FIRSTSOLAR - $1,50 pro Wp - Werden die etablierten Solarzellenhersteller unter Druck kommen? (Seite 240)

[meinolf67]

und hier nochmal richtig ausführlich:

http://minerals.er.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/selenium…

habe ich selbst noch nicht komplett gelesen; kommt irgendwann später...

[meinolf67]

Da stehen auch die 47.000 Tonnen drin; das sind aber "Reserves"!

Wer die Nomenklatur vom Öl her kennt, weiß dass das wenig Aussagekraft hat.

[meinolf67]

Laut USGS hat sich der Preis in 4 Jahren ver-14-facht:


http://minerals.er.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/selenium…

[meinolf67]

Der Artikel kostet 25,- USD. Wer teilt mit mir?




Broader Perspectives
Improved estimates for Te and Se availability from Cu anode slimes and recent price trends
Martin A. Green *
Centre of Excellence for Advanced Silicon Photovoltaics and Photonics, University of New South Wales, Sydney 2052, Australia
email: Martin A. Green ([e-mail])

*Correspondence to Martin A. Green, Centre of Excellence for Advanced Silicon Photovoltaics and Photonics, University of New South Wales, Sydney 2052, Australia.

Keywords
materials availability � Te availability � Se availability � Te and Se prices

Abstract
The recent Si supply shortage has provided a foretaste of what might occur when a photovoltaic technology becomes materials-supply constrained. Non-silicon technologies, involving some of the least abundant materials in the earth's crust, have even more fundamental problems with material availability. For both Te and Se, Cu anode slimes produced during Cu electrolytic refining provide the present major supply stream. The availability of material from such slimes is reassessed using recent data and shown to be more limited than earlier estimates. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

[meinolf67]

Antwort auf Beitrag Nr.: 32.748.002 von lohnsklave am 13.12.07 00:43:36

Sorry,

ich war der Böse, der nicht kommentiert hat.

Ich habe die Dinger aus folgendem Grund reingestellt:

-Tellurium ist kritisch für FSLR; sie sagen zwar, dass alles im Grünen sei, trotzdem hat es noch keinem geschadet, sich seine eigene unabhängige Meinung zu bilden. Der Autor gibt an, dass je Modul etwas 8g verbraucht werden. Wenn ich jetzt mal vereinfacht annehme, dass es jeweils 80W/modul sind (im Moment dürften Sie noch darunter liegen), dann bedeuten die bis jetzt bekannt gegebenen Ausbaupläne bis 2009 immerhin schon einen Te-Bedarf von 910 MW = 91 to/Jahr. Bezogen auf die Zahlen, die ich bisher zur Jahresproduktion gelesen habe, ist das zwar noch keine engpass, aber auch nicht mehr vernachlässigbar...

-Die Artikel geben Infos über konkurrierende Verwendungszwecke von Te, namentlich das phase-change-memory von ENER; ganz nebenbei ist man auch im Dünnschichtbereich Wettbewerber von FSLR, auch wenn ich sie bisher eher für Schlafmützen gehalten habe. In den letzten Tagen ist der Kurs allerdings gewaltig in Gang gekommen.

-und zuletzt: wenn wir mal die vom Autor genannte Größenordnung von USD 100/pound (=454g) für Te nehmen, dann landen wir bei 0,1g/W bei einem Te-Einsatz von 2,2c/W. Die angestrebten Herstellkosten in Malaysia liegen bei gut 70c/W. Das wären dann also SEHR GROB 3% für Te. Wenn wir jetzt mal spaßeshalbe annehmen, dass Te sich preislich ähnlich entwickeln sollte, wie z.B. SI -kann man ja nicht ganz von der Hand weisen, oder?- und sich der Preis verzehnfacht, dann landen wir schon bei einem relevanten Faktor.


Make no mistake:
Ich bin beeindruckt von und long in FSLR (20 Stk.); aber bei einer Bude, die so bewertet ist, muss man m.E. echt ALLES abchecken, was auch nur entfernt nach Gefahr riechen KÖNNTE...

[uk0804]

Antwort auf Beitrag Nr.: 32.748.002 von lohnsklave am 13.12.07 00:43:36

Nanosolar , ein nicht börsennotiertes Unternehmen aus Kalifornien wird demnächst auch zu produzieren beginnen, mit einer Dünnschichttechnologie, die mit einem Drucker feine Nanopigmente auf Alufolie aufträgt. Große Konkurrenz für first Solar ? Wie werden die Preise sein ?

