3Sun Gigafactory

A record-breaking story

When it opened in July 2011, 3Sun Gigafactory in Catania –in what is known as ‘Etna Valley’ due to the presence of firms specialized in electronics and semiconductors – was already Italy’s largest solar panel factory and one of the biggest in Europe. This was thanks to its 240,000 square meter space which was created after the conversion of a former industrial facility.

In its initial phase, 3Sun Gigafactory had a productive capacity of 160 MW and immediately sought to combine production with research. The 3Sun Gigafactory company had been set up the previous year, in August 2010, in the form of an equal basis joint venture involving Enel Green Power, the Japanese company Sharp, and STMicroelectronics, an Italo-French manufacturer of semiconductors.

In December 2011 production began on thin film panels using multi-junction technology. Less than one year later, in October 2012, the factory produced its millionth panel and by the beginning of 2014 it had produced 3 million panels. In 2015, the ownership of the company changed as Enel Green Power became 3Sun Gigafactory’s sole shareholder, acquiring the shares of both Sharp and STM. The same year the factory passed the milestone of 5 million panels produced.

At the end of 2017, having produced a total of 6.8 million units (amounting to over 900 MW) in 6 years, production of thin film panels came to an end. In August 2018 the ‘Sun Factory’ produced the first heterojunction (HJT) bifacial panel. At this stage the Catania facility became the world’s most automated photovoltaic panel production plant, being able to operate a continuous cycle 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

In February 2019 the first HJT cells were produced and in August of the same year mass production began.

In April 2022, EGP and the European Commission signed the grant agreement, under the framework of the EU’s first Innovation Fund call for large-scale projects. It will contribute to the realization of a Gigafactory for the manufacturing of innovative, sustainable and high-performance photovoltaic modules at 3Sun. The factory’s expansion is set to result in a 15-fold increase in its production capacity to 3 GW per year from the current 200 MW. This will increase local direct and indirect employment by approximately 1,000 jobs by 2024. It will also act as a catalyst for the relaunch of the European PV value chain and contribute to the reduction of the continent’s energy dependency.