- 200MW 3Sun factory to upscale to 3GW capacity
Italian Utility giant, Enel, has revealed that its 3Sun solar panel manufacturing plant in Sicily, following a grant agreement that it had signed with the European Commission will now become a 3GW-per-year facility. The Solar PV Giga factory, TANGO, is one of the seven large-scale climate transition projects to acquire EUR 1.1 billion in grants under the EU Innovation Fund. The fund comes from revenues from the EU’s Emissions Trading System (ETS).
According to Enel Green Power, the project will be Europe’s largest factory in the production of high-performance bifacial photovoltaic (PV) modules. Rge project is worth EUR 600 million in investments, with EUR 118 million coming from the EU’s Innovation Fund. The new development will see the 200MW 3Sun factory metamorphose into a 3GW capacity by 2024. The first phase of the project plans to have 400MW in operation by September 2023.
According to the announcement, the factory’s production will include bifacial heterojunction (B-HJT) PV cells that will be further developed to also incorporate a tandem cell structure, which would allow PV modules to exceed 30% efficiency.