MANUFACTURING
We are not building one factory. We are building the one we can copy.
Most of the carbon in a clean-energy product is spent before it ever makes power — mining, trucking, smelting, shipping, warehousing. ANEW's answer is to compress that chain into a single vertically integrated plant, build it where the energy is consumed, and then build the same plant again somewhere else. This page is how that plant is laid out, line by line, and how long each phase takes.
ANEW reference design — architectural rendering generated with Runway.
The idea
Design it once. Build it ten times.
A conventional supply chain treats manufacturing as a place you ship from. Raw materials move to one country, become cells in a second, become modules in a third, and cross an ocean to reach the site that needed them. Every leg of that journey is carbon nobody counts against the finished product.
The copy factory inverts it. One plant is designed in full — layout, equipment list, process flow, automation, utilities, quality system, training program — and then that same design is built again, in the next region that needs power. Nothing is re-engineered. The second build reuses the drawings, the vendor relationships, the commissioning sequence and the people who already did it once.
Three things compound as the copies accumulate: the cost of each factory falls, because the engineering is already paid for and the crews already know the sequence; purchasing power rises, because ten plants order equipment and raw material as one buyer; and the carbon footprint falls, because the finished product is made within reach of the site that consumes it. That is the whole argument, and it is the same argument the Impact page makes in emissions terms.
What gets copied
- The building envelope and utilities — the same shell, the same power, water, gas, drainage and cleanroom specification, so site works can start from a known drawing set.
- The equipment list — the same qualified tools from the same vendors, which is what makes a second commissioning faster than the first.
- The process flow — the same recipe, the same sequence, the same in-line metrology and test points.
- The training program — the trades curriculum taught in the local language, so the workforce is built alongside the plant rather than imported.
- The digital twin — the BIM model of the plant, carried forward so the next site is planned before ground is broken.
Line one
Bifacial solar, built on heterojunction cells.
The first and largest line in the plant. A 3 GW factory, built out in phases, making heterojunction (HJT) cells and the bifacial modules they go into.
Planning parameters from the Costa Rica solar project scope prepared with Kember Associates. Figures are pre-feasibility and subject to the detailed study described under Partners.
Why heterojunction, and not PERC
HJT is a different cell architecture, not a refinement of the current one. It combines crystalline silicon with amorphous silicon thin film to produce a hybrid cell that outperforms PERC — the technology that dominates today's supply — on efficiency, on temperature behaviour and on the number of process steps required to make it.
The temperature point matters more than it sounds. HJT has a lower temperature coefficient, so it loses less output as the panel heats up. In the hot climates where ANEW's factories and customers are concentrated, that is not a specification detail; it is the difference between the yield on the datasheet and the yield on the roof.
It also has somewhere to go. Introducing perovskite materials into the cell structure gives HJT a clear development path toward roughly 30% efficiency, which is why it is treated as the industry's best current option for raising power output rather than a lateral move.
The competitive picture. HJT is under 2% of the PV market today. That is not a weakness in the technology — it is a description of the switching cost facing everyone else. Chinese manufacturers dominate global supply with PERC lines, and upgrading a PERC facility to HJT is expensive: it requires replacing entire production lines, not retooling them.
Meanwhile the incumbents' operating costs have risen with energy and labour, shipping costs have eroded their delivered price advantage, and a growing share of buyers actively prefer non-Chinese supply. HJT cells can now be made at prices comparable to older, less efficient technology.
Global PV demand is forecast to pass 3 terawatts worldwide by 2030. A new line built on the better architecture starts where the market is going rather than where it has been.
Cell conversion efficiency
Where HJT sits against the incumbent technology, and where the perovskite roadmap points.
Bars are scaled to a 32% axis. Ranges are the cell-technology figures in the project scope; the perovskite figure is a roadmap target, not a production specification.
The two stages of the line
Fully automated module line
Built around M10 wafers and the latest multiwire interconnection technology, laid out for the highest achievable throughput. The line is configurable for glass/glass or glass/backsheet construction and will accommodate full-cell or half-cell modules. Scope includes layout, technology selection, manpower, capex and the warehouse planning for finished panels and work in progress.
