the solar coaster

Solar Power International '08 Wraps Up

2008-10-20T18:15:00.000-07:00

the solar coaster wasn't in San Diego this past week for Solar Power International 2008, but luckily, quite a few bloggers and other online media were.

RenewableEnergyWorld hosted the official video broadcast of the event, providing a day-by-day blow of the news and views coming out of San Diego, including some great videos of key speakers. For a more abbreviated version, check out Gunther Portfolio's post, in which he highlights especially the CEO Panel titled "Driving Down Costs," if you only have time for one video:

You'll also find a plethora of stories at GreenTech Media, Earth2Tech and Green Tech Blog covering the event. Here's a few stories that the solar coaster found highlight-worthy:

The 10 solar startups to watch at Solar Power International 2008.
GreenVolts' newly unveiled CarouSoul unit was the buzz of the exhibition, as Gunther Portfolio reports, while SkyFuel showcases its SkyTrough systems which boat a 35% reduction in cost compared to other parabolic trough technologies.
Utility in Gainsville, Florida considers implementing a feed-in tariff, and now, so does Oregon.
Speaking of Oregon, the northwestern state has already been put on the solar map thanks to SolarWorld and Sanyo opening up solar manufacturing facilities in Hillsoboro and Salem, respectively.
And speaking of maps, 3TIER was in San Diego to show how it uses the Google Maps platform to provide high-resolution data maps of solar, wind and hydro resources. This is yet another example of where the IT meets the ET (energy technology), and the need to reduce information asymmetries in the solar industry. (Remember Fat Spaniel, or even National Semi and Enphase?) Check out 3TIER's solar resource assessment map of the Western hemisphere here.
Building Integrated PV (BIPV) in focus.
The bleak financial situation might spur consolidation in the industry. There is some discussion of this in the CEO panel video above starting at 47'28" or so, with the Q-Cells CEO agreeing that consolidation is inevitable, but not before margins further upstream in the supply chain, which are still very healthy, get squeezed more.

Dilbert Goes Solar

2008-10-12T05:50:00.000-07:00

On the eve of a serious week ahead with Solar Power International 2008 taking centerstage in San Diego, the solar coaster would like start things off with something a little more light-hearted (hat tip to Gunther Portfolio):

Oct 9

Oct 10

Oct 11

Of course, there's a serious undertone to it as all kinds of companies try to cash in on the hot PV market. But in this current financial market, will venture capitalists continue to bite? Even more so, suggests this piece by Greentech Media.

Solyndra Reshapes Solar (and Other Thin-Film News)

2008-10-07T21:48:00.000-07:00

The emergence of Solyndra, a Fremont-California-based thin-film start-up, out of stealth-mode has created a mini-sensation within the cleantech blogospheare over the past couple of days. The company has caught the industry’s attention for a few reasons: (1) its novel technology, specifically with regards to the shape and configuration of its cylindrical Copper Indium Gallium Selenide (CIGS) modules; (2) the $1.2 billion in backlog orders that it has announced; (3) the whopping $600 million it has reportedly raised over the past three years; and (4) the quality and reputation of its VC backers.

The unique design of Solyndra’s modules boast two primary advantages. First, the modules are cylindrical instead of flat and are packed together with a minimum gap between modules, creating a self-tracking configuration that allows the modules to capture both direct and diffuse (including light reflected off the surface of the underlying rooftop) sunlight around a 360 degree axis as the sun position shifts throughout the day. This makes additional tracking systems unnecessary, thereby saving costs while boosting photovoltaic efficiency. The vented design also enhances air flow, allowing for better systems cooling than conventional modules, thereby reducing heat accumulation that would otherwise adversely affect photovoltaic performance.

Second, because of such enhanced air flow, the Solyndra systems do not require the kind of anchoring equipment such as roof-penetrating mounts and wind ballasts that conventional systems require to withstand general wind load. Thus, Solyndra’s modules can be installed using “one-third the labor, in one-third of the time, at one-half the cost” says one Solyndra customer.

Speaking of customers, Solyndra has lined up an eye-popping $1.2 billion worth of multi-year contracts in the US and Europe, exclusively targeting, according to Technology Review, commercial rooftop applications. Pretty impressive for a three-year old start-up. All this while hiring 500 employees, building a state-of-the-art thin-film production line (see video below) and raising a war chest of $600 million from high-profile venture financiers (although there is some suggestion of one of its investment rounds not coming through completely). According to Venture Beat, Solyndra’s investors include luminaries such as Virgin Green Fund, Rockport Capital, Argonaut Venutres, RedPoint Ventures, CMEA Ventures, US Venture Partners, Masdar Cleant Tech Fund and Madrone Capital (the Walton family fund that famously backed First Solar, the “Google of thin-film”…for now).

If you are curious about the knitty-gritty on its patent, Green Light Blog covers it here.

Other Thin-Film News

Just so you are caught up on other recent thin-film developments, here’s a hit list:

Konarka opens a new 1 GW thin-film production line in New Bedford, Massachusetts, taking over a 250,000 square feet facility previously occupied by Polaroid. Konarka’s modules are made of a proprietary organic “power plastic” material.
Sharp announced ambitions to capture half of the thin-film market by 2012 and could have as much as 6 GW of production capacity by 2014.
Earth2Tech discusses Semprius (which has devised a way to slice mono-crystalline wafers into thinner sheet without overly sacrificing conversion efficiency) and the dark side (i.e. cadmium) of thin-film.
CIGS thin-film manufacturer SoloPower, based in San Jose, California, raises $200 million to build a 100 MW production facility.

The Beginning of the US Solar Boom?

2008-10-04T18:09:00.000-07:00

Its been a big solar news week, but no news was bigger than the $18 billion package for renewable energy that was slipped into the $700 billion Wall Street financial bailout (H.R. 1424, the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008) and that that was finally passed by the U.S. Congress on Friday (Oct 4) and promptly signed into law by President Bush. Solar emerged the big winner, with the Green Wombat identifying some of the goodies the solar sector will have in store:

"The 30% solar investment tax credit [ITC] has been extended to 2016, giving solar startups, utilities and financiers the certainty they need for the years’ long slog it takes to get large-scale power plants and other projects online. The extension is particularly important to those Big Solar projects that need to arrange project financing in the next year or so.
The $2,000 tax credit limit for residential solar systems has been lifted, meaning that homeowners can get a 30% tax credit on the solar panels they install after Dec. 31. That will save a bundle - especially for those who live in states with generous state rebates - and goose demand for solar panel makers and installers like SunPower and First Solar. (If you buy a $24,000 3-kilowatt solar array in California - big enough to power the average home - you can claim a $7,200 federal tax credit. Add in the state solar rebate and the cost of the system is cut in half.)
Utilities like PG&E, Southern California Edison and FPL can now themselves claim the 30% investment tax credit for large-scale solar power projects. That should encourage those well-capitalized utilities to build their own solar power plants rather than just sign power purchase agreements with startups like Ausra and BrightSource Energy."

The third point cannot be understated. That utilities can now themselves participate in the ITC should delight authors of the "Utility Solar Assessment (USA) Study: Reaching Ten Percent Solar by 2025" report, the primary theme of which is that utilities have to be the central driving force of the solar revolution (see previous post "Fed Up with Solar"). Its now seems that a more ideal balance of carrots (this new law) and sticks (the renewable portfolio standards in roughly half of the American states that oblige utilities to produce a fixed amount of renewable power by a fixed date) will create winning business propositions for managers of utilities to scale up solar projects.

Julia Hamm, executive director of the Solar Energy Power Association, was quoted in an official statement as saying:

U.S. electric utilities’ engagement with grid-connected solar electricity has increased significantly in 2008, with major photovoltaic and concentrating solar thermal project announcements totaling more than 5,000 megawatts...Without the ability to take direct advantage of the ITC, the only viable financial option was to have these plants be owned and operated by independent power producers who then in turn sell the electricity to the utility. The change to the tax credit facilitates utility ownership as another option, which will result in additional projects and innovations.

