The mystery of China's photovoltaic "high pollution" is a bloody storm carefully concocted by foreign media

At the end of the year and the beginning of the year, unexpectedly, photovoltaic stocks collectively rose.

You must know that from the industry trend to the capital market, the photovoltaic market has been in the doldrums for about a year.

Among them, polysilicon, the upstream raw material of photovoltaic products, is the worst link.

In 2022, when the industry was booming, the price of polysilicon per ton was more than 300,000 yuan/ton, but now it has fallen to 5-60,000 yuan/ton, close to the lowest point in more than three years since China put forward the "carbon neutrality" goal.

In recent days, it has been reported that a polysilicon plant in Inner Mongolia has completely stopped production and is no longer dry.

Because for many companies, the current price of selling a ton and losing a ton has broken through the cost line.

This is the bitter fruit of some companies blindly launching polysilicon projects in the past two years.

But it doesn't really worry me.

Because every round of ups and downs in the photovoltaic market will bring about violent fluctuations in polysilicon prices and output.

Silicon is abundant in the earth's crust, so there is no need to worry about the development of photovoltaics, and there will be a long-term shortage of polysilicon.

The market economy itself is an economy of surplus.

If there is no excess, it can only show that marketization is not sufficient.

Now that polysilicon has fallen, it is only a matter of time before it rises again sooner or later.

But what makes me angry is that every time we write about photovoltaics and polysilicon, there are readers who leave a message at the bottom:

Photovoltaic and polysilicon are "high pollution" and "high energy consumption" industries under the banner of clean energy.

It has been more than 3 years since "carbon neutrality" was mentioned, and some people's cognition is still stuck at the beginning of the 21st century.

Today, we will make it clear at one time that "whether photovoltaic is high pollution".

Why do I have the confidence to say this? Because we happened to interview the person who was "hacked" back then, and we talked with him for five hours.

The mystery of China's photovoltaic "high pollution" originated from a well-concocted foreign media report.

The sinister and vicious intentions of his intentions are in no way inferior to the later Xinjiang cotton incident.

Unlike the Xinjiang cotton incident, this article had a very bad impact in China, so much so that more than ten years have passed since the dirty water was washed.

The person who witnessed this event is called Yan Dazhou, and he has many titles:

Deputy Chief Engineer of China ENFI Engineering Technology Co., Ltd

Chief Scientist of China Minmetals Materials

Director of the National Engineering Research Center for Silicon-based Material Preparation Technology

Industry insiders also have a more concise honorific title for him - "the pioneer of China's polysilicon industry".

The construction of many polysilicon factories in China is done by the general contractor to the team of ENFI and Yan Dazhou.

In 2008, when the financial crisis swept the world, European and American countries have sharply reduced subsidies for photovoltaic power plant projects, and at that time, Chinese photovoltaic companies that were highly dependent on exports encountered the first "cold winter", and Yan Dazhou was working as an executive in Luoyang Zhongsilicon, a leading domestic photovoltaic polysilicon production company.

In the early spring of that year, a South Korean-American female journalist, Ariana Eunjung Cha, wandered around the factory in Luoyang for a long time, repeatedly asking to interview Yan Dazhou and others of China Silicon, but China Silicon repeatedly refused.

On March 9, 2008, the Washington Post suddenly published an article titled "Solar Energy Firms Leave Waste Behind in China", which caused an uproar.

Between the cornfields and the elementary school playground, workers stopped and poured a bucket of bubbling white liquid onto the ground. Then they turned around and drove through the gates of their compound without saying a word. ”

According to the article, these white liquids are silicon tetrachloride, which is highly toxic. Luoyang Zhongsilicon dumps this liquid waste up to 10 times a day, eventually turning the entire land as white as snow.

Che also interviewed Professor Ren Bingyan, who is very well-known in the photovoltaic industry, and quoted Professor Ren as saying: "If you dump silicon tetrachloride on the land, you will not be able to grow crops." ”

Che Enjing attributed the pollutant emissions to Luoyang Zhongsilicon's lack of closed-loop recycling of silicon tetrachloride.

For more than a decade since then, the impression that "the production of polysilicon will produce high pollution" has been deeply implanted in the minds of many Chinese.

