Solar cell and module maker Motech Industries Inc (茂迪) yesterday said it plans to invest NT$1.5 billion (US$53.89 million) to expand production, with NT$400 million earmarked for high-efficiency next-generation solar cell capacity expansion.
The firm’s board of directors has approved the capital expenditure, the largest in five years, amid strong demand for the company’s tunnel oxide passivated contact (TOPCon) cells, Motech Industries president Fred Yeh (葉正賢) said.
“As photovoltaic systems integrator companies become more educated about the benefits of TOPCon solar cells, we are seeing strong demand,” Yeh said. “Orders are backed up into the second quarter of 2022.”
Photo: Chan Shih-hung, Taipei Times
“The next generation of TOPCon solar cell technology can raise the conversion rate to more than 22 percent, meaning that costs can be lowered by 6 to 8 percent,” he said.
Motech is expanding capacity from 15 megawatts (MW) to 200MW to satisfy demand and expand sales, he said.
“The next generation of batteries is 14.6 percent more efficient than previous [generations] and will produce more power, even under cloudy conditions,” Yeh said.
From the rest of the money, NT$1 billion is to go toward building more solar cell systems, while NT$100 million is to be invested in aquavoltaics, which combine eel and shrimp farms with solar photovoltaic arrays to get the most out of limited space, he said.
The company is new to aquavoltaics, Yeh said.
There is 30MW of capacity under development, which should join the grid “within the next year,” he said.
The beginning of the end is in sight for a parts shortage crisis that has plagued the tech sector this year amid supply chain bottlenecks and logistics logjams, Yeh said.
“Revenue and costs for Motech will peak [this] quarter, but the worst of the parts crisis is over,” he said.
Yeh said that he expects strong demand for Motech Industries’ solar cells to continue well into the second and third quarter of next year.
When Lika Megreladze was a child, life in her native western Georgian region of Guria revolved around tea. Her mother worked for decades as a scientist at the Soviet Union’s Institute of Tea and Subtropical Crops in the village of Anaseuli, Georgia, perfecting cultivation methods for a Georgian tea industry that supplied the bulk of the vast communist state’s brews. “When I was a child, this was only my mum’s workplace. Only later I realized that it was something big,” she said. Now, the institute lies abandoned. Yellowed papers are strewn around its decaying corridors, and a statue of Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin
UNIFYING OPPOSITION: Numerous companies have registered complaints over the potential levies, bringing together rival automakers in voicing their reservations US President Donald Trump is readying plans for industry-specific tariffs to kick in alongside his country-by-country duties in two weeks, ramping up his push to reshape the US’ standing in the global trading system by penalizing purchases from abroad. Administration officials could release details of Trump’s planned 50 percent duty on copper in the days before they are set to take effect on Friday next week, a person familiar with the matter said. That is the same date Trump’s “reciprocal” levies on products from more than 100 nations are slated to begin. Trump on Tuesday said that he is likely to impose tariffs
HELPING HAND: Approving the sale of H20s could give China the edge it needs to capture market share and become the global standard, a US representative said The US President Donald Trump administration’s decision allowing Nvidia Corp to resume shipments of its H20 artificial intelligence (AI) chips to China risks bolstering Beijing’s military capabilities and expanding its capacity to compete with the US, the head of the US House Select Committee on Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party said. “The H20, which is a cost-effective and powerful AI inference chip, far surpasses China’s indigenous capability and would therefore provide a substantial increase to China’s AI development,” committee chairman John Moolenaar, a Michigan Republican, said on Friday in a letter to US Secretary of
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co’s (TSMC, 台積電) market value closed above US$1 trillion for the first time in Taipei last week, with a raised sales forecast driven by robust artificial intelligence (AI) demand. TSMC saw its Taiwanese shares climb to a record high on Friday, a near 50 percent rise from an April low. That has made it the first Asian stock worth more than US$1 trillion, since PetroChina Co (中國石油天然氣) briefly reached the milestone in 2007. As investors turned calm after their aggressive buying on Friday, amid optimism over the chipmaker’s business outlook, TSMC lost 0.43 percent to close at NT$1,150