Viz-A-Viz with Dr.Ilka Verena Luck, Global Head, New Product Development & Technology, Heraeus Photovoltaics

Q Share us about your R&D facilities and how they are helping you to offer products with better power efficiency. And their role in delivering products with better power efficiency.

One of our core strengths is our R&D capability. Today, we have five Photovoltaic R&D centers in the US, Singapore, Taiwan, China and Japan. We believe that customization is very important to increase efficiency. From our experience, we know that it is possible to increase the efficiency of solar cells by up to 1%, just by introducing a new paste and customizing it properly with regard to the process.

Furthermore, our capacity and our expertise allows us to scale up the production of even customized products very quickly. This is important to allow our customers to keep the production running during introduction of new products.

The production itself runs at an unrivalled repeatability ensuring continuous compatibility of the Heraeus products with the production line and the delivery of high efficiency solar cells.

Q. Please tell our readers how Heraeus Products are supporting manufacturers in maximizing cell or module performance.

Heraeus Photovoltaics is strongly developing as a technology provider for the Photovoltaic Industry. Besides our full range of high efficiency silver paste products, we have increased our offerings throughout the value chain. We are also offering hardware such as Infrared lamps and screens for the silicon solar cell production as well as consumables such as diffusion barrier coating (Heraglaze) for enhanced crucible performance in the Si ingot manufacturing. However, our close relationship and on-site presence during the introduction of new products has been the key to our success. Each solar cell production line is different and therefore, it is important that we work closely with our customers to adapt our products to their production process.

Q. As a supplier to the Indian Manufacturers what do you feel that the govt. needs to do for boosting domestic manufacturing?

Apart from further increasing the efficiency, bringing down cost and enhancing production capacities to meet the continuously increasing demand. The main challenge of the power sector that all renewable players face is to provide level load of power by applying storage technologies in a sensible way.

Q. What is the roadmap Heraeus have for the Indian solar market?

Heraeus Photovoltaics has significantly expanded in R&D, application engineering and in production capacity over the last years. We have been recognized by leading industry organisations to be one of the most reliable supplier to the industry due to our professional supply chain management. So, Heraeus will be able to meet current and future demand from the Indian PV industry.

Heraeus offers its industry recognized cell optimization consulting and diffusion consulting to its Indian customers. Both services aim at providing world class technical expertise to Indian cell manufacturers so that they can compete with the best in the world and turn the “Make in India” vision to reality.

Q. Solar PV manufacturing is becoming increasingly global, and with 10 GW milestone achieved, India is fi nally expanding. What does this mean to Heraeus?

During the REI in Delhi, we noticed very strong interest in PV from investors and consumers alike. They clearly see the economic benefit and the easy installation. The PV market in India is set to grow over proportional.

Energy production from Photovoltaic is already the cheapest way to produce electricity and the prices will continue to decrease. Photovoltaics thus offers great opportunities for India to help solving the very strong growth in energy demand. However, this requires a good and technologically leading partner for the Indian solar market. We are convinced and strongly believe that we can be the technological partner. We want to be the partner of choice for the Indian PV Industry to establish market leadership and also want investors to better understand our technology and the benefits that high efficient cells bring for their return on investment.

Q. How does Heraeus currently view the opportunities in the Indian solar market? What is on the calendar for Heraeus in FY2017-18 and how do you plan to achieve it?

First of all, our interest is to provide the Indian PV manufacturers with high efficiency functional materials. As they become competitive on an international level, we enable them to cover more and more of the Indian installation market. As our customers grow, we happily grow with them.

In India, we are on the track to have more than 50% market share by the end of 2017. In 2018 and beyond, we plan to be proactive and aggressive to grow our market share even further. As the market evolves, we would announce other customer centric initiatives.