Fluidized bed reactor (FBR) technology has been hailed as a means to produce polysilicon for solar at lower costs and with a small fraction of the electricity used by the dominant Siemens process. However, long delays at two new projects and technical challenges are slowing the progress of this promising technology. Will FBR eventually deliver? The International Technology Roadmap for Photovoltaics (ITRPV) by SEMI is one of the core technical resources for the solar PV industry. Published annually, the document includes research from a range of manufacturers and covers expected developments in technology from polysilicon to modules. The 2013 ITRPV predicted that the market share of FBR polysilicon would rise to 20% in 2015, and 30% in 2017. However, two years later, two of the three large projects that have been announced have not come online, and the current market share is a fraction of what SEMI expected. As a result, by the 2015 ITRPV, SEMI had brought down its forecast to 13% of the 2015 market, and 18% by 2017. Experts say that even these numbers are too high, predicting that the 2015 share will be less than half of this. Such dismal results raise the question of what is happening with FBR, and whether these are just delays, or if the technology is dead in the water.
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