Sujoy Ghosh, VP and Country Managing Director, First Solar highlights the main elements that make factories of the future at the Turbocharged Tamil Nadu seminar organised by Industrial Economist.
There are a few elements on what we believe, as a company should be the factory of future, not just for our industry, but generically across manufacturing. Firstly, a factory of future should be carbon neutral. It should be run 100 per cent on renewable energy, it should consume green hydrogen, in case there is there is any kind of combustion going on, it should have green buildings. The factory of the future, basically, to qualify for that epithet should be carbon neutral. That’s the first goal which we have and the vision towards which we are working.
The second aspect, is that the factories should be designed to be gender neutral. Especially hardcore manufacturing shop floor environments. Today, as we think about running three shift operations and looking at maximizing, gender diversity is important in the workforce. It is necessary to think how to design workplaces to be neutral for gender. That’s the second thing, which we believe should be a core element of the factory of the future.
The third thing is, factories should be zero waste, whatever they make, should be recyclable, reusable, whatever the discharge, they should minimize that discharge to the extent it should be zero.
And lastly, of course, it should be digital, with latest technology like Internet of Things, high degree of automation, artificial intelligence, machine learning,.. All these technologies and platforms, which are evolving, need to find their way into the factory of the future, so that you can potentially operate or maintain the factory from remote. If there is a problem in a machine at the middle of the night, the factory should be able to diagnose and troubleshoot it without anyone at the floor. It could be done from remote and I think we’re already almost there. But as you think about the factory of the future, digitalization is a very important aspect of that element.
First Solar is building vertically integrated solar module manufacturing in Pillaipakkam, near Chennai at an investment of about Rs 5200 crore providing direct employment to 1200 people. This would directly contribute into the country’s vision of having 40 per cent of our energy generation capacity from renewables. Today, as the world transitions from oil and fossil based economy into renewables, solar suddenly has become the new oil. And ironically, today, China controls about 90 per cent of the manufacturing value chain, globally for high volume solar manufacturing, First Solar is the balance 10 per cent.
The Indian government looked at, and recognized solar as a strategic resource, and created a whole basket of incentives around incentivizing local manufacturing to become self reliant in this area. This was a perfect opportunity for us to look at expanding our manufacturing. India is one of the largest growing markets for renewable energy, and solar in particular. Tamil Nadu is actually the biggest state in terms of renewable energy generation in the country and this led us to look at the state for investment.
Watch the entire video of Sujoy Ghosh speak at the session here.
