To compete in this emerging space, manufacturers obviously must place an emphasis on the safety and quality of their products. SolarWorld Industries America, based in Hillsboro, Oregon, is a leading producer of photovoltaic modules, cells, and wafers.
Within this sector, there are a variety of procedures whereby photovoltaic modules are employed to capture sunlight and convert it to energy. Some companies use single-crystal silicon, others use polycrystalline, and still others use thin-film methods. In the United States SolarWorld uses single-crystal silicon.
“Ours is really kind of an old-school product in which we slice up wafers of silicon,” says John L. Coleman, Ph.D., continuous improvement specialist, module engineering, of SolarWorld. “We follow a semiconductor-type process to develop photovoltaic cells, which is done in our Hillsboro facility. The cells are then shipped down to our module-fabrication facility in Camarillo, California, where we interconnect and encapsulate them.” The result is a photovoltaic module ready for home or commercial use.
SolarWorld products are safety-tested according to UL and IEC standards. All of its modules are 100-percent tested to ensure that they’re grounded so that no consumer can walk over to an array and get a nasty shock — or worse.
“Each product is tested as per the safety requirements from UL and the IEC,” says Coleman. “Our products go to the appropriate sanctioning body, whose labs put them through a group of qualification tests. Once those labs qualify the product and say it conforms to a particular standard, we go into production with that particular flavor [of module].”
SolarWorld had manufacturing capacity of approximately 30 megawatts of photovoltaic modules in 2007, 100 megawatts in 2008, and is projected for 150 megawatts this year.
To handle the expanding demand (a nice problem for any manufacturer to have), SolarWorld has increasingly moved to an automated manufacturing process; Coleman estimates that up to 90 percent the company’s processes are now automated. In a data-driven manufacturing environment such as this one, analyzing the information coming off of individual pieces of assembly equipment is of critical importance. SolarWorld’s manufacturing execution system (MES) takes the data from these automated processes and feeds them into the STATISTICA software program from StatSoft Inc. STATISTICA allows SolarWorld to look at control charts, capability studies, and other statistical analyses.
Everyone’s concern
Safety testing is an area of quality assurance that has serious ramifications for everyone along the alternative energy chain — manufacturers, certification bodies, retailers, and, especially, the businesses and individuals that use these products. Some retailers (Home Depot is a prime example) have been known to take a product’s safety certification one step further by subjecting it to their own testing processes, which are often more stringent than those of the testing labs or even the manufacturers themselves.
Safety testing, if done properly, assuages risks such as liability, corporate reputations, and even death for all key stakeholders in the energy-generation business. These procedures have been in place for more than a century to ensure the safety of everyone that can be affected by the use of energy products. As energy demands increase and the environmental effects of fossil fuels mount, alternative energy sources will increasingly come to the forefront as options for businesses and consumers alike. The booming business for photovoltaic modules and wind turbines will continue as long as the public finds these products to be effective, affordable, and, of course, safe.
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