From Sand to Solar Panel

Deep End Era. Engineering with Sankalp · Oct 11, 2026 · 58m

A batch of panels loses power in the field, and Wen, a fictional factory quality lead, traces the problem through the silicon supply chain. Follow quartz through purification, crystal growth and wafering into PERC, TOPCon and HJT cells, metallisation and module assembly. The episode connects manufacturing choices to degradation, desert performance, costs, tandems and recycling. Story characters, plants and illustrative story numbers are fictional.

Chapters

00:00:00 Cold open: the panel that came back

00:02:26 From quartz to metallurgical silicon

00:05:01 The Siemens process: distilling a…