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Comment by slim | Hacker News Reader

But you still need to transport natural resources, right ? So what are natural resources used to manufacture solar panels?

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Mostly sand for the silicium. A little doping materials, phosphorous, arsenic. If you want to get fancy, cadmium, tellurium and selenium (but mostly that fad is over I think). Aluminium and copper for the frames and connectors, a bit of the usual plastics.

The big issue isn't resources, those are either present anyways or needed in very small quantities (dopants). The big problem is electricity for splitting up silicium oxide (sand) into usable silicium by electrolysis. You can do it in Germany, but then the power used will be mostly from lignite, so not very green most of the time.

Oh, and I forgot, glass for the cover. But again, mostly sand and heat.

So any place that does pretty much anything with aluminum should already be fairly well set up then? Especially if they already had some sand pits that used to make auto glass but have sat idle the last 50 years...

Describing my rural area of West TN. Dunno much about making solar cells, but now im wanting to learn more.

The "making silicium" part is indeed similar enough to making aluminium that there shouldn't be much of a problem there. It needs lots of electricity, but isn't terribly hard. The complicated part is in growing silicium monocristals, slicing them up, doping them, adding contacts and concentrators, etc. Kind of like building microchips, only that the structures are in mm sizes instead of nm.

We could see shipment of PV cells to be assembled into modules locally.

Also, don't forget the mounting hardware, which has seen surprising innovation as well. It's a significant part of the cost. Example: https://www.jurchen-technology.com/products/pv-substructures...

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