If we go back to March 9, 2008, when the two sessions were still in session in Beijing;

On March 15, the First Session of the 11th National People's Congress passed the Decision of the First Session of the 11th National People's Congress on the Institutional Reform Plan of the State Council, and the State Environmental Protection Administration was upgraded to the Ministry of Environmental Protection of the People's Republic of China, a constituent department of the State Council.

Five months later, the Beijing Olympics are about to begin, and some foreign media are keen to report negative news about China.

These are the big picture of the whole event.

Soon, the director of the National Development and Reform Commission, who was visiting the United States, saw the news and sent the article directly to Premier Wen Jiabao.

On March 11, Yan Dazhou and others successively went to the State Environmental Protection Administration, the National Development and Reform Commission, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, and the Ministry of Science and Technology to report on the situation of China Silicon one by one.

On March 12, Yan Dazhou flew to Shanghai to participate in the semiconductor industry exhibition.

The first thing he did after landing was to go directly to the Washington Post's office in Shanghai and ask for an interview with Che.

The other party said that he was interviewing outside and did not have time to receive him.

So Yan Dazhou left his phone number at the front desk and repeatedly emphasized that he must see Che Enjing, but after several contacts, the other party never answered Yan Dazhou's phone again.

Later, at the semiconductor industry exhibition, Professor Ren Bingyan spent half of his speech scolding Che Enjing's article as nonsense.

At this time, the U.S. side took advantage of this matter to request that several Chinese companies listed in the U.S. submit due diligence reports on the silicon pollution in Luoyang.

Li Bencheng, an executive at Canadian Solar, a leading photovoltaic company, approached Yan Dazhou and found that the photo in the article to illustrate the pollution showed a half-man-high cornfield with a white foam next to it.

Yan Dazhou knew that these white foams were not toxic silicon tetrachloride, but silicon dioxide, a non-toxic and harmless substance that is the main ingredient in glass and sand.

The careful Li Bencheng found that there was only wheat and no corn in Luoyang in March, and that spring corn in Henan would not be planted until late April to mid-May, so according to the time of Che Enjing's visit to Luoyang shortly before the beginning of March 2008, this photo is unreal, at least not taken at the scene during her unannounced visit.

Canadian Solar believed that the article was also untrue, and they replied to the American question.

According to Yan Dazhou's understanding, Luoyang Silicon once piled up a part of the silica outside the fence in a place, this place is usually piled up with rural straw and other agricultural waste, among which there is a cart of waste belongs to Luoyang Silicon, which has silica, and is mixed with limestone residue that has not burned through, after neutralization, it becomes acid-alkali neutral residue, which can be used to fill pits and pave roads, and there is no pollution.

As of 2007, Luoyang Zhongsi produces nearly 10,000 tons of silicon tetrachloride (by-product) every year, 80% of which is recycled and processed into polysilicon raw material trichlorosilane for return to the system using cold hydrogenation (more on later), and 20% into fumed silica.

The project under construction will convert all silicon tetrachloride to trichlorosilane and fumed silica, and there is almost no outgoing waste.

Unilateral explanations by companies are always difficult to put everyone's doubts at ease.

Later, the Ministry of Environmental Protection sent a special team to Luoyang Zhongsilicon, and conducted a two-week comprehensive monitoring of the upstream, midstream and downstream of the company, and the report was submitted directly to the central government, and the results showed that all emissions met the standard.

Later, the Chinese Academy of Environmental Sciences formed a team to conduct a survey of polysilicon manufacturers in China for three consecutive years, including China Silicon.

It was found that the 20,000-ton polysilicon production line of China Silicon had zero emissions of nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide and particulate matter.

Experts from the Academy of Environmental Sciences even said that the emissions of silicon in Luoyang are less than those of many power plants, so how can there be pollution?

In 2008, the polysilicon incident of China Silicon also attracted great attention from the domestic media, and the reporter of CCTV's "Economic Half Hour" program came to China Silicon for an interview, and Yan Dazhou welcomed the company's spokesperson, so that CCTV reporters could walk around the factory.

After the interview was completed, Yan Dazhou invited the reporter to Luoyang City for dinner. After three rounds of drinking, the reporter said:

"I've been walking around your factory for a week, and I've written all my manuscripts, and now I can't go back. ”

It turned out that he had followed the lines of the Washington Post article and predetermined how the "this company is polluting" news program should be produced.

Yan Dazhou asked him, "Then do you feel that there is pollution?"

