Japanese photovoltaic (PV) developer Solar Frontier has announced that its flagship manufacturing plant has now reached full commercial operation and is on track to produce 900MW of solar modules this year.
The Kunotomi factory is the largest PV production facility in Japan and when combined with Solar Frontier's existing sites gives the company an annual production capacity of around 1GW. The $1bn plant shipped its first panels in February.
Satoru Kuriyagawa, chief technology officer of Solar Frontier, said, 'The Atsugi Research Center functioned as a production laboratory where we were able to fine-tune processes from raw materials to finished modules until our modelling matched precisely what we wanted to see in production. We increased the efficiency of the factory with ten-fold scale over Plant 2 and extensive automation while also increasing the size and efficiency of the modules coming off the Kunitomi production line.'
Last month, Solar Frontier won a contract to provide modules for the Nissan Headquarters and in June received an order for 3.78MW of PV units.