Ms. Hamm also noted that the ITC extension means that some of the largest planned projects in history, particularly PG&E's 550MW power purchase agreement with OptiSolar and 250MW PPA with SunPower, both of which were contingent on the extnsion of the ITC, could continue as planned.

Solar integrators are no less excited. Earth2Tech has Akeena Solar CEO Barry Cinnamon extolling:

With an eight year extension of the solar investment tax credits and a complete removal of the residential cap for homeowners investing in solar systems – our customers can now realize a full payback of their solar investment in five years instead of 10, delivering a 20 percent return on investment, which in today’s economy is the very best investment homeowners can make.

The obvious looming question is how the global credit crunch will affect the cleantech sector. And even if financing comes through, there are also land use issues that developers of large-scale solar farms will have to contend with, especially in proposed sites such as the Mojave desert which consitute habitat for protected wildlife (See the Green Wombat's article "The hottest tech job in America: Wildlife biologist"). Recognizing the potential land use conflict, the Environmental Protetion Agency has plotted a "Google Map" identifying 480,000 sites that have been previously marred by toxic wastes that could be ideal for various renewable energy projects, including solar (see picture above), because of their cheap land costs and existing infrastructure. Whether these are healthy environments for workers to operate is another issue.

Chinese solar giant Suntech is pinning its hopes on a vibrant U.S. solar market and has wasted no time making an aggressive push into the U.S. market by acquiring Californian solar integrator EI Solutions, launching a joint venture with solar financier MMA Renewable Ventures to develop and finance large scale (10MW and above) solar projects, and enlarging its U.S. dealer network. Suntech expects to triple its sales in the U.S. in 2009.

Across the Atlantic, Spanish solar policy was also recently in the spotlight. With certain solar incentives expiring at the end of September, the Spanish cabinet approved a higher cap for solar installations (500 MW for 2009 and 460 MW for 2010) and a lower reduction in the country's solar feed-in tariff (now 32 to 34 Euro cents) than originally feared. Although the sense is that the solar industry is satisfied with the compromise outcome considering the more draconian reductions in incentives earlier proposed, a noticeable scale-back in the Spanish solar market, till now one of the hottest, is inevitable.

SolFocus in Focus

2008-09-29T03:40:00.001-07:00

SolFocus, based in Google Land (Mountain View, California), has been making all sorts of news in recent days. It announced the completion of its first commercial installation, consisting of 500 kw worth of concentrating photovoltaic (CPV) equipment in

Spain

. SolFocus’ installation is part of a larger 3 MW project spread across two power plants that three different companies are building for its first phase at the Institute of Concentration Photovoltaic Systems (ISFOC) in Puertollano.

SolFocus also announced that it was forming a CPV industry consortium with other participatnts of the ISFOC project, including Concentrix Solar, Emcore, Isofoton and ISFOC itself with the goal of accelerating the development of CPV into the mainstream. One of the practical steps the consortium may undertake is to set standards within the CPV for measuring efficiencies:

People measure it every which way," [Nancy Hartsoch, vice president of marketing for SolFocus] said. "Some talk about panel efficiency, some talk about system efficiency, and some will only talk about [a mirror or lens]. It can be very confusing to developers trying to figure out 'How much energy do I get at the end of the day?' We will work to figure out standards so they can compare apples to apples."

Separately, SolFocus announced that its CPV modules have met the safety and reliability standards of the California Energy Commission and have been placed on the list of approved equipment suppliers for the California Solar Initiative, which will allow SolFocus to participate in the Golden’s State’s solar rebates. According to GreenTech Media, this announcement sets the stage for a possible future announcement of a Californian desert project scheduled for the second quarter of next year.

Let’s take a closer look at their technology.

SolFocus Technology

A review of SolFocus technology on their website is broadly reminiscent of the technology of Nevada competitor, Sunrgi, which we reviewed in May. Essentially, SolFocus’ systems adopt mini-dish designs, concentrating sunlight by some 500 times through arrarys of primary and secondary mirrors onto an optical rod which channels the light onto an area of high efficiency, multi-junction solar cell material (with efficiencies approaching 40%). The systems are mounted onto their proprietary dual-axis (i.e. x and y axis) tracking systems to optimize their alignment to the sun.

The winning features of their design, according to company’s website, is that their systems use just 1/1000^th of active material found in standard solar cells, that 95% of the systems is made of aluminum and glass which is readily sourced globally, and that it the systems are designed for durability by being fully enclosed so as to protect its internal components from the elements.

Unlike Sungri’s systems, which rely on special heat dissipating technology, SolFocus’ cells are so small, they can be cooled passively without fans, according to this article.

The following YouTube video throws more color to the SolFocus story:

In the meantime, SolFocus is seeking capital to ramp up its production towards fulfilling its mission of achieving grid-parity (“The SolFocus mission is to enable solar energy generation at a Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE) competitive with traditional fossil fuel sources”) for CPV.

Suniva's Light-Trapping Pushes Effiiciency to Over 20%

2008-09-23T23:54:00.000-07:00

Suniva, an Atlanta-based startup, announced that is has produced high efficiency monocrystalline solar cells with a conversion efficiency of 20%, representing a significant improvement over the efficiency of 18.5% of its current line of ARTisun cells and close to the industry's leading efficiencies (23.4% by SunPower).

According to its website, Suniva has a three-prong approach to making efficient cells:

An improved set of screen-printed contacts. While screen-printing of solar cell gridlines is now a standard practice in the industry, Suniva has adjusted processing parameters and paste to improve contact performance.
An improved high sheet-resistance emitter to increase response from the blue end of the solar spectrum (where photons are more energetic) and raise the current level of the device.
An improved dielectric passivation layer to minimize recombination of electrons with holes and reflect light for a second pass through the active layer. By improving this passivation, fewer photogenerated carriers are lost at the surfaces and the power output of the cell is increased.

Translating the above bullet points into English, Technology Review ran an excellent piece discussing in greater detail how Suniva achieves higher efficiencies by "light-trapping" through the use of additional texturing on the surface of the silicon layer coupled with the addition of a reflective layer at the back of the silicon surface. This results in the ability to halve the thickness of the solar cell while achieving the same level of light absorption, which in turn allows Suniva to make do with not only a reduced amount of expensive silicon material but also with a lower quality, less pure and cheaper grade of silicon.

In a conventional solar cell, which can have a silicon layer 200 micrometers thick, impurities within the material can easily trap electrons before they reach the surface and escape to generate a current. In a layer of silicon just 100 micrometers thick, however, the electrons have a shorter distance to travel, so they're less likely to encounter an impurity before they escape.

Suniva’s website currently has stated goals of achieving 20% conversion efficiencies by, depending on which specific webpage you are on, 2010 or 2011. It seems that they have already handily outdone themselves. On the other hand, perhaps these are dates by which they hope to have 20% efficient cells fully commercialized, in which case some challenges lie ahead, according to Technology Review:

The results [of Suniva’s cells achieving 20% conversion efficiency] have been confirmed by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, in Golden, CO. But for those tests, Suniva used cells with 200-micrometer-thick silicon wafers, and reaching 8 cents a kilowatt [i.e. grid-parity] will require 100-micrometer wafers. That this is technically possible has been established. The challenge lies in acquiring large amounts of such silicon, since wafers that thin aren't commercially available, [Founder and CTO Dr. Ajeet] Rohatgi says. What's more, factories will need to be retooled to handle 100-micrometer cells, which machines designed to handle thicker wafers could break.