The reporter shook his head: "No. It seems that the development of national industry is really not easy. ”

In the subsequent episode broadcast by CCTV, the reporter instead used a set of "yin and yang brushwork" to depict the development of China's polysilicon industry. The core point of view was changed to read:

Chinese polysilicon companies with technology and strength are not polluting (such as Luoyang Zhongsilicon), but those without recycling technology are at risk of pollution.

In the end, the general impression left by this episode of the program is still that there was widespread pollution in the domestic polysilicon industry at that time.

Yan Dazhou said with a smile: "You must watch this TV movie 5 times, and you can only see his Tao after watching it 5 times." ”

Truth be told, at the time of the Washington Post's report, there were a few early polysilicon companies in China that had polluted by dumping untreatable silicon tetrachloride outside of their plants using a thermal hydrogenation process (explained later) due to their limited waste disposal capacity.

However, this is not in line with the true situation of Luoyang Zhongsilicon, nor is it the main way to treat pollutants in China's polysilicon factories at that time, let alone show that China's polysilicon production has been a "highly polluting industry" for more than a decade.

Polysilicon can be produced cleanly, and the entire industry cannot be mischaracterized because of individual incidents.

A very simple reason is that 45 tons of trichlorosilane raw materials can be invested at one time, 1 ton of polysilicon can be generated, about 20 tons of silicon tetrachloride are by-products, and more than a dozen tons of trichlorosilane without reaction, so the primary conversion efficiency is low.

Because silicon tetrachloride by-products contain silicon elements, and the purpose of polysilicon production is to purify as much silicon as possible through a series of chemical reactions.

Therefore, it is necessary to find a way to separate the silicon tetrachloride and convert it into trichlorosilane again for the next round of production, which is one of the directions of the "improvement" process of the trichlorosilane method for decades.

Jiangsu Zhongneng's technicians said: "Unlike other industries, how much we have a by-product logistics system, how much cost needs to be added to supplement these materials." How can we afford to discharge these treasures?"

In response to this problem, the main recovery technology of silicon tetrachloride sold to China by Germany, Russia and other countries at that time was "thermal hydrogenation", with a hydrogenation temperature of 1200 degrees Celsius, which was hydrogenated with silicon tetrachloride to form trichlorosilane (SiCl4+H2→SiHCl3+HCl), and the reaction conversion rate was 18%~24%.

The "cold hydrogenation" technology has three major advantages:

First of all, its hydrogenation temperature is lower, only 500~600 degrees Celsius, which is to react with silicon tetrachloride and then hydrogenate to form trichlorosilane (SiCl4+Si+H2→SiHCl3), and the conversion rate is higher, which can reach 25%~30%.

At that time, thermal hydrogenation technology consumed 20 kWh of electricity per kilogram, while cold hydrogenation only required 5 kWh of electricity (now only 0.3 kWh is needed), which has significant energy-saving advantages.

Secondly, cold hydrogenation has a significant scale effect.

The production capacity of the monomer cold hydrogenation unit can reach more than 200,000 tons to meet the needs of 10,000-ton polysilicon production, while large-scale thermal hydrogenation requires the installation of multiple sets of devices, and the unit cost and production capacity increase almost linearly.

The relationship between the production scale and production cost of different hydrogenation technologies

The third point is that cold hydrogenation can recycle the hydrogen chloride produced in the process, which is the main component of hydrochloric acid, and cold hydrogenation can use hydrogen chloride to participate in the reaction and reduce the pressure on environmental protection.

Although there are many advantages of cold hydrogenation, in order to form such a closed-circuit cycle in domestic polysilicon production and efficiently recover silicon tetrachloride and hydrogen chloride, the related technology is still a "bottleneck" link in China, so the state has also set up a special 863 special project to support the breakthrough of "cold hydrogenation" technology.

With the support of the Electronic Information Industry Development Fund of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and the support plan of the Ministry of Science and Technology, during the "Eleventh Five-Year Plan" and "Twelfth Five-Year Plan" period, the state supported Jiangsu Zhongneng, Luoyang Zhongsilicon, Daqo New Energy and Yellow River Hydropower New Energy Co., Ltd. to actively carry out hydrogenation technology research, of which Jiangsu Zhongneng has developed a single set of hydrogenation installed processing capacity of 200,000 tons through the introduction, digestion and re-innovation.

