The 3Sun Gigafactory Story: A wonderful Christmas present

Episode 1 I had already bought the plane tickets and put down a deposit on a rented apartment in Turin, where I had landed a great job. Had it not been for the call from 3Sun Gigafactory in Catania, my career would have certainly taken me to northern Italy, and then maybe abroad. You could say that the moment I gave all that up to work at the 3Sun Gigafactory photovoltaic panel factory in Sicily was a turning point in my career. And my story is by no means an isolated case. One day in November 2010, 21 people chose to leave their jobs at ST-Microelectronics, a leading multinational that produces semiconductors, to embark on a new adventure at 3Sun Gigafactory, created just a few months earlier on August 1 through a joint venture between Enel Green Power, the Japanese company Sharp and ST-Microelectronics. For all of us, there was a desire to embark on a new challenge: to take a chance on our region, Sicily, and on Japanese thin film panel technology. We believed in the project right from the start. Many of us spent more than a month traveling around Japan, immersed in a culture that in many ways is very difficult to understand. Then, we hosted our Japanese colleagues here in Catania. We followed them around like shadows to learn as much from them as we could. It was a wonderful time of reciprocal cultural exchange, rich in surprises not only in terms of the technology, but also our working life. The production simulation trials lasted up to 72 consecutive hours, continuing even through the night. And we observed behavior that seemed to us unusual, to say the least. Our Japanese colleagues were able to fall asleep during breaks while sitting cross-legged on the floor and then, as if by magic, they would wake up when it was time to resume work: it was if they put themselves in standby mode. Our common goal was to launch, in the space of just a few months, a new factory producing thin film photovoltaic modules – a groundbreaking feat for Europe. It was a dynamic environment with lots going on and everyone was very motivated. Our motto was “win together”, which certainly applied to the company as a whole but, above all, to our day-to-day working relationships, because everything was new, everything had to be worked out together; often we went beyond the boundaries of our own individual responsibilities, helping each other in the various groups in an interdisciplinary way. We learned a lot from them, but in some cases we even managed to outdo our teachers. The head of Sharp for Thin Film, Moritani-san, thanked our team for having managed, after months of hard work, to reduce the time required for scheduled maintenance from its original 12 hours to just 5 hours: an accomplishment that was even better than the 8 hours achieved by our Japanese colleagues. Our factory’s crowning achievement, from the very start, has been automation. Many processes had already been almost completely optimized by the Sharp technicians, but our contribution was instrumental in achieving further improvements and obtaining remarkable results: already in 2011 almost all the processes were automated, an achievement that even today, more than 10 years later, is still out of reach for some in the solar industry. This initial phase for 3Sun Gigafactory culminated with a historic accomplishment. The official launch, and the commencement of thin film solar panel production, was on 22 December 2011, just a few days before Christmas. It was a wonderful Christmas present, even though I don’t think any of us took any real time off work: for us the factory was like a newborn that needed everyone’s constant attention.

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The 3Sun Gigafactory Story: A wonderful Christmas present

The 3Sun Gigafactory Story: A wonderful Christmas present

Antonino Ragonesi

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