First Solar Mesa construction site photo blog: The next big PV production fab rises from the desert

Sep. 23, 2011 - Tom Cheyney - pv-tech.org

With its framework structure erect and the first walls attached, the shell of what will be one of the largest PV manufacturing plants in the US is quickly rising from the desert floor in Mesa, AZ, east of Phoenix. The freeway-close First Solar production center will join the company’s mothership factory complex in Perrysburg, OH, as a second domestic site once it comes online next year. During a visit to—and exciting Bobcat ride around—the project this week, I found out that construction activities are in full swing, as the accompanying photos attest.

The contractor team, led by global engineering and construction firm M+W Group, is building the nearly million-square-foot, $300 million facility for First Solar near the corner of East Elliot and South Signal Butte roads on about 130 acres of what used to be the GM/Mesa Proving Grounds, now owned by DMB.

Just off the perimter of the parcel, the chewed-up asphalt remains of a former test track bear witness to the site’s former life, although the rumbling sounds now produced there emanate from earth movers, cranes, water trucks, and other construction machinery.

Onsite sources told me that the initial facilities equipment, such as piping, air compressors, and the like, will start to show up by late October. The building itself should be weather-tight by December, with the first production gear rolling up in late February and March. M+W expects to fulfill its contractual purview and be off the site by the end of May.

Once the tools are installed by First Solar’s equipment team, the first part of the ramp-up will begin, with production expected to kick off in the third quarter of 2012.

Although designed to accommodate as many as 10 production lines, the thin-film company will start with a complement of four cadmium-telluride moduling lines, currently rated to produce a total capacity of just under 250MW, in one segment of what will at first be a partially fitted-out structure.

That number, however, is based on the firm’s most recent reported run rate, which is a notoriously fleeting target-metric. Almost every quarter for the past several years, First Solar has continually improved its manufacturing productivity and will undoubtedly reach an even higher throughput level when the fab begins producing modules.

Based on the latest historical year-to-year improvement trends, the initial capacity/run-rate figure is more likely to around 65MW or so per line, for a total of 260MW.

Whether the company eventually installs the half-dozen additional production lines at Mesa will depend on demand and other market conditions. If it were to do so in, say, Q2 or Q3 2013, the total capacity for the 10-line factory, calculating for probable run-rate improvements, would be approaching 700MW.

In addition to the main building, ground-mounted PV test arrays will be positioned on separate locations in the northeast, south, and southeast sides of the property. There will also be a ~3MW CdTe rooftop system providing some of the electricity for manufacturing and administrative operations, similar to the one installed at the Perrysburg site.

About 150 workers affiliated with the various contractors and subcontractors are onsite now, but that number will grow to at least 400 when construction begins on the guts of the building and the equipment starts to arrive. When the plant becomes operational, First Solar estimates that it will employ 600 full-time manufacturing associates there.

Once the new factory’s production line begins processing glass in earnest, it will feed the increasingly voracious appetite for modules of the company’s 2.6GW North American project pipeline, with most locations within several hours’ to a half-day’s tractor-trailer truck drive from Mesa.

As I observed first-hand earlier in the week, the construction of one of those Utility-scale (note the capital “U”) power plants—the massive and impressive 290MW (AC) Agua Caliente project near Dateland in Yuma County, AZ—is well under way and should see the first few blocks of modules (made in the company’s existing fabs) coming online and sending energy to the grid by late 2011/early 2012.

(Editor's note: If you are reading this post on a mobile device, may I suggest you check out our complete PV-Tech site in order to view the accompanying photos.)