[lohnsklave]

sorry, hab mir die zwei letzten Beiträge nicht so ganz genau durchgelesen, weil ich jetzt ins Bett will, aber nur so viel dass dies einen ziemlich negativen Touch auf FSLR wirft. Falsche Technologie, zu hohe Preise für den Rostoff, bitte korrigiert mich wenn ich falsch liege. Dann noch die andere Company ENER, also wenn ich das so halbwegs richtig übersetzt habe, dann raus aus FSLR und rein in ENER, kapiert hab ich aber trotzdem nicht die Bohne warum? Ist das jetzt eine Verarsche oder? Ich bin bisher ganz gut gefahren mit FSLR, bleibe auch dabei. Bitte klärt mich auf.

VIEL ERFOLG EUCH ALLEN !!!

[meinolf67]

DETROIT (ResourceInvestor.com) -- The world has had many gold rushes, two uranium rushes, so far that I can remember, and now, I think we’re on the verge of a tellurium rush. What’s that all about?

It’s about the time lag between the discovery of a chemical element and the discovery of a use for it. Briefly, until the last quarter of the 18th century there was no glimmer of a modern theory of the chemical constitution of nature.
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The “elements” as defined by the ancient Greeks, earth, air, fire and water were pretty much accepted as the fundamental constituents of the material world. Between the renaissance and the American Revolution, though, alchemists were evolving into chemists and metallurgists as it was discovered that earth and air could be broken down into many distinct metals and airs. This came about because the alchemists defined themselves by their single minded agenda: the “creation” of gold from “baser” substances.

This phrase is commonly misunderstood by Hollywood film makers to mean the creation of a valuable substance, gold, from less valuable substances, dirt, bat’s wings, “common” metals, such as lead and so forth. Actually the alchemists were saying that gold was nature’s perfect, immutable, end product of construction, and they believed that they could find the “constituents” of gold in other, more common, substances and build gold from them.

A great deal of work was done in furtherance of the above goal, and in the process, modern chemistry and metallurgy were born from the attempt to discover the building blocks of nature. The nineteenth century was, for chemistry, among other things, the great age of the discovery of the chemical elements.

Unlike all previous periods the investigations were not carried out because there was a preconceived “use” for the new elements, but as a great intellectual crusade to break nature down into understandable segments, such as chemistry, physics, metallurgy, biology, etc., and to find patterns in nature, i.e., physical laws, to understand how the world functioned.

The “elements” of the ancients were joined by oxygen just over 200 years ago. By 100 years later a pattern, the periodic table of the elements had been discovered that led chemists to realize that oxygen was in a family of elements that included sulphur, known from ancient times, and two newly discovered - in the nineteenth century - siblings called selenium and tellurium. At the very end of the nineteenth century the last of the great intuitive chemists, Marie Skladowska Curie, would add polonium, a radioactive element, to oxygen’s family.

Investors now take note. The reason that some elements are so hard to find in nature is that they are by products, they are always found in conjunction of other, more common, elements. Frequently they are chemically combined with the more common element or metallurgically alloyed with them, or a combination of both.

To cut to the chase: Native gold comes in many colours, because of the presence of additional elements dissolved in (i.e., naturally alloyed) or actually chemically combined with it. Copper, for example, can give us rose shades of gold, platinum gives “whites,” aluminium gives a beautiful purple colour, and, you probably already guessed, tellurium combined with gold gives it a black colour. This black material, found as an ore called calverite, is the second most common form of gold found in North America. Wikipedia has a nice compact article on tellurium, which contains more technical information on tellurium bearing minerals for those interested.

Prospectors in the nineteenth century probably glommed onto the gold in gold telluride, calverite, after noting that if they used the heavy black mineral they often found with native gold, to douse a fire or build a support for a fire that it would occasionally catch fire giving off an awful stench of garlic, but the cold embers might have a fleck or two of gold remaining after the tellurium had burned away as volatile tellurium oxide. The chemists were thrilled to have a source of tellurium and some, very few, miners had found a source of more gold, albeit at the cost of needing some complex chemical processing to get rid of the tellurium.