Through independent research and development, Luoyang Zhongsilicon has successfully completed the research of low-temperature pressurized hydrogenation technology, and silicon tetrachloride can be fully recycled after 3~4 cycles.

However, the Washington Post incident still has an extremely bad impact on China's photovoltaic polysilicon industry.

In August 2009, the executive meeting of the State Council "named" the polysilicon industry as having a "tendency to duplicate construction", and in October, the National Development and Reform Commission and other ten departments jointly held a "press conference on curbing overcapacity and duplicate construction in some industries", indicating that there is a risk of "overcapacity" in polysilicon.

In the middle of these two meetings, the State Council issued a document that had a significant impact on China's polysilicon industry, titled "Notice of the State Council on Forwarding Several Opinions of the National Development and Reform Commission and Other Departments on Suppressing Overcapacity and Duplicate Construction in Some Industries and Guiding the Healthy Development of the Industry", known as "Document No. 38".

It mentions: "Polysilicon is the basic material of the information industry and the photovoltaic industry, and it is a high-energy-consuming and high-polluting product. ...... The development of the photovoltaic power generation market in the mainland is slow, and 98% of domestic solar cells are exported, which is equivalent to a large output of domestic energy shortage. ”

Wu Dada, deputy director of the Photovoltaic Professional Committee of the Chinese Renewable Energy Society, said:

As soon as the article came out, domestic banks and approval agencies were all in the news about polysilicon projects. New projects have basically been stopped; those that have not been submitted for approval will no longer be submitted for approval; those that have been approved but not invested will no longer be invested; and those that have been invested but not put into production will not dare to be put into production again. ”

It should be said that the promulgation of "Document No. 38", in the long run, has a positive significance for the development of the domestic photovoltaic polysilicon industry to promote quality and efficiency improvement and eliminate backward production capacity, and effectively curb the chaotic situation of blind investment, duplicate construction and disorderly launch in various places.

However, the domestic official caliber embodied in Circular No. 38 also confirmed the notoriety of the entire polysilicon industry as a "high-energy-consuming, high-pollution" (commonly known as the "two highs") industry for a certain period of time, which caused the entire industry to fall into a passive situation in public opinion in the following years.

It was not until 2013 that the State Council issued the "Several Opinions on Promoting the Healthy Development of the Photovoltaic Industry" (Guo Fa No. 24), the scale of the domestic photovoltaic market expanded, the demand for polysilicon expanded, product prices rebounded, and many enterprises began to resume production.

Circular 38 mentions "strictly controlling the construction of new polysilicon projects in areas with energy shortages and high electricity prices", leading some companies to start moving to the energy price depression in the northwest, such as Xinjiang.

By 2022, the production cost of Chinese polysilicon enterprises can be less than US$7/kg, while the production cost of overseas polysilicon is higher than US$7/kg, and China's polysilicon production accounts for 85.6% of the world's total, and China's polysilicon production capacity and output have ranked first in the world for 12 consecutive years.

After half a century of development, China's polysilicon companies have been ahead of foreign companies in terms of quality, cost and scale of solar-grade polysilicon.

But this achievement is not a miracle achieved overnight in just a decade, but is the result of decades of hard work by China's polysilicon engineers.

At the end of the 20th century, when Yan Dazhou began to study the localization of polysilicon production line technology and equipment, he was faced with almost zero large-scale production capacity in China and a strict technical blockade of Chinese enterprises by overseas giants.

On one occasion, when Yan Dazhou visited the global polysilicon giant WACKER, WACKER people told him that as the leader of the German chemical industry, WACKER would give training to other German companies.

So Yan Dazhou asked: Is it okay for us Chinese to come to you for training? The people from Wacker said: No, we can't train Chinese. Yan Dazhou is not the only one who has this experience.

Professor Shen Hui of Sun Yat-sen University approached the head of Wacker's chemical R&D department to work with Chinese companies to develop polysilicon. WACKER says polysilicon is a sensitive technology and will not be developed in China.

When the price of polysilicon reached US$400~500/kg, Li Junfeng, then deputy director of the Energy Research Institute of the National Development and Reform Commission, also negotiated with WACKER's CEO to build a factory in China, but WACKER flatly refused.

Li Junfeng told them: "There is an old Chinese saying, 'Under the reward, there must be a brave man', if you don't agree, I promise that China will be able to make the polysilicon industry on its own, do you believe it or not?"