HJT cell line
The harder half. This stage requires a technology transfer of the HJT process into the plant, selection and qualification of the PECVD and PVD deposition tools and their ancillary equipment, and a production flow laid out for the shortest path between steps. It also means recruiting and training process engineers capable of running a cell line day to day.
Wafer in, module out
Wafer receipt & texturing
M10 silicon wafers are cleaned and surface-textured to trap incoming light.
Amorphous silicon (PECVD)
Thin passivating films are deposited on both faces — the step that makes the junction a heterojunction.
Transparent conductive oxide (PVD)
Sputtered TCO layers carry current across the cell without blocking light.
Metallisation
Low-temperature screen printing lays down the contact grid that HJT's thin films require.
Cell test & sort
Every cell is flash-tested and binned, so modules are built from matched cells.
Multiwire stringing
Cells are interconnected with fine multiwire, cutting shading loss and silver consumption.
Layup & lamination
Strings are laid between encapsulant and glass, then laminated into a sealed bifacial stack.
Framing & junction box
Frame, seal and junction box are fitted — the interface between the module and the array.
Flash test & pack
Final power measurement, class sort, labelling and palletising for despatch.
Line two
GaN and SiC — the transistors that move the power.
A solar factory that cannot make its own power electronics is still dependent on someone else's supply chain. Two wide-bandgap lines close that gap.
Planning parameters from the Costa Rica power-electronics scope prepared with Kember Associates, dated July 2026. Pre-feasibility figures.
Why wide bandgap at all. Silicon is near the end of what it can do in power conversion. Gallium nitride and silicon carbide switch faster, run hotter, and lose less energy as heat — which means smaller magnetics, smaller heatsinks, smaller enclosures and higher system efficiency. In an inverter, a charger or a traction drive, the device technology sets the ceiling for everything built around it.
Unlike consumer semiconductors, the power-electronics market has grown consistently rather than in cycles. Government efficiency mandates for power supplies, the electrification of transport, and grid-connected renewables all pull in the same direction. What the industry asks for is unglamorous and specific: efficiency, competitive cost, long-term reliability, and a supply chain that does not fail.
Why ANEW builds them rather than buys them. Every product in the ANEW range converts power — solar inverters, the Power Pack, EV charging, the transformer, micro-hydro and wind conversion. Those are internal customers with predictable volume, which is the condition that makes a device line viable in the first place.
The capacity above internal demand is saleable. Inverters for wind and solar plants are the obvious external market, and pricing it honestly against internal use is part of what the feasibility work has to settle — which products are for ANEW, which are for sale, and what that mix does to the plant's economics.
Where each device technology applies
Applicable voltage ranges for silicon, GaN and SiC, and the ANEW products that sit in each band.
Indicative bands. The two technologies overlap between roughly 650 V and 1200 V, where the choice is set by switching frequency and system cost rather than by voltage alone.
The silicon carbide market
Forecast growth in global SiC power semiconductors, and the demand driving it.
Source: Yole Group, 2024. The dashed line indicates the trajectory between the two forecast points, not year-by-year data. Automotive electrification is the primary driver; ANEW's interest is the grid and inverter demand that rides the same manufacturing base.
Epitaxial wafer in, inverter out
Epitaxial wafer receipt
GaN-on-silicon and SiC substrates arrive with the device layers already grown.
Device fabrication
HEMT and MOSFET structures are patterned, etched and metallised through the cleanroom.
Wafer probe
Every die is electrically tested on the wafer, before anything is spent packaging it.
Singulation & packaging
Known-good die are separated and packaged — thermal path and parasitic inductance decide real-world performance here.
Power module assembly
Devices are combined with gate drives and substrates into half-bridge and full-bridge modules.
Sub-assembly build
Modules meet magnetics, capacitors and control boards from the PCB line next door.
System integration
Inverters, chargers and converters are built up as finished ANEW products.
Burn-in & final test
Loaded, cycled and measured against specification before it carries a serial number.
The full GaN & SiC programme — scope, facilities and financials →
Line three
PCB manufacturing — where every ANEW product gets its brain.
The battery management system, the communications board, the eScout IoT hardware, the charger controller and the inverter control stack all start as bare board and finish on the same surface-mount line.
Electronics assembly is where a vertically integrated plant earns its keep fastest. Board-level work is high-mix and low-volume in the early years, which is exactly the profile that outside contract manufacturers price badly and schedule last. Bringing it in-house converts a queue position into a scheduling decision.