As most of RI readers already know, gold is today recovered in substantial quantities as a byproduct of copper refining, and visa versa. The gold that is dissolved in the copper, naturally, is released when copper is electro refined, and is collected in filter bags of anode ‘slimes.” Other common byproducts of copper separated by electro refining are silver, platinum, selenium and tellurium.

There is no primary tellurium mine in the United States or anywhere else. Tellurium and selenium are recovered mainly from copper ores mainly because they must be removed for the most common applications to be feasible. Their presence can cause the copper to be brittle. Some Mexican copper ore is less valuable for wire drawing than its American counterparts, because of its high selenium content. American domestic lead ores frequently also contain tellurium as a byproduct. Perhaps the best survey of tellurium sourcing and availability is that of the USGS.

Tellurium was almost universally left in the tailings until just after World War II; it had almost no commercial uses.

The discovery of solid-state electronics changed that forever. The first solid-state electronic devices depended on a property discovered in the very common element, silicon. When silicon was ultrapurifed and also prepared in a single crystalline form, i.e., the entire sample with which one was working was one crystal, it did not conduct electricity, but with the addition of a tiny amount of another element from a particular group it could be made to conduct electricity. The man made semiconductor had been born-in the U.S., of course-and the second industrial revolution was underway. That was 60 years ago.

A flood of investigations of the electronic properties of materials ensued between this first discovery of man made, designer, so to speak, semiconductors and the present day. It has been the modern equivalent of the nineteenth century’s search for chemical elements, but with a key difference. Investigators are looking not only to expand knowledge but for specific properties, which can be commercialized.

Solid state electronics, based on crystalline silicon and germanium, originally discovered in a rare mineral and only produced at first as a tiny byproduct of coal (ash), soon did away with essentially all of vacuum tube electronics. Before that first revolutionary changeover was completed some researchers at Bell Telephone Laboratories (the place where the first transistor was made in 1947) had looked at and discovered semiconducting properties in non-silicate (i.e., non ordinary window) glasses. The disordered solids, described as glassy or “amorphous,” made from, for example, germanium, arsenic and tellurium, could be formulated so that they could be used as electronic switches or memory devices as long as very small currents were involved. This was in the 1950s.

In the early 1960s an intuitive genius from Akron, Ohio, Stanford R. Ovshinsky, decided that amorphous semiconductors could be made that would switch and conduct large(r) currents and could be made much more cheaply than single crystal silicon or germanium devices. He also did extensive research on the use of amorphous materials as non-volatile computer memories. They caught the industry’s attention early on, because hey could be made to “remember” their setting even with the power “off.”

It has been 44 years since I made, in a cobbled together vacuum coater, at the inventor’s Stan Ovshinsky’s direction, a layered thin film of tellurium, arsenic, germanium, arsenic, and tellurium. After we figured out how to make non-destructive electrical contacts to the thin film I watched as Stan cranked up the voltage, by hand, until suddenly the oscilloscope showed that after a threshold voltage had been passed the film conducted electricity and then when the voltage was reduced the film stopped conducting electricity. I well remember the stench of burning tellurium in the air that day.

The crystalline semiconductor revolution continued in full swing for many years after that day, but slowly the properties of tellurium based glasses became useful. I remember also the very day that Stan said, looking at some crystalline dots we had created with a laser in an otherwise amorphous film under a microscope, “Isn’t that what a recording does?” It was, and the recordable CD and DVD were both direct results of that discovery as their pioneering Japanese manufacturers will tell you.

But it is just now in 2007, nearly 40 years after the above observation, that Stan Ovshinsky’s discovery of what others call phase change memory and what he calls the Ovonic effect may well explode in unpredictable ways and drive the demand for the very rare element tellurium through the roof.

Intel and Samsung both will, this fall, introduce flash memory replacements made from non-volatile amorphous technology that can be used, erased, and used again indefinitely, but, rather than being crystalline silicon technology based, are made from tellurium based glasses composed of germanium, antimony, and tellurium. These amorphous technology flash memory successors will replace some magnetic hard drive uses, but their (unpredictable) explosive growth could be in inexpensive, reliable, smart cell phones, kids’ toys, improved RFID chips and as many other applications, some of them undoubtedly new, that electronic engineers can think up.