WACKER's boss said: "This is impossible, the process here is too complicated, you Chinese can't do it, you can just buy my products." ”

The arrogance and self-confidence of Westerners came from the accumulation of technology that they had for half a century at that time.

In 1955, in order to solve the problem of raw materials for silicon-based rectifiers, Siemens developed polysilicon purification, successfully introduced trichlorosilane (SiHCl3) and hydrogen into a bell reactor, deposited high-purity polysilicon (SiHCl3 + H2 → Si + HCl) on the surface of the hot silicon core, and achieved large-scale production in 1957, which is the origin of the "Siemens method".

In the same year, WACKER in Germany also started laboratory production of high-purity polysilicon, which reached the level of only one impurity atom per 10 million silicon atoms.

In 1958, Siemens AG licensed this method to WACKER, and WACKER's polysilicon production increased from 0.53 tons to 60 tons in the decade of 1959~1969.

After nearly 60 years of optimization and improvement, this method has formed the mature "trichlorosilane method", formerly known as the "modified Siemens method", which can realize the closed-circuit circulation of materials and the comprehensive utilization of heat.

This approach is used for more than 90% of the world's polysilicon production capacity.

Although China since the 50s of the 20th century, there have been some scientific research institutes and factories have tried a variety of polysilicon production methods, and once received technical support from experts from the former Soviet Union, by 1969, the national polysilicon output exceeded 1 ton, but in the end many projects stayed in the process research stage, did not form large-scale production, so that at the beginning of the 21st century, let Chinese photovoltaic people unforgettable experience the taste of being "stuck in the neck".

In 1988, after graduating from graduate school, Yan Dazhou came to Beijing Nonferrous Metallurgical Design and Research Institute (the predecessor of China Nonferrous Metals Engineering Co., Ltd. and China ENFI Engineering Technology Co., Ltd., hereinafter referred to as "ENFI"), and successively undertook the scientific research and engineering design of electrolytic aluminum, cement, zirconium, titanium, rare earth smelting, rare earth materials, semiconductor materials monocrystalline silicon, polysilicon and other projects.

In his own words, a considerable part of his energy in the early years of his career was spent on "prospecting", and he looked for whatever the country needed. It was not until the turn of the century that he devoted most of his energy to the localization of polysilicon.

Polysilicon is not only a raw material for photovoltaic modules, but also a key raw material for the semiconductor integrated circuit industry.

Each of our mobile phone chips and computer chips are made on the basis of silicon wafers, and the raw materials of silicon wafers are also high-purity polysilicon (which is used to draw monocrystalline silicon rods and then cut into silicon wafers).

In 2000, as the chief designer of the project, Yan Dazhou wrote a project proposal to Sichuan, which was approved, and then submitted the "feasibility study report" of the project, and submitted a project with an annual output of 1,000 tons of polysilicon to the National Development and Reform Commission.

The National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) believes that the project is very valuable and at the same time very risky, so it allocates an industrial development fund.

However, the enterprise undertaking this project does not have the ability to invest more than a billion yuan at once, so it invites multiple parties to invest in the joint construction.

One of the shareholders is from a power company who does not believe in domestically produced polysilicon technology, and insists on using imported technology and equipment even though the National Development and Reform Commission has agreed to launch the project.

Yan Dazhou and others left Sichuan, and took their own technology everywhere to find people to discuss cooperation, hoping to land technology transfer, but no one looked at it.

In desperation, they chose a compromise plan to first implement the raw material technology involved in the synthesis of trichlorosilane in Tangshan, and built a 2,000-ton trichlorosilane production line, that is, to produce this important raw material for the production of polysilicon.

But even with such a front-end production line, its fate is very bumpy.

At that time, the CEO of the company in Tangshan said to Yan Dazhou: "Mr. Yan, you always say how good this technology is, so why don't you invest yourself?"

As a result, Yan Dazhou and other technical personnel, as well as some leaders of Enfi, a total of 8 people, each took out 50,000 yuan to invest in this project, which was all Yan Dazhou's savings at that time.

Their 400,000 yuan, plus the company's investment totaled more than 720 yuan, and later after the photovoltaic industry broke out and the price of polysilicon skyrocketed, one of them earned back all the investment.

Due to some financial and local reasons, the income of this project did not give them regular dividends, but fortunately, the domestic trichlorosilane synthesis technology got the opportunity for large-scale mass production for the first time.