Suniva's approach thus seems to be dispelling the myth that high conversions efficiencies and lower production costs are necessary trade-offs. (As an aside, the silicon-based solar guys aren’t the only kids in the block trying to get wafer thickness down. Utah scientists have devised cutting edge methods to slice germanium-based wafers resulting in less waste, and thus more usable wafers and ultimately lower costs per watt.)

Suniva was spun out of Georgia Institute of Technology's Center for Excellence in Photovoltaics, a research group founded in 1992 by the university. According to Venture Beat, the company received US$50 million in a second round of financing earlier this year, and expects to achieve the holy grail of producing cells at US$1 per watt (generally agreed as the cost level corresponding to grid parity) in two to three years time. Suniva ranked #9 in GreentechMedia's list of Top Ten Startups this year.

Suniva has been wheeling and dealing quite a bit for a two-year old (and not heavily capitilized) startup. In June, it announced it would begin production on a 32 MW pilot plant (and expects to add another 100 MW over the next two years) and signed up to a US$300 million wafer supply deal with REC. Just last month, it sealed a US$500 million deal to supply Solon AG, Europe's largest solar photovoltaic module manufacturer, with high-efficiency monocrystalline solar cells through 2012. In the same month, it tappws its India connections through its founder and CTO, Dr. Ajeet Rohatgi (pictured), Suniva entered into a long-term supply contract to supply Titan Energy Systems, one of India's largest and longest-standing manufacturers of solar modules, more than US$480 million worth of high-efficiency monocrystalline silicon solar cells through 2013 to be used in Titan's highest efficiency product lines.

We'll try to keep tabs on the progress of Suniva's ongoing RD&D.

SOLION--Energy Storage Solutions for Grid-Tied PV

2008-09-03T21:42:00.000-07:00

In the U.S., much of the solar buzz over the past week has been centered around the series of blockbuster fundraising rounds for thin-film startups, namely AVA Solar ($104 million) and Nanosolar ($300 million). Xunlight also got into the action with a more modest $11 million capital injection.

However, the announcement that Saft is tying up with Conergy and Tenesol launch SOLION, a large scale energy storage deployment project to supplement residential photovoltaic systems, was a more meaningful development for me, simply because I have argued for some time that the development of effective energy storage solutions is going to be one of the keys to a solar revolution. GreenCarCongresss sums up the role of energy storage quite nicely:

The role of energy storage in an on-grid application—such as that of a residence with solar panels connected to the grid—is to store excess PV energy until it is needed. Effectively, energy storage will ‘time-shift’ PV energy produced during the day, peaking at noon, to make it available on demand. This will both maximize local consumption and enhance the efficiency of the PV system. Surplus energy can also be fed back into the grid, for which the owner of the PV system would be remunerated at a higher tariff.
Energy storage will also increase security of supply while making individual consumers less dependent on the grid and help to boost the development of energy self-sufficient houses and buildings and contribute to the continuous growth of PV as part of the global energy mix...
The main benefit of on-grid energy storage for utilities is that it will reduce the peak load on their grid while at the same time making PV a source of predictable, dispatchable power that they can call on when needed.

Critics of renewable energy and the fossil/nuclear energy establishment like to highlight the intermittent nature of renewable energy sources like wind and solar, e.g. click here. I will leave it to the words of Hermann Scheer, one of the most forceful and eloquent advocates for renewable energy, for a insightful rebuttal in his book, Energy Autonomy:

In a strongly centralized and internationalized nuclear/fossil energy supply system, this simultaneity [of production and utilization of energy] is, on principle, not possible. The storage warehouse for petroleum is the oil tanker, for coal it is the coal heap, for natural gas the major storage caverns and the gas tank, for nuclear energy the fuel rod store, and for water power (if necessary) the reservoir. Transport and distribution systems--pipelines, tanker ships and trucks--take on supplementary storage function. Or else it is the power plants themselves that operate as steam power plants, that is, they produce steam, which they must then keep holding in side the power plants as a reserve in case there is a rapid increase in production. All nuclear power plants and all large fossil power plants are of this type...

In its campaign against renewable energy, the energy business never mentions its own storage capacity, as if this were not as easily usable as a reserve for solar- and wind-based electricity...The possibility that the sun might not be shining or the wind might stop blowing just when these sources are most needed to produce electricity is presented as an insurmountable obstacle--as if, by way of contrast, extra coal or uranium could be hauled out of the mines at the very moment there is a spike in demand for coal- or nuclear-based electricity.

Saft, an established name in the battery business, will develop lithium ion battery modules, while Conergy and Tenesol will develop ancillary components. In pilot trials, 75 SOLION energy storage systems will be deployed--25 in Germany and 50 in France--in order to validate the performance of these systems.

It is innovative game-changing initiatives, such as SOLION, that can fully harness the true potential of solar power. We'll be keeping tabs on the progress of SOLION right here at the solar coaster.

NREL beats Boeing Spectrolab efficiency record; Harnessing untapped infrared

2008-08-26T22:52:00.000-07:00

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory of the U.S. Department of Energy announced that it has achieved what it claims to be a world record photovoltaic cell conversion efficiency of 40.8%.

According to NREL, its new solar cell differs significantly from those of the previous record holder, Boeing Spectrolab, which boasted an efficiency of 40.7 and was also based on an NREL design:

Instead of using a germanium wafer as the bottom junction of the device [as per a the previous design], the new design uses compositions of gallium indium phosphide and gallium indium arsenide to split the solar spectrum into three equal parts that are absorbed by each of the cell's three junctions for higher potential efficiencies. This is accomplished by growing the solar cell on a gallium arsenide wafer, flipping it over, then removing the wafer. The resulting device is extremely thin and light and represents a new class of solar cells with advantages in performance, design, operation and cost.

The following diagram, courtesy of NREL (via Semiconductor Times) depicts the improvements in NREL's new solar cell design:

It is also worth noting that this new observed efficiency mark was measured under concentrated light of 326 suns. One sun is about the amount of light that typically hits Earth on a sunny day. As a result, NREL notes that the new design is suited for "the space satellite market and for terrestrial concentrated photovoltaic arrays, which use lenses or mirrors to focus sunlight onto the solar cells."

Readers of this blog may recall that in July 2007, we reported that a group of researchers form the University of Delaware had claimed the world record for solar cell efficiency at 42.8%. In trying to reconcile these competing claims to the world record, spokespeople from both camps agree that comparing both systems is like comparing apples to oranges. Greentech Media details the reasons why.

Tapping into Infrared

In other research, scientists have developed new semiconductor materials that can tap into the previously unharnessed infrared spectrum of light in order to boost theoretical efficiencies to 63%.

Conventional semiconductors are silicon based and are only able to absorb light from the visible spectrum. Researchers led by Perla Wahnón at the Institute for Solar Energy at the Polytechnic University, and José Conesa at the Institute of Catalysis of the Spanish Higher Scientific Research Council, both in Madrid, Spain, have added titanium and vanadium in order to alter the electronic properties of semiconducting material to boost its theoretical conversion efficiency from 40%. The researchers emphasized that real-world conversion efficiencies would be less than these theoretical efficiencies.

The MIT Solar Revolution

2008-08-12T00:12:00.000-07:00

Watch out Silicon Valley! The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is steadily making a name for itself as the solar R&D hub

America

(and thus the world). In noticing one solar news story after another emerging from the venerable university, I decided to provide a summary of MIT’s recent solar activities in one single post.

Announced this April, the Solar Revolution Project at MIT is research program funded by a $10 million gift by the Chesonis Family Foundation. The Project “will focus on three elements—capture, conversion and storage—that will ultimately make solar power a viable, near-term energy source.”

