BP Announces Plans for New Solar Cells Factory in Spain

BP Solar announced today its plans to build a new photovoltaic (PV) solar module factory in Spain next year. The plans call for the 100 million Euro factory to manufacture enough solar modules to produce 300 MegaWatts (MW) of electricity. The factory will be built in Puertollano in Castilla La Mancha, and will be the largest solar module assembly plant in Europe.

BP Solar estimates that the new factory will create 500 to 600 new jobs, in addition to increasing the equipment needed to produce more energy from a valuable renewable resource. BP Solar has been in the solar energy field for over thirty years, and has production plants in the United States, India, Australia, China, in addition to Spain, where there is already both a production plant for PV modules and an assembly plant to bundle the modules into arrays.

The Chairman of BP Group in Spain, Alfredo Barrios, said in the company press release that the joint effort between local, regioinal, the central government with BP Solar will "help deliver a project that will provide numerous social benefits through job creation and also the development of a sustainable environment."

The new solar module plant will operate in two phases. The first phase will have the production capacity to produce enough PV modules to generate 300 MW a year, which is equal to the prevention of almost 420,000 tons of carbon dioxide emissions per year. 300 MW of electricity is roughly equivalent to the amount of energy needed to power 200,000 households for an entire year. A second phase expansion may come in time and will boost the production level to 500 MW a year.

Solar power is an increasingly attractive choice for electric power generation as the cost of fossil fuels rise. Add that to the environmental costs of oil, coal, and natural gas, and the interest in solar energy and the growth of the solar power market has experienced large percentage of growth in the past few years.

To give some perspective on the size of the new BP Solar venture, the combined production capacity of the four current BP PV module production plants in the US, Australia, India and Madrid, Spain is only 90 MW, according to BP Solar. Currently, BP is hoping to increase current production at those plants to a combined 200 MW.

"This project is part of BP Solar's ambitious growth plans," said Emilio Camblor, the Strategy Delivery manager at BP Solar Spain. "The new facility gives us additional capacity located in our key market - Europe - and it confirms our commitment to both the region and Spain as a competitive environment in which to do business."

Sources: BP Solar, SolarBuzz