It also protects the parts of the product that change most often. Firmware revisions, sensor changes, a new communications module — all of these are board changes, and a plant that owns its own line can turn a revision in days rather than a quarter.
Test is the point, not an afterthought. Automated optical inspection catches placement and solder defects in line. Flying-probe and in-circuit test catch the electrical faults that inspection cannot see. Functional test exercises the board as the product will actually use it.
Every board carries a serial number and a test record, which is what makes device-signed field data credible later. A claim about performance in the field is only as good as the traceability behind the hardware making the measurement.
Bare board to box build
Solder paste print
Stencil printing lays paste on every pad, verified by in-line paste inspection.
Pick and place
High-speed placement heads populate the board from reel and tray feeders.
Reflow
A profiled oven forms every joint at once, under a controlled thermal curve.
Automated optical inspection
Every board is imaged and compared against the reference before it moves on.
Through-hole & selective solder
Connectors and power components that cannot be reflowed are placed and soldered selectively.
Flying probe & ICT
Electrical test finds the faults optics miss — opens, shorts, wrong values.
Conformal coat
Boards destined for outdoor enclosures are coated against humidity, salt and dust.
Functional test & box build
The board is run as a product, serialised, then assembled into its enclosure.
The sequence
Solar and power electronics first. Then the rest of the platform.
The order is deliberate. Solar and the GaN/SiC lines come first because everything else in the ANEW range depends on them — a battery needs conversion electronics, a turbine needs an inverter, a tracker needs a module to carry. Once those two lines are running, the remaining product families come onto the floor in turn.
Solid-state battery & eCube
Cell handling, module stacking, busbar welding, enclosure assembly and the battery management hardware that comes off the PCB line. Storage is the product the whole micro-grid is organised around, and it is the largest single assembly line after solar.
Depends onPCB line · Metal stamping · Sheet metal · Wire
Solar trackers & mounting
Structural fabrication, drive assembly, actuator and controller build, and the mounting-bracket and install-kit hardware that goes in the same crate. Tracker output is what turns a module's rated power into delivered energy.
Depends onSolar module line · Metal stamping · Magnetics
Wind generation
Blade and hub assembly, generator winding on ferrite magnetics rather than rare earths, and the nacelle electronics built around the SiC conversion stage from line two.
Depends onSiC line · Magnetics · Plastics · Sheet metal
Water & micro-hydro
Turbine and runner machining, sealed generator assembly, and the marinised enclosures and harnesses that let a unit sit in moving water for decades rather than seasons.
Depends onMagnetics · Machining · Cable assembly
Distribution & conversion
The transformer, junction box, pole power, comms board and EV charging hardware — the equipment that moves power from where it is made to where it is used, and the largest consumer of the in-house wire and stamping lines.
Depends onGaN & SiC lines · Wire · Magnetics · PCB
eScout IoT & controls
The measurement and control hardware that makes a micro-grid self-healing, and the device identity that makes its data trustworthy. Built on the PCB line from the first day it runs, because every other product ships with one inside.
Depends onPCB line · Plastics · Test & calibration
The rest of the plant
Everything else a finished product needs to exist.
A cell line and a board line still leave you buying enclosures, brackets, cable, connectors and magnetics from somewhere else. Each of those is a container on a ship and a dependency you do not control. These are the lines that close the loop.
Plastics & injection moulding
Enclosure bodies, connector housings, gaskets, cable glands, junction-box shells and the internal mouldings that hold everything in position. Tooling is designed alongside the product rather than after it, which is what keeps part counts down.
FeedsJunction Box · Comms Board housings · Power Pack internals · Install Kit
Metal stamping
Progressive-die stamping for brackets, chassis members, mounting hardware, busbars, terminals and heat-spreader plates. High-volume, repeatable, and produced from coil rather than assembled from bought-in parts.
FeedsMounting Bracket · Solar Tracker · Pole Power · Transformer hardware
Wire extrusion
Insulation and jacketing extruded onto conductor in-house — the step that turns bare metal into usable cable. Compounds are selected for a 50-year service life, UV exposure and zero VOC content.