Here at the solar coaster, we previously discussed an MIT spin-off company called 1366 Technologies, which recently won a solar startup competition. But that is just one of several innovations to have gushed out of the MIT solar R&D pipeline. Let's take a look at a few other solar research and business developments emerging from the venerable Cambridge-based research university:

Energy Storage

MIT researchers have developed a new water-splitting (electrolysis) catalyst that is easily prepared from earth-abundant materials (cobalt and phosphorous) and that for the first time, potentially operates in benign conditions, i.e. pH neutral water at room temperature and 1 atm pressure. This finding has massive implications for the development of fuel cells as effective energy storage devices and hence address the intermittency problem that solar power faces. Green Tech blog reports that the Masdar City in Abu Dhabi could be a testing ground for the technology.

Separately, A123 Systems, an MIT spin-off and maker of lithium ion batteries for application to electric vehicles, electric grids (with implications for solar and wind) and consumer electronics have filed a registration statement for a $175 million initial public offering on Nasdaq.

Solar Concentrator

Covalent Solar, an MIT spin-off, has unveiled a new solar concentrating technology, which consists of organic dyes painted onto glass or plastic that effectively absorb and re-emit light that so that they are then trapped inside and travels within the plane of the glass/plastic and channeled to the edges where it is capture by strips of PV cells. Some light passes through the concentrator, and is absorbed by lower voltage solar cells underneath. Because such an arrangement does not require tracking or cooling features, it is more cost effective compared to other solar concentrating technologies such as those from Sungri, SolFocus or Energy Innovations. According to this video, early tests have demonstrated that use of Covalent’s technology can yield a 20% boost in performance, but the company is hopeful that this will increase to 40 – 50% with further tweaks. GreentechMedia identifies certain technical challenges that the Covalent team will have to address, such as the relatively short lifespan of the organic dyes

Solar Thermal Dish

Another MIT spin-off company, RawSolar, has developed a 10 kW solar thermal dish which the company claims it can produce more cheaply than its competitors “because it will use simple, standard materials and components, which can be ordered from local distributors anywhere in the U.S.,” according to Earth2Tech. The dish can concentrate sunlight1,000 times onto an aluminum tube emerging from the center of the dish, thereby heating water held in the tube to produce steam power.

According to RawSolar’s website, its “patented design flexes flat mirror into precisely the right shape without any special tooling or skilled labor, achieving incredibly high performance, long lifetime, and at a very low cost.” Citing the technology’s inventor, David Wood, MIT News reports that the modest scale of the dishes work to their advantage:

Unlike many technologies where economies of scale dictate large sizes, a smaller dish requires so much less support structure that it ends up costing only a third as much, for a given collecting area.

Solar Cooling

Promethean Power Systems, yet another MIT spin-off company, boasts an energy efficient hybrid solar powered thermoelectric refrigerator. The company claims their products, suited for rural off-gird or partially electrified area, can provide cooling at an operating cost that is 66% lower than that of conventional units. The company’s vision is to “develop a complete, stand-alone rural refrigeration system that stimulates businesses, reduces dependency on fossil fuels and increases the quality of life in emerging markets by enabling its users to reliably store food, vaccines and other perishable items.” Green Tech blog provides an excellent write-up.

First Solar Goes Big

2008-08-08T20:15:00.000-07:00

Recall how we previously discussed that utilities are the stakeholders that should be driving the solar revolution in order to get the

U.S.

to the dream of “10% solar by 2025.” But First Solar, the Google of solar and the world’s leading thin-film manufacturer is beating the utilities at their own game by going into the utilities business as well. Last month, it announced that it had inked a twenty year purchase power agreement with Southern California Edison to build and maintain a 7.5 MW (expandable to 21 MW) thin-film power plant in Blythe, California. When completed, it would be the largest PV power plant in the Golden State. According to some sleuthing by the Green Wombat, the plant site spans some 120 acres.

Very shortly after, First Solar announced another 10 MW PV power plant project in Boulder City, Nevada for Sempra Generation, the San Diego-based natural gas production company. The PV plant will be built across 80 acres of land adjacent to an existing Sempra natural gas power plant, presenting a unique energy supply proposition in a solar-natural gas hybrid system whereby the natural gas plant supplies the base-load and the thin-film PV system provides the peak load. Such hybrid systems may be the way of the future as they reflect the understanding of the true value proposition of solar today—i.e, solar has already achieved grid parity in many geographic areas during peak demand periods and serve as an effective complement to base-load power supply.

Unlike the case with Southern California Edison, Sempra will actually take over ownership and maintenance of the power plant once construction is completed. However, these two deals are indication of First Solar’s ambitions to vertically integrate its operations, moving from PV module manufacturing to the actual delivery of solar generated power.

As far as utility-scale solar power plants are concerned, thin-film PV, because of their relative conversion inefficiencies, require far more land area than solar thermal systems or non-thin-film PV, and lack the molten-salt storage technologies that some solar thermal systems have. On the other hand, there are no moving parts in a thin-film solar power plant so maintenance demands are reduced and much less water is consumed compared to solar thermal systems that rely on conventional steam turbines to generate electricity (a key consideration in water-scarce desert areas where solar power plants are typically located). And of course, as long as polysilicon supply remains constrained and thin-film conversion efficiencies continue to improve, thin-film PV will continue to gain market share against crystalline-based PV. First Solar is not the first thin-film company to announce plans to build PV power plants; OptiSolar previously announced plans to build a massive 550 MW plant.

One utility that is heeding the call to go solar is Florida Power & Light, which has engaged SunPower to build two PV power plants totaling 35 MW in Florida.

Related:
- First Solar announces blow out Q2 financial results.
- Thin-film to grab 28% solar market share by 2012, projects Lux Research.

Solar Prius; GT Solar to List; Country Briefs

2008-07-09T08:13:00.000-07:00

The Toyota Prius is going solar. Sort of. It is reported that electricity from Kyocera solar panels attached to a models of the famed hybrid car to be released next year would make up a portion of the 2 to 5 kilowatts needed to run parts such as air conditioning. It won't power the cars for 5 to 8 miles or reduce gas mileage by 17 to 29% as this white paper by Solar Electric Vehicles, a seller of solar electrical systems for cars, would lead us to believe (hat tip to Earth2Tech). Its really more a “symbolic gesture” than anything else.

But this prototype car from Taiwan (again, h/t to Earth2Tech) is totally solar-powered and capable of running at 70 kmh.

Speaking of autos and solar, General Motors will be the beneficiary of the world's largest rooftop solar installation (12 MW) on its assembly plant in Zaragoza, Spain, courtesy of thin film flexible solar laminates from United Solar Olvonic, a subsidiary of Energy Conversion Devices.

GT Solar to List

Solar manufacturing equipment company GT Solar has set its IPO terms. It will sell 30.3 million shares at a price range of $15.50 to $17.50 and trade on Nasdaq under the ticker “SOLR.” Interestingly, none of the IPO proceeds are going to be used as working capital; they are all being paid out as distributions to existing shareholders. Infer from this fact what you will about GT Solar’s future ambitions, or better yet, check out their IPO prospectus.

Around the World

Japan is contemplating reviving subsidies for solar installation which were discontinued in 2005. Solar is one of eight pillar strategies in India's climate change action plan. It is short on details but does set some numerical targets, such as the establishment of 1,000 MW of concentrating solar power (CSP) by 2017 and the production of 1,000 MW per year of photovoltaics by 2017. Spain, on the other hand, is contemplating reducing their feed-in tariffs for solar after Germany reduced theirs last month, but by not as much as the solar industry feared.

I am getting more and more reports of solar activities in Korea. With its industrial experience in semiconductors and electronics, I’m betting big things for the Korean solar industry. the solar coaster first mentioned Korea last month. Today, The Korea Times reports that familiar names Samsung, LG, and Hyundai Heavy Industries are all getting active in the solar game, building solar production lines. KCC, South Korea's largest manufacturer of construction materials, will reportedly invest KRW 3.9 trillion (USD 3.8bn) to expand polysilicon production capacity through 2020.

