Kyocera announced the start of commercial manufacturing operations at the company new solar cell manufacturing plant in Yasu City in Japan. The facility was completed in March this year, and had begun initial test production, but has now officially been put into commercial "mode", and will produce 16.9% conversion efficency solar cells.

Together with the company's other manufacturing facility, the Shiga Yokachi Plant, also in Japan, Kyocera plans to increase its annual production capacity to 1 Gw by 2013. This year, the company is ramping up production to 600 MW of capacity, in order to answer the already growing demand from the solar energy industry. This is a 50% production increase from last year.

The company plans to concentrate more on improving solar cell efficiency, in order to contribute to the further reduction of cost of electricity produced from solar energy.

[source: Kyocera]