$435 Million To Be Invested To Triple Solar Production By LG Electronics
LG Electronics will invest $435 million to triple its production of N-type solar modules. An expanded production facility in Gumi, South Korea will be employed to reach this goal. Currently, LG’s production is approximately 1 GW, but it wants to grow that figure to 3 GW by 2020, with a stop at 1.8 GW by 2018.
“The significant increase in production offers the hope of lower prices for these premium modules over time, making top-of-the-line solar affordable for “mainstream consumers,” wrote Jim Jenal, Founder & CEO of Run on Sun, a Pasadena, California solar power installer and integrator.
LG has a number of Neon products you can check out, ranging from 275 watts up to 360. These solar modules are all considered high-efficiency. (If the name LG sounds familiar to you, it might be because you have seen the company’s non-solar products like mobile phones, display screens or appliances like washers and dryers.)
SunPower makes the same kind of n-type solar modules and says its are the most efficient in the PV industry.
Its nameplate production capacity has been reported to be 1.5 GW, so it currently has more than LG, but SunPower may reach less by 2020 than LG: 2.5 GW vs. 3 GW.
SolarCity wants to have a 1 GW solar production facility up and running by 2017 in upstate New York, which produces n-type solar technology as well. Once source explained that at the full 1 GW production level the number of solar panels would between “9,000 and 10,000 solar panels per day.”
Conditions at LG Electronics may differ in some ways, but that figure might provide at least some indication of how many would be produced in South Korea, where six production lines will be added to the existing eight.
LG started its solar division in 1995, and since then its solar products have won awards such as the 2013 Outstanding Performance Intersolar Award, as well as one in 2015.
Image Credit: LG Electronics
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