Blogs & Ecology

Masdar has broken ground in its first solar panel factory, a $230 million thin-film plant in Ichtershusen, Germany that is part of the company’s $2 billion investment in thin-film production.

The factory will make panels of amorphous silicon on equipment from Santa Clara, CA’s Applied Materials, so the project will somewhat span the globe. Applied Materials’ equipment will also appear in Masdar City (pictured above) at its 140 MW factory, which will be up and running towards the end of 2010.

The German-based factory will open towards the end of next year, and will be able to produce 70 MWs worth of panels each year. This will be just the start of Masdar’s solar panel production. The company plans to hit 1 GW of annual production by 2014.

Via Nanotechnology Now