Dow ENLIGHT™ Photovoltaic Films Achieve New Commercial Milestones In 2012

The Dow Chemical Company’s (NYSE:DOW) high-performance ENLIGHT™ Photovoltaic Films marked a number of significant commercial milestones in 2012 with the introduction of new products, additional manufacturing locations and continued technical advancements all aimed at delivering enhanced levels of efficiency and performance to solar panel manufacturers worldwide.

ENLIGHT™ polyolefin-based films from Dow enable photovoltaic cells to work more efficiently at a lower cost, which extends the useful life of solar panels. Due to strong demand, Dow inaugurated a new ENLIGHT™ Photovoltaic Film production facility in Thailand in July, located close to fast growing panel production markets in the Asia Pacific region.

New Products Launched in 2012

Dow introduced ENLIGHT™ Back Encapsulant Composite Films, a new “2-in-1” technology that serves as both a backsheet and back encapsulant layer for photovoltaic panels. The simplified structure eliminates delamination that can occur in today’s panels – helping to assure good panel performance and lower lifetime system costs.

Next generation ENLIGHT™ Polyolefin Encapsulant films were also introduced. These new films retain their advantage in moisture resistance, adhesion, and long term weathering performance with additional advances in extended electrical properties and optical transmission, leading to overall increased power generation when compared with more traditional EVA-based encapsulant films.

In addition, next-generation ENLIGHT Films now have five times better Potential Induced Degradation (PID) resistance compared with EVA films, showing only 15 – 20 percent loss in power after accelerated aging, versus a 90 percent loss for EVA under the same conditions.

Additional Production Capacity – Including Installed Solar Panel Power

In July, Dow completed construction of a new, state-of-the-art manufacturing facility for these breakthrough products in Map Ta Phut, Thailand, which has doubled global production capacity for ENLIGHT™ Films. The Map Ta Phut operation has been built with the latest energy efficiency techniques and also recently completed the installation of a 100 KW high efficiency solar panel system on the roof of its manufacturing plant. This system, which will be in place for approximately 25 years, will generate enough electricity to offset 4 million pounds of green house gases that would have been emitted by fossil fuels during that time, or the equivalent of planting 35 acres of trees.

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