A little on-line research will turn up many facts about Tellurium (Te)production issues. There are some discrepancies but for the most part they are minor. Te is a by-product of copper mining. About 1 ounce of tellurium is recovered from 500 pounds of copper. Te is not mined outright as the worldwide demand is too low to support Te as a pure mining operation. The three main uses of tellurium are for hardening steel, in thermoelectric coolers and now solar cells. The worldwide production of refined Te is about 135 metric tons in 2007. There are about 21000 metric tons of reserve. Consumption is split between steel and thermoelectric cooler production.
Several sources verify that FSLR uses about 8 grams per 60 watt panel. This works out to about 135 tons of Te to needed produce 1GW. Their need represents an increase in demand presumably above worldwide capacity. FLSR claims that it has tapped into a large source of Te and that supply issues are not a problem----that remains to be seen. Dig a little into VNP and you might get come up with a different conclusion. Perhaps they have figured out a way to cheaply mine Te from ferromanganese crusts on the ocean ridge. Or since the average human body contains about 700 micrograms of Te perhaps they will be grinding and extracting Te from corpses and cadavers ;-) FSLR also will have to use thinner layers of Te to make the supply last. John Benner of the NREL said in a 3/2007 presentation that given Te usage of about 6 grams per meters squared of panel puts the wordwide production limit at about 3GW per year (based upon USGS Te production data) and given process improvements to using reduced thicknesses of Te at most 20GW per year. And BTW, his report ignores the emerging DVD/optical memory use for Te that will eclipse all the other uses combined.
So you might conclude that this is a resource limited technology that will reach saturation of capacity in just a few years barring no increases in supply.
