ersol and NITOL Group sign Polysilicon supply Letter of Intent

Polysilicon back from Siberia beginning in 2008

Earlier this week at ersol's Annual General Meeting on June 5, 2007, ersol Solar Energy AG (FRA:ES6) announced the signing of a Letter of Intent (LOI) with the NITOL Group for an undisclosed amount of Polysilicon through 2012. ersol purports this polysilicon supply is sufficient for incremental production growth of about 140MWp over the four (4) year term. See ersol wins further cooperation partner for silicon supply (Deutsch) for the official press release.

Per Jürgen Pressl, the Management Board member responsible for the ersol Silicon and Wafers divisions, the polysilicon produced by NITOL will undergo comprehensive material testing in 2008 before approval for production subject to the LOI terms.

As I wrote in From Siberia with Polysilicon, NITOL Silicon will leverage internal trichlorosilane production to produce polysilicon using the good, old Siemens process. I suspect NITOL may be planning to provide polysilicon in the form of Czochralski monocrystalline silicon ingots.

My gross estimates indicate the projected polysilicon production represented by this deal averages to at most 350 Metric Tons of polysilicon per year. A widened deal with ersol or additional contracts with new strategic partners may be under discussion or pending proven polysilicon production material.

This is the first major polysilicon supply deal announced with Russian firms to my knowledge since I blogged about NITOL’s Siberian polysilicon and the SiPro Silicon Program in From Russia with Polysilicon.

The presentation from ersol’s Annual General Meeting is available in German (Deutsch) now along with the Präsentation zur Rede des Vorstands. This Speech of the Management Board should be released in English during work week 25 (June 18 to 22, 2007).

And kudos to ersol for having both English and German versions of their tagline:

Right from the start.
Von Anfang an.