Poseidon opens new silicon recycling facility in Chennai

Chennai, May 30 (UNI) Poseidon Solar Services Pvt Ltd, a subsidiary of Solar-Fabrik AG opened its new silicon recycling facility here today.

The plant, located adjacent to the existing facility, would increase the capacity of silicon processed to more than 600 MT per annum, a company release said.

This silicon could be used to produce approximately 75 MW of solar panels. The silicon recycled by Poseidon was used to fill in the severe demand-supply gap of polysilicon that was crucial to the red hot solar PV industry.

The new plant was a modern world class facility that had an automated line for silicon processing. All the processing was done in such way that there was no exposure of humans to any toxic materials.

"This plant was unique, because it was only one of a handful of such dedicated plants worldwide for silicon re-processing and it was the only one in the world with an automated line," Solar-Fabrik CEO Christoph Paradeis said.

"Furthermore, we plan to install a very unique process technology for the recovery of currently unusable silicon (such as highly doped materials) in the new plant in the first half of 2009," he added.

It would further strengthen our procurement efforts led by Global Expertise Wafer Division Ltd." Poseidon had also installed a 25 KWp PV system on the roof of its new facility. The new system was made of a mixture of different types of mono and multicrystalline modules, the solar cells for which have been provided by Q-Cells AG.

In addition to fulfilling its role in using renewable energy for its production, the system was also used as a test bed to get field data on the types of systems best suited for Indian conditions.

Poseidon and Q-Cells would jointly monitor the system and have access to the data, the release added.

UNI SNR SJ 1706