National Semi Conjures Some Magic

2008-07-08T09:21:00.001-07:00

National Semiconductor is the latest semiconductor company to enter the solar industry. It has done so in tantalizing fashion, teasing the industry with vague descriptions of a potentially game-changing product that can dramatically improve systems-level performances of solar installations.

The company announced the development of its proprietary SolarMagic technology, which it says on its website “recoups up to 50 percent of the lost energy, dramatically improving the economics in shaded and other real-world conditions.” SolarMagic optimizes solar panel performance particularly in instances of shade or blockage by debris. The company did not specify what form the technology would take other than that it is a “per panel electronic solution” and that is is “compatible with today's solar architectures regardless of the underlying solar cell technology.”

The very general product description is vaguely reminiscent of Enphase’s per-panel micro-inverters, which, coupled with their proprietary monitoring software, is able to maximize performance of a whole solar system by circumventing the “weakest link phenomenon.” Said National Semi on its website:

Today's systems are limited by the weakest link, and one or two compromised panels can take down the entire string or array. This is somewhat similar to a section of Christmas lights that go out when one light fails. However, with SolarMagic technology, if one panel in a solar installation is shaded, dirty, or otherwise compromised, that panel is allowed to produce what little energy it can while the other panels continue to operate at their full potential.

According to Greentech Media, the device is expected to add 10% to the cost of each panel. Expected to be available commercially in the first quarter of 2009, SolarMagic is currently undergoing pilot tests by California-based solar installer REgrid Power, Inc. According to REgrid Power, the SolarMagic technology has yielded performance improvements of up to 44% in shaded conditions and 12% overall versus systems running without SolarMagic.

the solar coaster is spellbound, and will keep tabs on further product announcements concerning SolarMagic.

Fed-Up with Solar

2008-07-05T03:47:00.000-07:00

The U.S. Bureau of Land Management did an about turn on its decision to suspend new solar project application in the desert lands it manages. This is good news for proponents of a joint paper by Clean Edge and Co-op America, which projects the US to obtain 10% of electricity through solar by 2025 if it gets its policies right.

BLM Reverses Moratorium on New Solar Project Applications

In May, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), a U.S. fedeal agency, announced that it would temporarily suspend the receipt of new applications (but would continue to review the 125 applications already received) for solar projects on the 258 acres of federal lands it manages over 12 states (predominantly in solar irradiance-rich western states) for two years while a programmatic environmental impact study (PEIS) would be carried out. The New York Times ran a story covering industry reaction to BLM’s decision only last week, apparently sparking off a flurry of backlash resulting in a dramatic reversal of the moratorium on solar applications on Wednesday (July 2). As are result, the BLM will continue to accept new applications for solar projects, in addition to reviewing the 125 existing applications, while also carrying out the PEIS.

The reasons for the moratorium in the first place are worth a look. At least one blog as posited that the unspoken reason for the suspension was to give breathing space for the understaffed BLM to process applications currently in their docket. However, the official reason for the suspension—the conduct of a PEIS—deserves further scrutiny. As the feds point out, the law, specifically the National Environmental Policy Act, requires agencies to conduct environmental impact studies on “major federal actions with the potential for significant impact on the quality of the human environment.”

What sort of environmental impacts might large scale solar projects pose? The first thing to recognize is that the lands in question encapsulate fragile desert ecosystems that serve as habitat to a unique diversity of flora and fauna. The environmental impacts of solar projects can be categorized as land disturbance/land use, visual disturbance, hazardous materials, water impact, and others. Click here for more detailed explanations. I have no sympathy for those who charge that solar projects spoil the aesthetic of the beautiful Mojave Desert. It sounds all too Kennedy vs. Cape Wind to me. If you can’t build solar plants on a freakin’ desert, where the hell can you build them? But the concerns of water impact are worth an extra mention. I for one was recently caught off guard to learn from a 2006 government report that certain solar tower and solar trough technologies consume comparable amounts of water to coal and nuclear plants. I need not state the obvious—water is not exactly abundant in deserts. Ooops, I just did.

Indeed, the BLM has previously conducted a PEIS for wind projects on federal lands, and recently published for public comment a Draft PEIS on geothermal energy development. So although the proposed PEIS on solar development may stoke fears of this being yet another case of environmentalists blocking green power, it is consistent with BLM’s past actions and with federal law. I also agree with Green Wombat on the value of having BLM conduct a ecosystem-wide PEIS when he says:

...developing a desert-wide environmental policy is absolutely essential for huge power plants that in total would cover hundreds of square miles of a fragile landscape home to protected wildlife and rare plants. Otherwise, watch each individual project get bogged down in endless environmental challenges.

U.S. Can Achieve 10% Solar Generation by 2025

Still, BLM’s reversal is good news to the proponents of "Utility Solar Assessment (USA) Study: Reaching Ten Percent Solar by 2025," a joint report by Clean Edge and Co-op America that projects that the US can obtain 10% of its electricity from solar power by 2025 if technologists, utilities and policy makers adopt its prescription. Desert solar power is an important component to achieving this goal, and BLM’s reversal only serves to bolster the chances of making this goal reality. I’ll leave it to other blogs to provide you the executive-executive summary of the joint report, but I will highlight two things that stood out for me in reading it.

First, the central premise of the report is that it is the utilities, more than any other stakeholders, which have to drive the solar bus. Promoting distributed power generation in the form of solar panels represents a paradigm shift for delivering power; utilities can’t wrap their minds around how to manage such a dispersed system as they are used to managing centralized coal, natural gas or nuclear facilities. This report is rather refreshing to me as it means that the very institutions that have resisted solar in the past should now come to terms with the new realities that leave them with little alternative but to champion it. These realities, the report points out, include:

Rising coal and natural gas costs in the wake of supply scarcity and soon, US carbon regulation
The cost-competitiveness of solar power with peak fossil fuel electricity generation
The growing number of states that have enacted Renewable Portfolio Standards, and some even with solar power set-asides.
The declining costs of solar power due to technological improvements and growing economies-of-scale (18% decline with each doubling of capacity).
The emergence of new players such as SolarCity who have introduced innovative financing models that spare end-users the upfront costs of owning solar panel installations and making it more attractive to switch to off-grid power options like solar, thus posing a threat to traditional utilities market share.
The growth of utility-scale concentrating solar power projects, predominantly in the southwestern desert regions in which the BLM has just relit up the neon “OPEN” sign, still offers a familiar centralized model of energy distribution for utilities to take comfort in.

Indeed, some leading investor-owned utilities have already heeded solar’s siren call. North Carolina’s Duke Energy is one. Since the solar coaster last reported on Duke’s PPA to purchase electricity from Sun Edison’s proposed 16 MW solar PV plant, Duke has announced plans to install distributed PV systems across 850 sites in the Tar Heel State at the cost of $100 million, yielding 16 MW of power, enough to serve 2,600 homes. Duke Energy will own and operate these PV systems and sell the resulting power to its customers. Florida-based FPL has accelerated its own solar investments, with 110 MW of solar capacity in Florida, the self-dubbed “Sunshine State”, pending approvals.

Second, the report mentioned certain game-changing trends that could really accelerate solar adoption which the solar coaster has not dwelled into too much detail to date—smart grid technologies, plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEV) and all-electric vehicles (EV). With smart meters, utilities can introduce “real time” electricity pricing and allow consumers to fully appreciate the true value of solar power during peak generation periods. Intelligent grid interconnections can also better facilitate net metering—i.e. allowing PV users to sell electricity back to the grid during periods of excess generation, thus bringing a better return on investment for the PV users.