Here is an announcement by Intel and a brief retrospective of the technology’s previous false starts in a recent, yesterday, in fact, trade journal’s comment:

“Phase change memory consumes little power, lasts far longer than conventional memory, and can hold large amounts of data in a small space. The bits also can't flip or get corrupted easily. The real challenge has come in manufacturing and reliability. Switching a bit from crystalline to amorphous requires pulsing it with an electronic charge or heating it up rapidly to 600 degrees Celsius without flipping the neighboring bits.”

Read the whole article. It is mostly non technical, and very illuminating about a technology now coming into its own, finally.

A uniquely tellurium-based vehicle for investors is not yet here. Look for copper producers to now “discover” that they are tellurium producers. This will be funny, because many copper producers until just a very few years ago didn’t even care about molybdenum.

Perhaps a hedge fund will buy up all the physical tellurium it can find and create an immediate run up in the price. Note that this could put a damper on tellurium glass based electronics. Even if a fund tried this, the price would crash as soon as Intel or Samsung announced they could no longer get material. Perhaps then someone will create a tellurium ETF.

In any case, I’m going to try and find out who is producing tellurium in the U.S. right now. If you know, please comment. The USGS does not identify the major producers; it just says that they are doing so.

Next week I’m going to tell you about the military’s use of tellurium and selenium and their use in solar energy conversion. Tellurium and selenium chemical compounds are sensitive to light over a large range of wavelengths. Their electronic properties can be changed by sunlight or by infrared (heat) light. Glasses made from these elements can even focus infrared light.

Next time you’re at an air show or reading about heat-seeking missiles, just take a look at the dome on the front of such a missile. That’s a lot of selenium/tellurium glass.

Did I tell you, by the way, that my technical supervisor when I worked at ITT Advanced ElectroOpical Laboratory in San Fernando, California in the 1960s was Doctor Richard Orthuber, who, in 1937, invented the technology for the heat seeking guided missile? It was based on cadmium sulphide and cadmium telluride’s ability to change its electrical properties when heat from an object such as the exhaust of an aircraft engine was focused upon a device made from it.

Tellurium has been around a long time, but it’s just now breaking its way into the public’s awareness. I don’t think it will take nearly as long for tellurium to become a good investment as it took for the phase change memory to be mass marketed.

[meinolf67]

Tellurium, one of the rarest elements on earth, was once not thought to be very useful. According to USGS and a Mining Journal Review article, half of its traditional use is as an alloying agent in iron and steel to improve machinability; 25% of it is in catalysts and chemical use; 10% of it in alloying with non-ferrous metals like copper and lead; 8% of it is in electronic application and the remaining 7% in other applications, including as pigment agent in ceramics.

Annual global tellurium production is about 170 tons to 200 tons, based on various different estimates. It's mainly produced from the anode slime accumulated during electrolytic process of copper refining. According to this detailed analysis, copper produced from different places contain vastly different tellurium content. Typically, one ton of copper contains 100 grams of tellurium and only 33 grams are extracted and produced using existing technology. That caps the current global tellurium production at no more than 400 tons, without major investment to improve the tellurium extraction efficiency, assuming globally 12.4 million tons of copper is produced using electrolytic process per year. Because of the low quantity and thin revenue of tellurium in comparison to the revenue from main copper product, copper refineries are UNLIKELY to invest money, time and effort to improve the tellurium extraction rate, unless tellurium price goes up a lot from here, approaching gold price levels.

According to USGS, tellurium price started 2004 at $10 a pound. By the year-end it reached $22.50 a pound. In 2005 the price quickly rallied to $130-$180 a pound in mid year, then flat down to $100-$130 a pound. In 2006, it once again ran up to $155 a pound and then settled for the year at $50-$75 a pound.

So what prompted the rapid price raise? First Solar's (FSLR) CdTe solar panel was one of the demand factors. FSLR produced 60 MW in 2006 and about 20 MW in 2005. At 8 grams of tellurium per panel and 60 watts per panel, that's 8 tons tellurium consumed in 2006 and 2.7 tons in 2005. That's barely 4% and 1.4% of the supply. It's a factor in demand increase, but not the major factor.

The main Te demand increase was from other applications. CD-RW discs use tellurium, as do DVD-RW discs. And even later, ReWritable Blu-Ray DVD discs were developed by Panasonic, using a material called tellurium-suboxide-palladium.

Recently, Intel (INTC) announced a new type of phase change memory chips to start mass production in later 2007. This also uses tellurium. To understand the background of this break through, you need to read an old article: A 30-year memory problem solved?

