Dutch HyET Solar aims to scale up production capacity to 900 megawatt peak in 2021
"Thin film has the future, also in large-scale energy production," said Rombout Swanborn, a major shareholder in HyET Solar, who wants to scale up its production capacity to 900 megawatt peak by 2021.
HyET Solar's Powerfoil is a thin film based on silicon PV modules. This is flexible and lightweight, which makes it suitable for standalone solutions, for example and building integrated pv (bipv). However, that's not why main shareholder Rombout Swanborn joined the company. "If you want to accelerate the energy transition, you have to dare to go big to think. The business case for applying our product in solar powerplants is in many cases more favorable than the one in the use of traditional crystalline silicon solar panels. Now that that has been scientifically proven, we start production significantly upscaling in the Netherlands, Indonesia and Oman. "
Swanborn received his doctorate in 1987 as mining engineer at the Delft University of Technology. He did that with a solution for a known problem in the oil industry. The older an oil field, the more challenging the extraction due to the mixing of oil, water, gas and sand. Swanborn designed a compact separation technology with which a profitable exploitation is possible are extended and preserved. Main sponsor of the study Shell. During a corporate career at Swanborn further developed his invention. In 1994 he started his own company that quickly became the international market leader in the offshore industry. It independently Swanborn's entrepreneurship earned him a fortune. He sees that primarily as investment capital in new innovative companies of their own accord, and promising start-ups. Thereby, he is driven by his passion for engineering. Swanborn doesn't want to go to the store fit but is a techie.
World player
Swanborn continues to build as an investor on its separation technology. He explicitly chooses to focus on the energy transition. "You can label that as somewhat schizophrenic – work within the traditional energy sector and in sustainable energy. I don't see that so. The world cannot do it in the short term without fossil fuels. We carry contributes to a more efficient and cleaner extraction. At the same time we help build - partly from an overlapping technology - to create the energy system of tomorrow, in the full width of the chain. Let's do that within the HyET Group. HyET Hydrogen focuses on converting, among other things of green energy into hydrogen. This one storage is indispensable in the future, given the persistent discrepancy between sustainable generation and consumption about the seasons. HyET Low Carbon focuses on technology development at the field of carbon dioxide management, for example CO2 extraction from waste streams, gases and air. With the we want third company - HyET Solar become a global player in the development and production of thin film solar modules. We are currently booking in this significant progress. "
Convince
HyET's Powerfoil modules have an efficiency of 12 percent. The company is currently working together with TNO within the innovation project FlamingoPV to increase it efficiency. It focuses on 13 percent return for dual junctions and 14 percent for triple nodes. In addition, in the Netherlands developed a facility to produce 35 megawatt peak per year for modules from 1.3 meters wide to 30 meter long. And that is only the prelude towards large-scale industrialization. "Who thinks of thin film solar cells, Due to its flexibility and lightness, it is soon thinking of application in all kinds of niche markets, "says Swanborn. "But that's not why I'm in HyET Solar got on. Want a powerful build a business that makes a difference in accelerating the energy transition, you have to dare to think big. That also echoes in our name; HyET stands for High yield Energy Technologies. It was my firm belief that applying thin film in it extensive solar power plants the future. That's a statement that cannot count on resonance everywhere in the solar energy world. That the business case for the large-scale applying our Powerfoil - in which you sell the total costs over the life of an extensive solar park against the return - however special can now turn out to be favorable, has now also been established in an independent scientific validation process. With that conclusion we can further convince the market.'
Profit
HyET Solar, together with Shell, released the Levelized Cost of Electricity (LCoE) for a 100 megawatt peak installation calculate in a desert environment by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado and the University of Groningen. The results are just in. In summary: where the LCOE of such a plant with crystalline silicon solar panels, usually about 0.025 up to 0.04 US dollars per kilowatt hour, it is in the case of HyET under the same conditions up to 24 percent lower. The modules of HyET may be less efficient, but that is made up for by many other factors. That way they are cheaper, and they are put together on the ground. That produces a profit in area of 20 percent on. In addition, savings are made on infrastructure and mounting systems. Moreover, is cleaning the panels very easy to automate and relatively cheap.
Royal couple
Swanborn: "Of course we hope that Shell now also becomes a customer and a powerplant with our technology goes to build. The company has industrial application possibilities enough and it would be a nice sign. There are already planning for 10 megawatt peak pilots, with PDO in Oman and Vopak in Singapore. We can supply these from the production site that we are currently building in the Netherlands. In the first quarter by 2021, it will have a capacity of 300,000 square meters of Powerfoil per year, which is with a return of 12 percent translates to just under 40 megawatt peak. I think that incidentally we are best within the Flamengo project may go to 15 percent. We want to start within 6 months scale up the site to 300 megawatt peak. During the recent visit from the royal couple to Indonesia we signed a contract with the national oil company Pertamine. There too, the third quarter will be held next year's spade into the ground to a production site of the same build capacity. My goal is to in Oman by then construction from such a factory, which our total production at 900 metawatt peak brings. With that we have the scale and footprint to be very cost effective operate, and the partners to us as serious and innovative player in the solar energy market. That is also necessary. The solar energy world is quite conservative. A lot of parties have burned their fingers of investments that evaporated then production to the Far East shifted. Our product is perfect for manufacturing in the west, including The Netherlands. That also drives me to here make it a success. "
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