Energy storage has been considered the “Holy Grail” of renewable energy development as it addresses the issue of intermittency of such sources. It just so happens that the quest to find on-grid energy storage solutions dovetails really well with the quest to build green cars, specifically PHEV/EV. PHEV/EV is where the world of electricity meets the world of auto fuels. The development of PHEV/EV represents additional demands on the electricity grid, but they also represent an additional source of electricity, in the form of storage! Says the report:

Since vehicles typically aren’t’ in use more than 90 percent of the time, they could provide the perfect “vehicle” for storing electricity (in their battery packs), then sell this energy back to the grid at times when it is most needed, such as evening hours after commuters return home. Vehicles’ power might come from rooftop solar carports at work, from residential solar PV systems, or from centralized PV or CSP power plants.

Sounds great time me but one point is worth checking—I was led to believe that the premise of PHEV/EV was that they would be plugged-in in the evenings so as to relieve pressure on an already over-taxed grid. Under this scenario, the feeding-in of electricity by vehicles would not occur at night, when solar systems are not operating. This perhaps suggests that for the co-benefits of solar and PHEV/EV to be fully realized, careful whole-systems planning between both realms of clean energy development is needed.

Solar's Journey to the West

2008-07-02T06:13:00.000-07:00

This post was originally published on The Green Leap Forward on Jun 17, 2008.

I attended the inaugural Western China Photovoltaic Industry & New Energ y Development Forum which was held in the city of Chengdu, Sichuan province earlier this month (June 5-7).

A full transcript in Chinese of the proceedings is available here.

A recurring theme was the need to develop China’s domestic PV market. Although China is among the largest producers of solar photovoltaic (PV) cells in the world, over 90% of such PV cells are exported, leading Shi Dinghuan (石定寰), causing the Chairman of the Chinese Renewable Energy Industries Association (CREIA) to lament that China ships out its clean energy only to leave pollution (i.e. coal fired power generation) behind.　At the end of last year, just 80 MW of solar PV was installed in China compared to almost 6,000 MW of wind energy. But more on this paradox later. Let's first see how Chengdu (成都）and Shuangliu (双流) in Sichuan province are seeking to leapfrog Jiangsu province and Baoding (in Hebei province) as the solar PV manufacturing hubs of China.

Sichuan: the Solar Gateway to the West

Sichuan is pushing solar as its next pillar industry. The governments of Chengdu and Shuangliu have established the Chengdu/Shuangliu Photovoltaic Industrial Park. The goal is to turn the region into a “Western Solar Valley” (“西部光谷”) and achieve RMB 100 billion in annual output. On the first day of the conference, some 17 agreements amounting to RMB 14.5 billion in investments into the Solar Valley were penned.

China has abundant solar resources, with solar irradiation comparable to areas of corresponding latitudes in the US, and comparing favorably over areas of corresponding latitudes in Japan and Europe (click here for Greenpeace’s China Solar PV Report 2007). Tibet, in particular, boasts the best solar irradiance of all of China, in part due to its elevated altitudes which greatly reduces irradiance diffusion. The development of a vibrant solar industry in the western regions is also consistent with the national “Go West” policy of developing China’s interior western and remote regions that have traditionally lagged behind the coastal economies. Incidentally, it is these very western remote regions that are homes to a significant portion of the estimated 15 million people in 2006 with no access to electricity. Distributed energy solutions such as solar PV, among others, can be the most cost-effective sources of power in these regions. But as alluded to earlier, these regions are not where the PV panels are being deployed.

In terms of solar PV manufacturing, Sichuan, and Chengdu/Shuagnliu in particular, boasts certain strategic advantages, such as favorable investment policies, an abundance of hydroelectric power and affordable electric power in general, and the availability of skilled labor from surrounding universities. It also a relatively well developed logistics supply chain given the pioneering work of the aviation industry which Chengdu/Shuangliu has up to now built its economic base around. But take a read at this post for a devil’s advocate point of view on shifting supply chains to the western regions.

Some anchor companies at the industrial park include Tianwei New Energy Resources and Apollo Solar, both of which are taking vertically integrated approaches in developing their operations in Sichuan. Tianwei New Energy Resources Southwest Industry Park, a subsidiary of Tianwei Group, will channel some RMB 3 billion into building solar production facilities with a capacity of producing 200 MW of silicon ingots, 50 MW of solar modules and 100 MW of solar cells and a solar research center.

Another recurring theme of the conference was thin-film PV technologies. The solar industry as a whole has hitherto been anchored on silicon based technologies. The recent explosion of solar demand, however, has cause a short to medium term bottle neck on silicon feedstock supplies, providing a boon to so-called “thin-film” technologies which use little to no silicon. Apollo Solar is striving to be the foremost vertically integrated thin-film PV module manufacturer. The competitive advantage of Apollo is that it has mining rights to certain quarries such as Dashuigou (大水沟) and Majiagou (马家沟) within Sichuan province that gives them access key precious metals such as telluride, bismuth, indium, selenium and others that go into making thin-film modules. Some conference attendees told me that the rumor on the market is that it is Apollo which is providing First Solar, the world’s biggest think-film manufacturer based in Arizona, U.S., with its supply of these precious metals. A factory visit to Apollo’s plant revealed metals processing infrastructure and a think film module manufacturing line in place, but nary an employee in sight. Reportedly, operations are to commence this October.

Quantity AND Quality

Anthony Chia, Vice President of Quality Control at Trina Solar based in Changzhou, Jiangsu province, said at the conference that the way to set Chinese module manufacturers apart from the competition is through quality. Until recently, Chinese modules have suffered from an image problem of having lower quality. Although that has quelled somewhat with established Chinese brands such as Trina and Suntech Power gaining increased global market shares, Chia envisions a world market where it is Chinese, rather European or North American institutions that set quality certification standards. In a very real sense, China’s PV module industry is vulnerable to the whims of these quality certification bodies (or if one might dare read into it, protectionist measures to protect local PV industries). For example in Europe, it currently takes three to six months for newly developed module to be approved for sale by one of these quality certification bodies in the European market, explained Chia. Even minor amendments to certification criteria may threaten to extend the approval process to up to a year. The essence of Chia’s message is this: If China is going to be the world’s leading producer of PV modules, does it not also make sense for it to be the standard setter for quality certification? (I suppose critics might gripe against a potential conflicts-of-interest.)

Domestic Solar Adoption: A Chicken and the Egg Problem?

But I come back to the key issue of developing China’s domestic solar market. There is no doubt that China will have continued success in producing homegrown companies that have mastered the process of low-cost manufacturing and dominate the global PV manufacturing market. But rather than exporting all this clean energy, the Chinese solar industry should think about how it can take steps to develop the local solar market as well.

In my few months of talking to industry professionals, I have gotten the overwhelming sense that everyone is waiting for the government to enact the right policies to spur development. In turn, I have also gotten the sense that the government is waiting for the cost of solar (which in the US costs about 20 to 30 cents per kwh compared to 5 cents for coal-fired power) to drop before it goes all out to push the solar power in the same way it is pushing wind. But the price of solar is not going to achieve these dramatic cost reductions without a scaling up of solar technology deployment, and what better market (for sheerly physical reasons) to scale up solar than in China?