FeedsAll DC and AC harnesses · Array cabling · Interconnects
Electrical wire production
Conductor drawing and stranding, built around electrical-grade aluminium in place of copper wherever the application allows. Aluminium is far more abundant in the earth's crust than copper, and switching conductor is one of the largest single reductions available in the product's material footprint.
FeedsGrid interconnect · Distribution · Earth-abundant materials
Magnetics & transformer winding
Coil winding, core assembly, impregnation and test for the transformer, the inverter magnetics and the charging hardware — built on ferrite magnets rather than neodymium, keeping rare-earth elements out of the bill of materials.
FeedsTransformer · Inverters · Wind and hydro generation
Cable & harness assembly
Cut, strip, crimp, overmould and continuity-test. Harnesses are where field failures concentrate and where installation time is won or lost, so they are built and tested in-plant rather than assembled on site.
FeedsInstall Kit · eCube · EV Charging · Every product with a connector
Sheet metal & enclosures
Laser cutting, forming, welding and finishing for cabinets, racks, weather enclosures and structural frames — in stainless steel, chosen for the service life rather than the purchase price.
FeedsPower Pack · eCube · Battery cabinets · Site enclosures
Test, calibration & QA
Environmental chambers, HiPot and dielectric test, EMC pre-compliance, calibration traceability and the documentation that UL and CE certification demand. Quality data flows back into the process, not into a filing cabinet.
FeedsEvery line · Governance & certification
Recycling & end of life
A recycling operation is scoped into the plant from the beginning rather than bolted on later — process scrap, cell and module reclaim, and the take-back path that makes a 100% recyclable design claim mean something in practice.
FeedsMaterial recovery · Environmental commitments
Why integrate rather than buy
- Carbon. Every bought-in component is a shipping leg. Making it on site removes the leg entirely — the single largest lever in the footprint of a finished product.
- Cost. Margin stacking disappears. So does the premium a contract supplier charges for low volume and short notice.
- Control. A revision to a moulding, a bracket or a harness becomes a scheduling decision instead of a supplier negotiation.
- Materials. Aluminium instead of copper, ferrite instead of neodymium, stainless instead of coated steel — material substitutions only hold if you own the process making the part.
- Jobs. Each integrated line is skilled local work, taught through the trades program in the community's own language.
The schedule
How long it takes, phase by phase.
Two tracks run in parallel. The power-electronics facility reaches production in roughly 15 months; the solar plant in roughly 21. Both then ramp, and both feed the second copy factory.
Indicative build-out schedule
Months from project start. Bars show the working window for each phase, including the overlap that keeps the critical path short.
The 21-month and 15-month totals to first production are the planning parameters in the project scopes prepared with Kember Associates. The internal phase boundaries and overlaps are ANEW's planning assumption and will be replaced by the detailed critical-path schedule that the feasibility study produces.
Capital by line
First-phase capital requirement, in US dollars.
Solar, GaN and SiC figures are the planning parameters in the project scopes. The vertical-integration lines are scoped within the feasibility work and carry no published figure yet — the bar is shown hatched rather than estimated.
People by line
Direct employment at the plant, at production.
Direct plant headcount only. Installation, service, logistics and the trades work created downstream of each factory are counted separately on the Impact page and are the larger number.
What each phase actually resolves
Site & utilities
How large the site must be, what services it needs, and the full area for factory plus utilities, storage and support — so the construction and civil engineering scope is known before it is priced. Certification requirements are listed explicitly so nothing is assumed.
Equipment
Every tool for every stage, with recommended vendors and estimated cost. Initial quotations typically fall once real orders are ready to place, so the study establishes a ceiling rather than a final number — including vendors capable of working with perovskite materials.
Technology & transfer
Full process-step definition, cell design, expected efficiencies, and the production, test and quality-control equipment to achieve them — plus the technology-transfer plan and the licensing and IP procedures and costs that come with it.
People
Not just line headcount but a full organisational plan — operations, planning, purchasing, logistics — so the gaps against current staffing are visible and recruiting can start on the critical path rather than behind it.
Timing
A stage-by-stage timeline with the critical-path items identified, so time to market is a known quantity and commercial decisions can be based on it rather than around it.
Cost & cashflow
A full cost schedule broken into capex and opex, upfront and ongoing, in enough detail to define the additional investment required from project partners — with investment and cashflow forecasts, ROI and payback under several scenarios.
