A Japanese solar manufacturer, Solar Frontier, has been chosen to supply 150 MW of solar panels to a solar plant under construction in Kern County, California.
The plant will be one of the largest that employs CIGS technology, and is being developed by French utility EDF's renewable energy development arm, enXco.
The first phase, about 60 MW, comes online by the end of this year and the rest of the project should be finished in mid-2013.
Solar Frontier is the world's largest CIGS manufacturer with 1 GW of capacity, an acronym for its raw materials, copper indium gallium selenide. The thin-film technology is much cheaper to make than traditional panels and has the potential to produce about the same amount of energy.
Solar Frontier is suppling GE with GE-branded CIGS panels and is working with IBM to jointly develop thin-film solar cell technology based on the elements copper, zinc, tin, sulfur, and selenium (CZTS).