All those electronic applications mentioned above, CD, DVD and memory chips, relate to the same phase change material called chalcogenide, which contains tellurium. Chalcogenide, the material used in ovonics, is really the cultimation of decades of scientific research on amorphous materials, which was once considered of very little practical use, but of academic interest only.

I originally connected these dots from an article I read entitled "Is There a Tellurium Rush in the Making?". Kudos to Sergio Garcia de Alba for submitting the article Energy Conversion Devices: An Amorphous Gem, which finally allowed me to connect the dots. It's all related to tellurium. Energy Conversion Devices Inc. (ENER) was funded by Stanford Ovshinsky, who invented the amorphous semiconductor materials and coined the name Ovonics. He has numerous important inventions. Chalcogenide, which is a tellurium containing material, is one of them.

Today, after many decades of quiet research and perfection, chalcogenide has suddenly become a very very useful material, having revolutionized and is continuely revolutionizing the whole electronic industry. I like to compare the precious element tellurium to a supernova. It's been quiet and ignored for so long, but all of a sudden it erupts into an extremely bright superstar. The tellurium supernova shines so brightly that it could KILL.

Let's follow the ENER article a little bit:

...a little company called Ovonyx...licensed its memory technology to semiconductor giants like Intel (which is a partner in Ovonyx), Samsung, Elpida, Hynix, Qimonda, and ST Microelectronics. The memory technology is based on chalcogenidephase change memory. It is expected to replace NOR flash memory, and could also eventually replace DRAM and NAND flash. Samsung has announced production of a 512Mbit part in 2008, and Intel a 128Mbit part that could arrive as soon as the end of this year or early 2008 (Intel's part codename is Alverstone). ...What's interesting for investors is that phase change memory could become a $40 billion+ market in a few years.

This phase change material thing is really HUGE! $40B+ market just in memory chips and we have not even included all the rewritable CDs, DVDs and Blu-Ray DVDs. And it ultimately could also replace the hard disk drives so future computers would no longer need a hard disk drive.

If you are not shocked so far, then read this article about phase change memory. Let me quote from page 2:

A person using a computer with PRAM could turn it off and back on and pick up right where he left off -- and he could do so immediately or 10 years later. Such computers would not lose critical data in a system crash or when the power went out unexpectedly. 'Instant-on' would become a reality, and users would no longer have to wait for a system to boot up and load DRAM. PRAM memory could also significantly increase battery life for portable devices.

How wonderful it would be!

Needless to say, this whole new chalcogenide based electronic industry will consume a lot of tellurium, probably all the global tellurium production and then some more. It will drive the price of tellurium to a crazily high level, maybe at gold price, maybe at platinum price, and in doing so, it will kill a lot of trivial, low added value industry users of tellurium.

The kill of this tellurium supernova will probably include FSLR. This company is most vulnerable because it uses a lot of tellurium in its solar panels, any dramatic tellurium price will increase its cost to the level that it can no longer have a profit margin. When a business no longer has a profit margin, it cannot survive. But the tellurium kill probably will go behind that. Tellurium as an alloying agent will probably have to end, as will tellurium used in portable electronic beverage coolers.

My advice to people would be to buy and hoard some tellurium metal ingots if you can still find anything at decent price. If you have FSLR long positions, I recommend that you sell them before it is too late. Tellurium, such a scarce and precious natural resource, is one of nature's best gifts to human kind, and it was never meant to be used on trivial things like generating a few watts of solar electricity; rather, it should only be used in high value added and far more useful things like advanced computer memory chips.

FSLR started on the wrong technology using the wrong material, the extremely toxic cadmium plus the extremely rare tellurium, a deadly combination leading this otherwise aggressively growing company onto a death march. It's a tragedy of nature's making, not the management's fault. But the FSLR management really need to wise up and realize that their sole CdTe product will lead them to nowhere. They must diversify into other technologies, or they may have to shut down business just a few years down the road.

Full disclosure: I currently do not have any ENER position but is looking for opportunity to buy some. I have short positions in FSLR and am planning to short more when it starts the eventual collapse. I am also actively buying physical tellurium metal ingots as investment.

[Hoerschwelle]

Antwort auf Beitrag Nr.: 32.733.683 von Spittiinvestor am 11.12.07 23:24:05

Nachbörslich hat FSLR schon fast wieder den gesamten Verlust wett gemacht