The people who have done it before
You do not learn to build a cell line by building one.
Our technology manufacturing friends are your friends.ANEW Energy
A first-of-its-kind factory built by people doing it for the first time is a very expensive way to learn. ANEW's approach is the opposite: bring in the specialists who have already designed, built and commissioned these exact lines elsewhere, and copy what they know into the plant along with the equipment.
ANEW works with Kember Associates Limited on the solar and power-electronics manufacturing programs. Both of the lines described on this page are being scoped through feasibility work led by their team.
Peter Kember
Production Line Design · Solar & SemiconductorSpecialises in the design and implementation of new production lines in semiconductors, sensors and solar cells. Senior consultant to executive management and government ministers, and an advisor to the EU on technology development and the implementation management of international high-tech projects — with delivered programs in Malaysia, China, Russia and Brazil spanning MEMS, power electronics and solar cells.
Paul Connelly
Semiconductor Process & CommissioningOver 20 years across semiconductor, hi-tech and pharma manufacturing and telecommunications. Semiconductor design, build and commissioning has been his mainstay — previously with Oxford Instruments, Plasma Technology, Brooks Automation and Applied Materials, delivering for end users including NXP, ST Micro, Intel, TSMC, Samsung and Texas Instruments.
Meet the full engineering team →
A note on the technology, stated plainly
Heterojunction cell technology was originally developed by Sanyo Electric in the 1990s, later acquired by Panasonic, and matured into the modern HJT panel. Building an HJT line therefore involves licensing and IP arrangements as part of the technology transfer, and defining those arrangements — what is licensed, from whom, and at what cost — is explicitly part of the feasibility scope rather than something already settled.
ANEW Energy states no licensing agreement it has not signed. Everything on this page describing the Costa Rica solar and power-electronics facilities is pre-feasibility planning: design targets, planning parameters and scopes of work, not completed construction or committed contracts.
FAQ
The questions people ask about the factory.
Why build a 3 GW factory but only install 1.2 GW of lines?
Because completing 3 GW in one phase is neither practical nor economical, but retrofitting a building is worse. The shell, the utilities and the entire installation are built to operate at 3 GW from the start, so additional production lines can be added later with minimal disruption to the lines already running. Expansion toward 3 GW is planned to be funded mainly from the profits of initial sales.
Is any of this built yet?
No. The solar and power-electronics facilities described here are at the pre-feasibility stage. The figures on this page are planning parameters and design targets drawn from the project scopes prepared with Kember Associates, and they will be replaced by the detailed study output — site drawings, equipment list with costs, workforce plan, full capex and opex breakdown, and a project timeline from financial closure to completion.
How would a project like this be financed?
Financing structure depends on the chosen vehicle. For the Costa Rica project the routes under consideration include a new public-private partnership via the ANAPP framework, streamlined private initiatives, or the Infrastructure Transparency Initiative (CoST). Community and project-level financing is a separate question, covered on the Fund Your Project page.
Does GaN make SiC redundant, or the other way round?
Neither. They overlap between roughly 650 V and 1200 V, and outside that band they do different jobs: GaN where switching frequency and size matter most, SiC where voltage and power do. ANEW's product range spans both regimes — micro-inverters and chargers at one end, string inverters and traction-class conversion at the other — so the plan covers both rather than betting on one.
Why does vertical integration lower carbon rather than just cost?
Because most of the emissions in a finished clean-energy product are logistics and upstream processing, not final assembly. Each bought-in component carries its own journey — mine to smelter, smelter to component plant, plant to port, port to assembly. Making the part in the same building as the product removes those legs outright. The same logic scaled up is why the factory is built where the energy is consumed rather than shipped there.
What happens to the second factory?
It reuses the first one's complete design set — drawings, equipment list, process flow, automation, commissioning sequence and training curriculum. Planning for it begins while the first plant is still ramping, at around month 24. The ambition is ten of them worldwide, each built in the region it supplies.
Build the factory with us.
Equipment vendors, process engineers, development finance institutions and host governments — if any part of this page is your line of work, we would like to hear from you.
Solar generation on the roof and on the field, storage in the bays, and the production lines described above under one envelope — the plant is designed to run on the energy it makes.
ANEW reference design — architectural rendering generated with Runway.