Here’s a preliminary policy prescription from The Green Leap Forward:

Enact feed-in-tariffs. The National Reform and Development Commission should promulgate comprehensive feed-in tariffs which require grid companies to purchase solar power at preferential tariff rates. These tariff premiums are to be fixed, but also gradually decreased over a period of, say, 20 years. As a possible "safety valve", these fixed tariff rates can be reexamined periodically to adjust for changing market conditions. The German government, for example, recently reevaluated the feed-in tariffs for solar. The premium that the grid company paid to solar power producers should be spread across all end-users, per the Renawable Energy Law of 2006. The hesitation of Chinese policy makers in adopting feed-in tariffs is something I hope to explore a little more in future posts.
Strengthen Solar Lobby. Chinese solar companies should actively lobby the government to push ahead with solar policy reform. It is to their advantage, afterall, to develop a broader customer base. The newly established New Energy Chamber of Commerce may provide an avenue for such activities.
Financial Innovation. Think about innovative ways of providing financing for solar installations. Given the early development of consumer credit in China, it may be some time before we can think of mass solar deployment in the residential sector, so continued advances along the credit front should be encouraged. For now, we should think about how third-party financing arrangements—whereby a facility engages another institution that installs and continues to own the solar panels, but sells the solar-generated electricity to the facility owner just like a utility, thereby relieving the user of prohibitive upfront costs of installing and owning the solar panels—can positively alter cost perceptions to solar power. Such third party financing institutions should target commercial and industrial entities, perhaps with the support of provincial and municipal governments which have energy efficiency and renewable energy goals to meet.
Technical Capacity Building. Develop the necessary capacity and technical expertise for all steps of the PV value chain, but especially for downstream solar activities such as systems integration, installation, and after-sales services such as performance monitoring and system repairs and upgrades. This will require significant investments in education, but also lead to significant positive externalities such as job creation and spill-over benefits to other electrical engineering sectors.
Government Procurement. Initiate mass procurement and deployment of PV in government facilities. Not only does the central government setting a right example work in China, but it provides a necessary starting point for the scaling up of PV deployment. The central government is large enough a bureaucracy after all.
Strategically Increase R&D. Much hype is generated whenever announcements on breakthroughs in PV conversion efficiencies or silicon wafer thickness are achieved. But there are plenty of cost reductions to be gained in other parts of the solar value chain. Increasing efficiency of polysilicon production, module assembly, balance-of-systems or even installation are all avenues that R&D dollars can be channeled to increase technological (and hence cost) breakthroughs.

These merely represent my initial thoughts on how to push to PV adoption agenda in China. What are your thoughts? Please leave a comment!

Sidebar: This piece in Renewable Energy World on China's PV industry focuses on polysilicon production.

Intel; GE; IBM; Nanosolar

2008-06-30T06:28:00.000-07:00

Chipmaker Intel is the latest technology giant (after IBM and Applied Materials) to join the solar fray. It has spun-off its solar division to form an independent company called SpectraWatt that will manufacture crystalline silicon based solar cells. Neal Dikeman of CNet talks to the CEO of SpectraWatt about future prospects and the possibility vertical integration.

GE has increased its stake in PrimeStar Solar, a thin-film start-up relying on cadmium telluride technology (just like thin-film blue eyed boy, First Solar). While the use of cadmium causes some toxicity concerns, PrimteStar seeks to address these through its production policies. Separately, GE is teaming up with GAF Materials, North America's largest roofing company, to create "one-stop shopping for new roofs and solar electric systems." These are just the kind of strategic and innovative partnerships that can potentially help bring the transaction costs of installing roof-top solar systems down.

Speaking of IBM, the Big Blue continues its solar agenda by collaborating with Japanese manufacturer Tokyo Ohka Kogyo, a leading supplier of photoresists for semiconductor, flat panel display, printed wiring board and packaging, in CIGS (Copper-Indium-Gallium-Selenide)-based thin-film technologies. According to the press release, it aims to develop cells with 15% conversion efficiencies compared the to the 11 to 12% efficiencies available in the best commercially available thin-films cells today.

As if in response to IBM's announcement, NanoSolar released some truly astonishing footage of its its new "nanoparticle ink" press, a $1.65 billion 1-GW-per-year tool capable of coating 100 feet-per-minute of CIGS material that has a 14% efficiency. This is significant news for several reasons. First, most production tools in the solar indnustry have production capacities of only 10-30 MW annually. Second, solar cell efficiencies of 14% represent an improvement over what is commercially available today. Third, the company claims that 100 feet-per-minute is just a start, and that 2,000 feet-per-minute is possible! See also this piece by GreenTech Media for a the potential cost-breakthroughs that this annoucnement represents. Previously, the company also announced that it has a "fabulous" plan for serving the residential roof-top market. If all that the company claims is true, I wouldn't bet against this Google-backed startup (technically backed by Google's founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, rather than Google itself) when they IPO.

Micro-inverters…Lots of Them

2008-06-11T09:36:00.000-07:00

Enphase Energy spoke with the solar coaster about their groundbreaking micro-inverter system technology.

Many solar PV breakthroughs have been achieved by increasing solar conversion efficiencies of solar cells. One of the themes I have previously touched on in achieving grid parity solar power is the reduction of the balance of systems and installations costs. In Enphase Energy’s Micro-inverter system, launched yesterday, we might just be seeing a significant breakthrough in increasing solar system efficiency (which is really what matters, rather than just solar cell efficiency).

The Single Large or Several Small (SLOSS) debate is a well-known battle of ideas in the field of conservation biology. Enphase is seeking to prove that when in comes to solar power inverters, there is no debate, and that several small is the way to go.

An inverter is a necessary component of any solar system. It converts the direct current (DC) generated from a PV system into alternating current (AC) to make it compatible with the grid and usage of electrical appliances. Typically, a solar installation will rely on a single large inverter. With Enphase’s novel Micro-inverter System, each solar panel gets its own micro-inverter. Each micro-inverter is connected to a communications gateway that feeds solar power generation data to a monitoring data center that can be assessed by the solar user by the internet. Check out this cool video which take a closer look at the micro-inverters and how they are installed.

The Micro-inverters represent a remarkable technological advancement for a variety of reasons:

Increased energy harvest—According to Enphase’s CEO, Paul Nahi, its 1,000 or so pilot Micro-inverter systems currently deployed have experienced a 5 to 25% increase in energy harvest over traditional single inverter systems. The reason is two-fold. First, its inverters are the first to achieve 94.5% inversion efficiency. Second, and perhaps more significantly, the phenomenon where multiple solar panels arranged in series and connected to a single large inverter perform only as well as the worst performing solar panel is avoided. Because each panel now has its one micro-inverter, a poorly-performing panel (for whatever reason such as shade or damage) will not affect the efficiency of the other panels.

Increased reliability—The obvious advantage to having “several small” over “single large” is that the system is no longer vulnerable to the failure of the single large inverter. Additionally, Enphase’s Micro-inverters have a MBTF (mean time before failure) of 119 years, as compared to 15-20 years of regular large inverters. Another dimension to increased system reliability is that because each panel now has its own inverter feeding data to the monitoring center, a user is now able to, in the event of suboptimal performance, pinpoint the malfunctioning panel by acessing such data on the internet through Enphase's web-based monitoring software (see screenshot on right showing panel by panel performance data of a typical solar array) and resolve the problem more promptly.

Increased ease of installation—Enphase’s Micro-inverter system radically simplifies the installation process by eliminating installation complexities (e.g. string design, marginal designs, co-planarity, and matched modules) associated with installing a high voltage inverter. There is no need to make space for a large centralized inverter and wiring time is reduced. The result, says Nahi, is that the balance-of-systems costs can be reduced by 13 to 15% by using Enphase’s systems.

All this means is that the return on investment in a solar system is greatly enhanced in multiple ways, and none of them have to do with increasing solar cell technology. According to Nahi, not only are there life cycle savings to the Enphase Micro-inverter system, but the up-front economics of the system also compare favorably to traditional single inverter systems.

Enphase has raised $6.5 million since its inception in 2006 from investors such as Third Point Management and Applied Ventures. According to Greentech Media, Enphase is selling its products and services through installers and distributors such as AEE Solar, DC Power Systems, Focused Energy, Solar Depot and SunWize.