Since then, Yan Dazhou and others have continued to write the "feasibility study report" and once again embarked on the journey of traveling across the country: Guangxi, Yunnan, Shanxi, Inner Mongolia......

Until 2003, he came to Luoyang City, Henan Province.

There is a polysilicon factory that has stopped production, laid off workers, and is about to go bankrupt, which is a polysilicon project imported from the Japanese company under the personal chairmanship of Premier Zhou Enlai.

This is the first polysilicon production line imported from abroad in China, with an annual production capacity of only 3 tons, and the technology is incomplete, but this is the only two remaining polysilicon production units in China at the end of the 20th century (the other is Emei Semiconductor Materials Factory).

When Yan Dazhou came to the door, 178 workers were about to be laid off and had been out of production for several years.

But Yan Dazhou found that the people here know what polysilicon is.

When Yan Dazhou and his team introduced their technology, the other party expressed real recognition.

This factory is the prototype of the later famous Luoyang Silicon.

That year, China's polysilicon production was around 62 tons, and Yan Dazhou wanted the plant to start with 500 tons.

But the two sides couldn't make up so much investment, so it was reduced to 300 tons, with a total investment of 240 million.

Yan Dazhou and his colleagues live in a modest guest house near Yanshi, the office is a farmer's mud hut, and a tractor drives by "suddenly" while working.

After two years of preparation, construction and commissioning, by October 2005, the first furnace of polysilicon was successfully mass-produced here.

In that year, the production scale of polysilicon in mainland China exceeded the 100-ton mark for the first time, with an annual production capacity of 400 tons, including 300 tons of silicon in Luoyang and 100 tons in Emei, Sichuan, with an actual annual output of 80 tons.

During the construction of this demonstration line, Yan Dazhou faced a problem: the lack of a reduction furnace, which is a key equipment for the chemical reaction of trichlorosilane to produce polysilicon.

The size of the reduction furnace is measured in terms of "number of pairs of rods", because after the reaction is completed, the polysilicon in the furnace comes in the form of "inverted U-shaped" rods connected to the top of the furnace in pairs.

Today, the largest reduction furnace in China has 72 pairs of rods, and the more rods it means, the better the mass production efficiency, and at that time, there were no reduction furnaces with 12 pairs of rods in China.

Yan Dazhou and they planned to design and build their own, but they lacked start-up funds, and the banks refused to give them loans, so the Luoyang Municipal Government used the city's 10 million yuan of scientific research funds that year and took out 5 million yuan of them to support them.

Bell Reactor (Reduction Furnace)

With the funds, Yan Dazhou found that the localization of various parts and components supporting the reduction furnace had become a problem again, and they could not find what they wanted in China.

For example, for the power supply of the reduction furnace, it is necessary to use IGBT (insulated gate bipolar transistor) to adjust the voltage and current during the operation of the reduction furnace, and a component called "thyristor" (also called thyristor) is used, but no domestic company has heard of this kind of thing, and ENFI needs to start the transformer factory to manufacture it.

There are also a large number of non-standardized equipment, all of which are drawn by ENFI and handed over to relevant manufacturers to manufacture.

In this process, there are some domestic suppliers who can support polysilicon production line equipment, and some of them have later become listed companies.

German companies such as WACKER were able to achieve a leading position in polysilicon production in the second half of the 20th century because of the large number of equipment suppliers with whom they worked and supported each other.

For example, SolMic provided the process package and took the lead in technical coordination, Centrotherm provided the reduction and hydrogenation unit, AEG provided the electrical part of the reduction and hydrogenation unit, and Siemens provided the control part of the reduction and hydrogenation unit.

The healthy development of China's polysilicon industry is also inseparable from the cooperation between ENFI and other enterprises and a large number of upstream equipment and parts companies.

In this way, Yan Dazhou and others spent a year to make the first reduction furnace, and by the Spring Festival of 2004, this furnace had a trial output of polysilicon.

The local branch of the Bank of China was the first to agree to grant them a loan when the project was feasible.

In this way, the project with an annual output of 300 tons of polysilicon has received more financial support and can be smoothly promoted.

You must know that from the establishment of Emei Semiconductor Factory in 1964 and the start of the construction of an annual polysilicon production line of 800 kilograms, until 2005, in the past 41 years, the annual production capacity of polysilicon in the country has occasionally exceeded 100 tons, but the actual output has never exceeded 100 tons, which is far from meeting the development needs of China's electronics industry.

