PHOTON International The Photovoltaic Magazine

Once the world’s largest module manufacturer, Siemens Solar’s brand of modules will now cease to exist. Shell Solar has announced plans to buy the entire shares of its partners, Siemens AG and E.on, in their joint venture Siemens & Shell Solar GmbH.

	© PHOTON International
The shell rules on: At the Sustain trade fair in Amsterdam last May, Shell had its own exhibition even though the Siemens & Shell GmbH joint venture already existed. But in future, they won’t need to worry about such details.

PV pioneers will remember Siemens Solar’s monocrystalline modules as some of the highest-quality PV products ever made. But business is a bad place for nostalgia. In the near future, the Siemens brand will completely vanish, along with all module types manufactured in several countries under the aegis of the Munich-based company. On Jan. 23, Shell Renewables announced that it plans to acquire all shares of its joint venture Siemens & Shell Solar GmbH and operate the new company under the name Shell Solar. If regulators approve the deal, Shell will aim for a full corporate integration of its new assets within the next six months.

Shell’s move is not a real surprise – just a logical consequence of their investment in Siemens Solar, which was announced in Dec. 2000. Since the joint venture Siemens & Shell Solar GmbH was formed in April, Shell had owned 33 percent, while the former Siemens Solar shareholder Siemens AG reduced its original share from 51 to 34 percent and the German energy company E.on from 49 to 33 percent. André Romeyn, Shell Solar’s manager for communication and branding, already told PHOTON International last February that »in the end, we will become the major shareholder in this joint venture, which means we will be bigger than Siemens and E.on. But I can’t give you an actual percentage since it is all part of the process.« Small residual shares would not have made much economic sense for Siemens AG and E.on, both of whom had wanted to sell their deficient solar subsidiary for some time, but were unable to find a buyer.

The date for a complete takeover comes earlier than anticipated, on the other hand. Romeyn said last February that Shell before the end of 2002 wanted to add all further worldwide solar businesses in to the joint venture, which currently includes only its German solar assets. But then Gernot Oswald retired in December (see PI 1/2002, p. 32). And the departure of the ex-Siemens Solar CEO, who served from April to December with Shell’s Philippe de Renzy-Martin as CEO of Siemens & Shell Solar GmbH, indicated that time for a change had come. Renzy-Martin will lead Shell Solar alone, as he did before the joint venture, while continuing the Royal Dutch Group’s expansion into solar. »Solar PV is one of the fastest-growing of all the technologies in a rapidly developing part of the global energy market,« he said. »Shell has a strategic commitment to making renewable energy a commercial reality, and this move is a key step in building a strong, global solar business.«

The acquisition of Siemens will catapult Shell Solar into fourth place on the list of the world’s cell and module producers. Shell claims its combined annual module production capacities are 60 MW; the cell production capacity should be somewhat lower. In fact, Siemens was already ranked number four in 2000; Shell only brings about 10 MW of cell production capacity into the business, so the strongly expanding top three of Sharp, BP Solar, and Kyocera are not yet in any danger of being overtaken.

Unlike Kyocera and Sharp, which produce all of their cells in Japan and sell only modules with poly- and monocrystalline cells, Shell’s business structure is much more spread out – rather like BP Solar, which became major player after it bought the US company Solarex. Starting with a commercial cell and module production in the Netherlands, Shell Solar now also has manufacturing facilities in Germany, Portugal, and the US, and a sales network on all continents. In addition to its polycrystalline cell technology, Shell has complete access to Siemens’ monocrystalline and thin-film technology based on CIS. The only companies with more commercial cell technologies available are BP Solar (a-Si, CdTe, mono- and polycrystalline Si) and RWE Solar (a-Si, EFG, mono- and polycrystalline Si). But Shell is active on other cell technology fronts as well. It recently announced an R&D joint venture with the Dutch company Akzo-Nobel to built a pilot plant for a roll-to-roll process to mass-produce amorphous silicon cells on flexible substrates (see PI 11/2001, p. 8). Shell is also involved in a Dutch R&D project for dye-sensitized solar cells.

Renzy-Martin now carries the burden of completely integrating Siemens into the Shell business structure and deciding which of the several cell technologies he will favor, while not forgetting to continue with expansion plans. A second cell production line in the Gelsenkirchen factory has been on the cards for a while, but not yet realized.

Whatever Shell does with the Siemens technologies, the Siemens brand will not completely disappear from the solar world – at least not yet. A subsidiary of Siemens AG is producing on-grid inverters and has just begun sales of a new string inverter. ms