[elcdodedocle]

Well I agree with you. And I also suspected those numbers, to be honest. A sudden increase to 80% of total production? 80% from what? Since when? But I did not do a lot of research: I tried to find sources as the article is not only vague on context but also on references, but the numbers I found were not clear either. They only showed that around 90% of the global production was from silicon crystal based panels already back in 2013, way before the patent expiration. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_of_photovoltaics citing https://www.webcitation.org/6SFRTUaBS and https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/bitstream/J...). I found no breakdowns to compare boron vs. gallium doping over time. I do not know anything about foundries. Maybe replacing boron with gallium is not a trivial change in process. Maybe the patent and planned obsolescence are not the issues here and I was being pretty cynic on my comment without fact checking it anyway. But way too often they are. If that figure, 80%, is true, and the shift from boron to gallium happened over the last year like the article claims, it is very likely that 2 main factors, if not the main ones, were those.