[elcdodedocle]

You know why release a product to the market that lasts longer when you can just hold the patent and make shitty panels that have to be replaced every so often? Forget the competitors. Forgive the cynicism but this was clearly a 20 year long win-win for the industry. Long live the big wheel industrial complex. F the consumer.

*and the environment.

[new299]

When I see a broad statement like this, it seems interesting to dig a little further.

The article itself doesn’t provide much detail to back up its claims. And specifically it would be interesting to understand the patent issue better.

The patent they cite says claims “ A silicon single crystal produced according to Czochralski method using a melt in contact with a quartz crucible, to which Ga (gallium) is added as a dopant that controls resistivity of the crystal in a range of 5Ω.cm to 0.1Ω.cm, wherein a diameter of the single crystal is 4 inches or more, and the single crystal is used for a solar cell.”

Which seems pretty broad. Would that really have held up in court if it was tested? Was this patent really blocking fabrication of gallium doped silicon?

A text from 2015 suggests there were open issues around fabricating gallium doped silicon:

https://books.google.co.jp/books?id=S43SBQAAQBAJ&pg=PA253&re...

So it seems likely that there were open issues around fabrication until at least 2015. Have there been other process developments that have made Gallium doping viable in recent years?

The patent largely covers the fabrication process, and was recently licensed to a Chinese fabrication company. Is it likely that this IP was really blocking them? I.e. given that they may not publicly disclose their fabrication process, how would you know they were infringing.

If this IP was of such fundamental importance why was it not challenged? This is rare in my experience (outside of semiconductors at least).

So, it doesn’t seem clear cut to me. And it would be interesting to understand the issues better.

[elcdodedocle]

Well I agree with you. And I also suspected those numbers, to be honest. A sudden increase to 80% of total production? 80% from what? Since when? But I did not do a lot of research: I tried to find sources as the article is not only vague on context but also on references, but the numbers I found were not clear either. They only showed that around 90% of the global production was from silicon crystal based panels already back in 2013, way before the patent expiration. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_of_photovoltaics citing https://www.webcitation.org/6SFRTUaBS and https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/bitstream/J...). I found no breakdowns to compare boron vs. gallium doping over time. I do not know anything about foundries. Maybe replacing boron with gallium is not a trivial change in process. Maybe the patent and planned obsolescence are not the issues here and I was being pretty cynic on my comment without fact checking it anyway. But way too often they are. If that figure, 80%, is true, and the shift from boron to gallium happened over the last year like the article claims, it is very likely that 2 main factors, if not the main ones, were those.