Polycrystalline Silicon Bottleneck Confronting Photovoltaic Industry and the Countermeasures

The actual conditions of the photovoltaic industry in the world as well as China were described. At the present time, the solar cells based on bulk crystalline silicon dominate the photovoltaic market. Silicon demand from photovoltaic application is increasing at unprecedented rates. However, since 2004 the global solar cell industry has been experiencing a severe polysilicon shortfall. The situation is even more serious in China and the polysilicon shortage has become the bottleneck of China's photovoltaic industry. In order to get rid of the trouble confronting the photovoltaic industry, the following tasks should be done: ① to complete the construction of polycrystalline silicon plants being still in construction in China; ② to improve the technologies of polysilicon production in order to reduce the energy, metallurgical silicon, chlorine and hydrogen consumption. The polysilicon production cost should be reduced and gain an advance in the competition. The processes should be environment friendly. In a long run, it is expected that fluid bed process will be adopted by a number of manufacturers to supply the photovoltaic industry. There is a big potential in switching over to thin film technology including amorphous silicon, microcrystalline silicon, and compound semiconductor films. However, the challenges of improving performance of the thin film products and scaling up production lie ahead.