Sweden’s Nordcell Group, founded in 2023, has announced plans for 1.2 GW module manufacturing facility to be located in northern Sweden.
The company said production is set to begin in the first half of 2025, without disclosing the exact location of the new manufacturing facility.
“The project makes sense from both a financial perspective and not the least from an environmental perspective,” Nordcell co-founder Hamid Toosi told pv magazine. “We see a clear growing demand for truly sustainable products driven both by consumers, as well as regulatory pressure from the EU.
The founders point to the opportunity presented by regulations that are expected as a result of the Net-Zero Industry Act (NZIA), which provides a quota of 40% of technologies to be manufactured within the European Union (EU) by 2030.
“The EU is estimated to install around 1 billion solar panels by 2030. Unless something changes, 97% of them will be non-European panels,” Nordcell co-founder Vahid Toosi said in a statement.
Nordcell said it will be “leveraging” the low-CO2 emissions electricity mix in Northern Sweden to bring to market a product with lower CO2 emissions associated with its production. To that end, it has a collaboration with researchers from Germany's Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems (Fraunhofer ISE).
“We've partnered with Nordcell from the start, initiating an early Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) to analyze the environmental impact of production. It became evident that Sweden holds significant advantages globally in reducing the carbon footprint in PV production,” said Jochen Rentsch, Fraunhofer ISE’s head of PV technology transfer, in a statement.
Nordcell’s website suggests that it will be producing modules for the residential, commercial, and utility markets. The company stated it aims to produce 2.5 million panels annually in a plant that “emphasizes scale, AI-driven automation, and state-of-the-art quality”.
In a statement, Peter Fath, board member at the European Solar Manufacturing Council and spokesperson of the association of German mechanical engineering association VDMA said Nordcell is fundamentally rethinking the standard production blueprint and deploying next-level automation combined with the globally most advanced production equipment. “By this Nordcell will be able to produce best in class solar panels at a competitive cost,” he added.
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