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Silicon ingot, from which you can slice off the wafers to make solar cells, has become much cheaper.
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And that is the situation the silicon ingot business was in as Solyndra started up and went into production.
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Your raw material is silicon ingot, itself made from sand.
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If silicon had remained high priced it might even have worked: but as they were ramping up production into a world where the raw silicon ingot had just fallen to 10% of its previous price they were doomed.
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However, the price of that ingot of silicon has also been falling.
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After all, an ingot of silicon is made by taking beach sand and a bit of energy: add a bit of care and attention and there you are.
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We get more wafers out of our great big ingot of silicon and thus, if silicon stays static in price then the price of each wafer should be falling.
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At the risk of being too simplistic to make silicon wafers, which is what you use to make computer chips and solar cells, you take a great big ingot of very pure silicon metal and then slice it very thinly.
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