Chinese polysilicon manufacturer Daqo New Energy has announced the start of pilot production at its 35,000-ton-per-year ‘phase 4B' polysilicon fab.
The company on Monday announced the production lines had been constructed ahead of schedule and had begun producing poly.
Daqo said the plant would be ramped up to full output by the end of March, at which point the manufacturer would have a total annual poly production capacity of 105,000 metric tons.
The company did not specify where the new production lines have been developed but Daqo's main production facility is in Shihezi, in Xinjiang province and the previous, Phase 3B expansion in capacity took place in Xinjiang.
Despite talk of a future glut of polysilicon production facilities, Daqo CEO Longgen Zhang reiterated the company's plan to have 270,000 tons of annual poly capacity in 2024, and said the new facilities would “be market-ready for” the production of higher-efficiency n-type solar modules.
Quoted in a Daqo press release published on Monday on the Cision PR platform, Zhang said: “With the rising prices of fossil fuels, solar PV is becoming more competitive and its economic value is being increasingly recognized by the market, as reflected by the increased prices of solar products this year, a rare occurrence in … solar PV history. We believe we are just at the beginning of a new era in which solar PV will play an increasingly critical role as one of the cleanest, most sustainable, and most cost-effective sources of energy. We expect to see accelerating growth in solar demand in the foreseeable future.”
