Reliance Backed Wafer Manufacturing StartUp NexWafe Plans 6GW US Manufacturing Plant

German solar startup NexWafe GmbH, which counts India’s Reliance among its key investors, is considering a major expansion in the US with 6 GW of solar wafer manufacturing capacity there. Towards this end, NexWafe GmbH has established a U.S. subsidiary to evaluate the development of multi-gigawatt-scale solar wafer production in the U.S. with an initial target production volume of six gigawatts (GW).The US subsidiary will be led by Jonathan Pickering, previously president of Chinese solar manufacturer JA Solar Americas and former vice president of equipment supplier company Applied Materials.

NexWafe has been working on a more efficient, lower cost manufacturing process for wafers, its EpiNex production technology. EpiNex aims to simplify polysilicon production and reduce energy consumption and production time. It achieves this by  producing monocrystalline silicon wafers grown directly from inexpensive raw materials, going directly from the gas phase to finished wafers. This proprietary process obviates the need for costly and energy intensive intermediate steps such as polysilicon production and ingot pulling on which traditional wafer manufacturing relies. NexWafe uses in-line manufacturing, both for the formation of an initial release layer as well as for epitaxial deposition of silicon in an atmospheric chemical vapor deposition process. NexWafe’s unique patented technology is expected to drastically cut wafer production costs, making solar photovoltaics the lowest-cost form of renewable energy available.

Currently, the firm is building a 250 MW production plant in Germany.

Under its agreement with Reliance Solar Energy Limited (RSEL), there is an India Strategic Partnership Agreement where RSEL will secure access to NexWafe’s proprietary technology and plans to build large-scale wafer manufacturing facilities in India using the NexWafe processes and technology.

The US move is no surprise considering the massive incentives on offer under the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) there, which have triggered a manufacturing boom of sorts in the solr supply chain. Of course, the NexWafe investment scores with its deeper backward move into the supply chain, rather than just modules and cell manufacturing, as most plans have been so far.