In a manufacturing facility in a smoggy nook of China’s inland Shaanxi province, the nation’s world-leading photo voltaic trade is on show. Robots scoot round carrying sq. slices of polysilicon, a substance normally made out of quartz. The slices, every 180mm throughout and a hair’s breadth thick, are known as wafers. They’re bathed in chemical substances, shot with lasers and etched with silver. All that turns them into photo voltaic cells, which convert daylight into electrical energy. A number of dozen of those cells are then bundled collectively right into a photo voltaic module. The manufacturing facility, which is owned by LONGi Inexperienced Vitality Know-how, an enormous of photo voltaic manufacturing, can churn out about 16m cells a day.
