PHOTON International The Photovoltaic Magazine

Mitsubishi Heavy Industries installs self-made panels on company locations in Japan

In March, the Japanese company Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Ltd. (MHI) finished installing PV systems totaling 370 kW on 11 of its industrial and office buildings. MHI, which operates an amorphous silicon module factory, has used their 100 W a-Si modules with dimensions of 1.4 × 1.1 m for the installations.

	© Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Ltd.
Homemade: Mitsubishi Heavy Industries has installed PV systems on 11 of its buildings. This 20 kW system is installed on the roof of the company's technical center in Yokohama, Japan.

The largest of the systems, at 140 kW, is on the company's shipyard and machinery works in Nagasaki, said Noriyuki Obitsu, of MHI's Solar Cell Power System Group. The New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO) covered half the costs with funds from Japan's PV Field Test Program for Industrial Use, but Obitsu declined to provide details on the actual system expenses. He only revealed that MHI mounts frameless modules to a concrete base, fixing it with an ethylene propylene rubber that dramatically trims down costs.»According to our calculation,« he stated,»total system cost is expected to be reduced by 20 percent compared with our conventional [rooftop] system.« Two other factories may get PV installations, he said, but the final decision has not yet been made.

MHI began producing a-Si cells in October (PI 9/2002, p. 27). For PHOTON International's cell survey 2002 (see PI 3/2003, p. 42), the company reported production of 600 kW in 2002 and ambitious plans to increase the output to 10 MW in 2003, of which about 40 percent is destined for sales overseas.