This demonstration line for large-scale production covers several key equipment and technologies needed for China's polysilicon production line, including large-scale reduction furnaces, dry recovery (recovery of dried hydrogen chloride gas) and cold hydrogenation, successfully breaking the blockade and monopoly of foreign companies.

On this basis, the ENFI team was able to continuously develop technology and upgrade equipment, and soon they expanded the scale to 1,000 tons, 5,000 tons, and 20,000 tons.

Before 2005, Japanese and German companies were only willing to sell polysilicon raw materials to China.

Perhaps it was learned that some local companies in China had broken through the industrialization technology and realized the scale of polysilicon equipment and production lines, and after 2006, they suddenly agreed to export related technologies and equipment, and since then the situation of large-scale mass production of polysilicon in China has been opened.

With the vigorous development of the domestic photovoltaic manufacturing industry, foreign equipment began to enter China in a steady stream, when the price of an imported 12-pair rod reduction furnace was as high as 600,000 euros, and some companies still rushed to buy it.

It was also in 2006 that the global market demand for solar-grade polysilicon surpassed that of electronic-grade polysilicon, the polysilicon used in semiconductor chips.

In order to further improve the localization level of key polysilicon equipment, the national "863 Plan" later gave ENFI great support.

In 2005, there were no 24 pairs of rods of large-scale reduction furnace in the world, the Ministry of Science and Technology of the People's Republic of China organized academicians and experts to demonstrate "24 pairs of rod energy-saving polysilicon reduction furnace complete sets of equipment research", many people objected, thinking that it was impossible to do.

However, the high-tech division overrode public opinion, saying that this matter must be supported, and resolutely promoted the implementation of the reduction furnace project.

At that time, there was only one and a half years left in the national "Tenth Five-Year Plan", and they squeezed out 3 million unused funds from other research groups.

As a result, ENFI lived up to expectations and completed the task beyond expectations in 2007, making the 24 pairs of rod reduction furnaces the core domestic equipment. The annual production capacity of a reduction furnace reaches 80~100 tons, which is equivalent to the annual output of the country before 2005, and this technology has been successfully applied in 1000 tons and 2000 tons of industrialization projects.

After that, the national "Eleventh Five-Year Plan" and "Twelfth Five-Year Plan" support plan successively supported the research of 36 pairs of rods and 48 pairs of rod reduction furnaces, and the output of a single furnace increased by more than 50% compared with 24 pairs of rods, forming a technical system with Chinese characteristics, basically realizing localization and reaching the world's advanced level.

In 2007, China's polysilicon production scale exceeded 1,000 tons for the first time, reaching 1,130 tons, including 520 tons of Luoyang Zhongsilicon, 155 tons of Xinguang Silicon Industry, 155 tons of Emei Semiconductor Factory, and 150 tons of Jiangsu Zhongneng.

At the beginning of the 21st century, the Chinese not only achieved the rapid expansion of photovoltaic polysilicon production scale, but also achieved a key breakthrough in clean and efficient production technology, which is particularly worth mentioning is the "cold hydrogenation" technology just mentioned.

In 2002, China ENFI applied for an invention patent for cold hydrogenation technology, and it was applied in the industrialization project of polysilicon with an annual output of 300 tons. Around 2007, the year when the price of polysilicon was the highest, Luoyang China Silicon upgraded its cold hydrogenation technology and equipment to meet the needs of the polysilicon project with an annual output of 2,000 tons.

At this moment, ENFI has been working on this technology for ten years.

In 1996, the state supported the cooperation between Beijing Nonferrous Metallurgical Design and Research Institute and Emei Semiconductor Materials Factory to build a small-scale polysilicon industrial production demonstration line with an annual output of 100 tons, forming a complete trichlorosilane process polysilicon production system, including silicon tetrachloride hydrogenation and other steps.

In 1997, Yan Dazhou and others set up a factory in Dahua, Tianjin, and carried out cold hydrogenation tests on a miniaturized unit by taking advantage of the local conditions for producing chlorine.

Later, they built an enlarged version of the cold hydrogenation unit in Emei, Sichuan, and built a 100 tons/year polysilicon closed-circuit circulation process system, which recovered all the tail gas of each link, and solved the "three highs" of material consumption, energy consumption and pollution of the traditional Siemens method.

