Silicon Shortage Eases, Pointing to Future Price Reductions for Solar Panels. By Ben Arnoldy, CSM, June 5, 2008. "Quartz, the raw material for solar panels, is one of the most abundant minerals on earth. But for years, the solar industry has faced a bottleneck in processing quartz into polysilicon, a principal material used in most solar panels... Now the silicon shortage may be coming to an end... thanks to new factories coming online. If true, the price for solar panel modules could start falling by as much as a third by 2010, says Travis Bradford, president of the Prometheus Institute for Sustainable Development in Cambridge, Mass... Global demand for solar panels is growing at about 50% per annum, says Mr. Bradford, but the polysilicon supply for solar will grow by 80% for each of the next couple of years. 'That should be faster than the demand is growing and should be putting some downward pressure on prices,' he says... There are also a host of new polysilicon manufacturing firms trying to get up and running in China. Half a dozen major plants will go online this year, and another six to 10 next year, says Bradford. By the end of 2009, he says, the industry will be producing almost three times what it did in 2006."
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