s (DOE’s) web site said that CdTe solar cells are the second most common photovoltaic (PV) technology in the world marketplace after crystalline silicon, currently representing 5% of the world market. It said that CdTe thin-film solar cells can be manufactured quickly and inexpensively, providing an alternative to conventional silicon-based technologies. The record efficiency for a laboratory CdTe solar cell is 22.1% by First Solar.
DOE said that CdTe is a direct-bandgap material with bandgap energy that can be tuned from 1.4 to 1.5 (eV), which it said “is nearly optimal for converting sunlight into electricity using a single junction.” It said the cells use high throughput manufacturing methods to produce completed modules from input materials in a matter of hours.
Toledo Solar was a partner in a team that won a proposal to establish a Cadmium Telluride Accelerator Consortium with funding from a program established by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Solar Energy Technologies Office to hasten the development of cheaper, more efficient CdTe solar cells.
