AVANCIS is celebrating the topping out ceremony for its second factory in Torgau, Saxony. The new construction will increase the company’s current production capacity of 20 MWp per year by fine times, for an annual total of 120 MWp. Production at Plant 2 is already scheduled to start in the first quarter of 2012. It will create 200 job openings and produce 850,000 modern solar modules annually. During this period, the first plant at the site, Plant 1 will continue operating full speed ahead.

AVANCIS’ second factory is the prototype of a generation of plants with which the company seeks to advance the industrialization of its cutting edge production process.

“Our solar modules’ CIS thin-film technology is a relatively new manufacturing method which is already quite successful and still has plenty of additional potential to reduce costs and improve the conversion efficiency,” said Hartmut Fischer, CEO of AVANCIS. “The 100-megawatt factory being established here is the starting shot for the industrial mass-production of our solar modules. Our own planning team designed the factory according to the most demanding of requirements and it meets state-of-the-art standards. It is the prototype for additional factories we will build worldwide with our parent company, Saint-Gobain.”

AVANCIS is consistently putting this expansion strategy into practice: together with the internationally successful corporation Hyundai Heavy Industries (HHI), the company has established a joint venture to produce CIS thin-film modules in South Korea. Construction work on a third factory based on the example set by Plant 2 in Torgau is already scheduled to begin at the beginning of next year. It will also have an annual production capacity of 100 MWp.

But first, work is underway at top speed on the completion of the “first template plant” in Torgau, which is being established vis-à-vis the existing factory in Torgau.