Short Selles of Solar Cell Raw Materials Stocks Seem To be Wriitng The News

Implications: This article seems mostly nonsense to me. It is poorly researched and seems to conflate different solar technologies and their problems with one another in a purposefully confusing way.

Analysis: There are some companies which are trying to utilize mirrors to collect and focus sunlight to boil water to create steam to turn turbines to generate electricity.

This could have been done, and was done at various times over the last 100 years, or more. The problem in the past has been that such devices work only during the day and must be placed in regions that get as much direct sunlight as possible. Then the system must be connected to a storage system, such as a battery field, and to a power grid, so that when they are not generating electricity those using this system for power during the day can still get power at night. In practice this has meant constructing such systems in desert or arid regions, where a water supply for the boilers is a problem, and high costs would be incurred by connecting to a grid over long distances. Battery storage of power collected during the day also adds large initial costs and larger maintenance fees.

Now that California, for example, is so heavily populated, batteries are mass produced by the tens of millions, and the electric grid is widespread many entrepreneurs want to create such "solar" power stations, and being rebuffed only by knee-jerk environmentalists who somehow think their power stations will be more dangerous to desert animals and flora than would be the emissions of coal, oil , or gas fired power plants, which will otherwise be built.

In any case it must be noted that NO NEW TECHNOLOGY AT ALL is  needed to construct such power stations; the only inhibition is that they produce electricity in remote areas cheaper or safer than any other method. This, i believe, is now possible due to the pollution and rising costs of fossil fuels.

As for Chinese producers of electronic grade silicon or metallurgical grade silicon suddenly becoming able to produce large amounts of polycrystalline solar grade silicon  inexpensively when long experienced western companies are just now beginning to do so in beta testing this is risible. No one knows if there will be enough solar grade silicon being made in the next two years to satisfy the theoretical demand that could occur if the supply is there.

As for thin film photovoltaic cells the issue is simply one of supply. There is clearly not enough supply capacity to increase the production of new gallium, indium, selenium, or tellurium fast enough to supply more than a small percentage of the presumed market demand for solar energy conversion devices in the next two ro three years.

If mass produced polycrystalline silicon does not reach a high enough volume then new solar energy conversion capacity will be strictly limited to what is actually available.

There will be no sudden Chinese supply of new material for any of the critical uses in solar energy conversion in the near term.

Short sellers are the ones telling stories such as this article purports to tell. Pay them no attention; they are not worried about anything but a margin call.