Back to growth: SunPower to boost solar cell manufacturing by 25%

By Ucilia Wang Oct. 30, 2013 SunPower plans to build a new solar cell factory, a move that reverses the trend of solar manufacturers shuttering factories to deal with an over supply of solar equipment worldwide that began in 2011. Until very recently, closing down solar factories had become a normal occurrence, a natural result of the worldwide glut of solar equipment. But now that trend is starting to reverse, and the latest evidence comes from solar cell maker SunPower, which on Wednesday said it plans to actually increase its solar cell production capacity by 25 percent, or 350 MW.   The Silicon Valley company plans to build out the new factory at a pre-existing manufacturing site in the Philippines and start production in 2015, said CEO Tom Werner during a call to discuss the company’s third-quarter earnings. With the new factory, the company will have about 1.8 GW of solar cell production capacity. And in fact, demand for SunPower’s solar panels has been so strong as of late that the company has been running all of its factories fully over the last two quarters.

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