This series of layouts has laid a solid foundation for the rapid breakthrough of localization of the 300-ton demonstration line and subsequent larger-scale cold hydrogenation units.

After 2004, China's photovoltaic industry was able to quickly seize the opportunity of the outbreak of the European photovoltaic market, rapidly expand the production capacity of each link, master the relevant technical principles and carry out large-scale iteration, upgrading and optimization, thanks to the accumulation of technical capabilities of domestic related equipment and raw material enterprises in the past few years or even decades.

Even if this accumulation is based on small-scale, demonstration projects, it fully reflects the essential leap of its technical capabilities "from scratch".

When the increasingly mature mass production technical capabilities of Chinese polysilicon companies are connected with the explosion of overseas photovoltaic markets in the 21st century, China's polysilicon industry has exploded with unprecedented market vitality.

In August 2007, when polysilicon prices had reached a frenzied state, Luoyang Zhongsi's polysilicon was sold for 3.75 million yuan/ton, which is even more expensive than drugs by weight.

But once we sit on the ground and collect money, we will become a thorn in the side and a thorn in the flesh of the old polysilicon forces in Europe and the United States.

Note the timing – there are only half a year left before the Washington Post published an article smearing Chinese polysilicon.

European and American countries take the lead in realizing the production of things, Chinese can also make profits, and even have a tendency to replace imported polysilicon.

How could they see China, the world's largest downstream PV manufacturing country at the time, making a lot of money in the upstream polysilicon field, so that European and American polysilicon companies have since lost their competitive advantage and even gone bankrupt?

In fact, shortly after the publication of the Washington Post article, and after China really started to rectify and restrict the development of the polysilicon industry, overseas polysilicon giants took the opportunity to aggressively expand their sales to China and seize the Chinese market.

According to statistics from the General Administration of Customs, China imported 20,000 tons of polysilicon in 2009, accounting for 55% of domestic demand.

In 2010, China imported more than 40,000 tons of polysilicon, a year-on-year increase of more than 100% in most months, and the price of polysilicon also rose from US$55 to nearly US$100 per kilogram.

But the scenery should be long-sighted, and they are just "grasshoppers after autumn" - they can't jump for a few years.

After the great development of the domestic photovoltaic industry in 2013, Chinese polysilicon enterprises have grown rapidly, not only through the rapid popularization of cold hydrogenation technology, to solve the problem of by-product recycling and reuse, but also to achieve large-scale mass production of "granular silicon", so that the energy consumption and carbon emission intensity of photovoltaic polysilicon have been further greatly reduced, and even the shipment of electronic grade polysilicon has been realized - that is to say, Chinese will use more and more Chinese high-quality polysilicon in the future to produce Chinese's own semiconductor chips.

There are many more wonderful stories about China's polysilicon industry, which we have written into the book "Great Power Photovoltaic", which includes the secret history of the growth of a number of Chinese photovoltaic polysilicon such as Tongwei Yongxiang and GCL Technology, as well as how China's polysilicon industry "killed" the international (photovoltaic) polysilicon giants step by step.

Why can China's photovoltaic products become cheaper and cheaper, polysilicon raw materials can become cheaper and cheaper, and at the same time, the production process can be environmentally friendly, energy-saving, and even create a garden-like factory?

Will granular silicon completely eliminate traditional bulk polysilicon?

Which polysilicon manufacturer is more worth paying attention to?

Can China rely on a strong photovoltaic industry chain to realize the domestic substitution of upstream raw materials in the semiconductor field?

These answers are hidden in "Great Power Photovoltaics".

This is the first book created by our Coldplay team and China's most authoritative photovoltaic organization, China Photovoltaic Industry Association (CPIA), which lasted 3 years, with a length of 600,000 words, including interviews with more than a dozen leading entrepreneurs and top industry experts, and 40 million words of literature, covering 70 years. This is also the first book that can be called the "general history" of the entire photovoltaic industry.

After reading it, an investor commented on social platforms like this-

"This is the best book I've ever seen about the development of the industry, and there is no one. ”

We have only one wish:

Coldplay Lab records the process of China's countless advantageous industries from scratch and from weak to strong, and grows together with the pace of China's industrial upgrading.

The ancients were unrelenting in their learning,

Young and strong, old and old.

On paper, I finally feel shallow,

I don't know how to do it.