Balance of system and installation breakthroughs are just the kind of stories I’d like to focus more on. As this excellent article on Enphase’s corporate background observes:

In the fast-growing solar industry, most of the venture capital to date has flowed into developing newer and better photovoltaic cells, while the inverter has largely been overlooked, Nahi said. "There are all kinds of new panels coming out . . . and it's thrilling to watch," he said. "But very little investment has been made in the inverter space."

Hopefully, this new technology byEnphase and the news by Xantrex that is has received $1.9 million in orders from OptiSolar are signs of change.

Impending pSi oversupply; Masdar big on thin-film; Reprieve in Germany

2008-06-03T19:39:00.001-07:00

Polysilicon

Kyocera announced innovations in reducing thickness for multicrystalline silicon-based cells, leading to more efficient consumption of polysilicon, the raw ingredient that is currently experiencing a short-to-medium term supply bottleneck. Gunther Portfolio reports of a company called Schmid Silicon Technology that has developed an alternative process to the conventional Siemens process of polysilicon manufacturing called the UMOSI process, which supposedly has a cost structure that is 28% cheaper.

There are signs that the bottleneck will ease soon, however. Michigan-based Hemlock Semiconductor is ramping up production as its new facilities come on line and will double polysilicon production this year and will produce 46,000 tons by 2012. An affiliate of China-based PV manufacturer, Yingli Green Energy, is also exploring a move up the solar value chain to produce 3,000 tons of polysilicon annually. In fact, the Prometheus Institute warns that a worse-than-expected oversupply of polysilicon is impending.

Thin Film

I would think that an oversupply of polysilicon is good news for installers of silicon-based PV solar panels, and a less favorable proposition to thin-film PV producers, which have built their current competitive advantage on the fact that they use less polysilicon. However, the Prometheus Institute believes that advances in technology will help the thin-film industry continue to thrive as production grows from 1GW this year to 9 GW in 2012. One observer attributes this to the barriers to entry in an industry that is dominated by handful of large players like First Solar.

Another “big player” is the government of Abu Dhabi. More specifically, the government-owned Abu Dhabi Future Energy Co., as part of its Masdar Initiative and Masdar City plans, has contracted Applied Materials to build three SunFab Thin-Film lines with 210 MW of capacity. This $600 million contract is part of a $2 billion initiative to start a world class thin-film development company (see press release).

Big Solar

Some notable joint projects for utility-scale solar plants in the U.S. announced recently include eSolar and Southern California Edison’s plants totaling 245 MW in the Antelope Valley of Southern California; and Duke Energy and SunEdison’s PPA to build a 16 MW solar plant in Davidson County, North Carolina that will be the largest PV array in the country at the time of construction.

Policy

The entire solar industry heaved a collective sigh of relief when an agreement to reduce feed-in tariffs for solar power in Germany by up to 10% instead of 25-30% as urged by opposers of the subsidy was reached among German policymakers. On the China front, it is reported that the central government will soon release policies to stimulate domestic adoption of solar power. Currently, more than 90% of solar modules produces in China are exported.

Corporate and Industry Trends

German auto-parts manufacturing giant Bosch is to aquire 50.45% of PV-maker Ersol, valuing the company at just over EUR 1 billion. Greentech Media asks whether this is a fair price and notes that this could be a start of a trend of large engineering and manufacturing firms seeking to diversify their holdings as valuations for silicon-based PV producers decline as polysilicon goes into oversupply.

Meanwhile, South Korea seems to be ramping up its solar industry with reports like this and this.

And to end this post on a sunny note, solar optimist and futurist Ray Kurzweil predicts solar will be competitive with fossil fuel energy in five years.

Impending pSi oversupply; Masadar big on thin-film; Reprieve in Germany

2008-06-03T19:39:00.000-07:00

Polysilicon

There are signs that the bottleneck will ease soon, however. Michigan-based Hemlock Semiconductor is ramping up production as its new facilities come on line and will double polysilicon production this year and will produce 46,000 tons by 2012. An affiliate of China-based solar manufacturer, Yingli Green Energy, is also exploring a move up the solar value chain to produce 3,000 tons of polysilicon annually. In fact, the Prometheus Institute warns that a worse-than-expected oversupply of polysilicon is impending.

Thin Film

Another “big player” is the government of Abu Dhabi. More specifically, the government-owned Abu Dhabi Future Energy Co., as part of its Masdar Initiative, has contracted Applied Materials to build three SunFab Thin-Film lines with 210 MW of capacity. This $600 million contract is part of a $2 billion initiative to start a world class thin-film development company (see press release).

Big Solar

Policy

Corporate and Industry Trends

Meanwhile, South Korea seems to be ramping up its solar industry with reports like this and this.

And to end this post on a sunny note, solar optimist and futurist Ray Kurzwel predicts solar will be competitive with fossil fuel energy in five years.

Happy Birthday, solar coaster!!!

2008-05-23T15:22:00.000-07:00

the solar coaster turns one year old today!

Here's the birthday wish list:

For its birthday, the solar coaster wishes that over the next year, governments round the world adopt progressive policies promoting solar power and other renewables, such as feed-in tariffs and net metering, and increase allocation of public funding to basic R&D in the renewables sector.

At the same time, the solar coaster also wishes that research labs and solar companies the globe over continue to make headway in reducing the cost of solar, not just by improving solar conversion efficiencies but also by reducing costs in balance-of-systems, in addition to non-technological (i.e. installation, financing, interconnection, etc.) aspects.

Finally, the solar coaster hopes that solar energy is further able to contribute to the poverty alleviation causes in the developing world, but delivering energy to remote rural areas not connected to electricity grids.

the solar coaster has been proud to bring solar news and analysis for the past twelve months, and looks forward to another twelve and many more ahead!

SunPower and IBM Claim Higher Efficiencies; DuPont Enters Thin Film Market

2008-05-22T06:23:00.000-07:00

SunPower Reaches 23.4% Cell Efficiency
SunPower Corporation announced that it has produced a full-scale, five-inch prototype solar cell with an efficiency of 23.4%. This is a world-record for a large area solar cell according to the company.

IBM Also Claims Major Boost in Solar Cell Efficiency...
IBM has managed to squeeze 230W of power on to a centimeter square of solar panel using concentrator photovoltaics. The energy was then converted to 70W of usable electric power, the best power efficiency yet achieved, the company claims.

...and Replants Chip-Cooling Tech in Solar Farms
IBM has developed technology that will let solar cells withstand the heat of more than a 1,000 suns...representatives from IBM Research's photovoltaics research will present a method for cooling concentrating photovoltaics, a solar design where light is magnified onto high-performance solar cells.

DuPoint to Enter Thin Film Amorphous Silicon Market
DuPont (NYSE: DD) announced that it will soon begin construction on a research center in Hong Kong and a manufacturing facility in Shenzhen to support the rapidly growing photovoltaic (PV) solar energy industry

India May Set Up Solar Energy Commission
The Centre proposes to set up a Solar Energy Commission, with equal participation from the private sector. It is to tap the solar energy potential for meeting the future energy needs of the country.The initial investment for the project will be around $ 10 billion.

Barriers to Solar Energy's Blockbuster Promise
Green Tech Blog reflects on what is holding back the solar explosion in California.

Fun Solar Tech of the Month: Solar Lilypads!

HelioVolt's new thin-film recors; BrightSource lights up with more funding

2008-05-14T09:57:00.000-07:00

Austin, Texas-based solar startup HelioVolt announced that it has reached 12.2 percent efficiency with its copper indium gallium selenide (or CIGS) solar cells, which are ideal for built-in PV applications. This is getting ever so closer to the 15 to 20% range of most crystalline based PV efficiencies.

HelioVolt's "secret weapon" is its manufacturing process, dubbed FASST™. According to the company's website, FASST™ is "the fastest and most cost-effective technology for printing thin-film CIGS on the market today[,]10 to 100 times faster than current processes."

Elsewhere, solar thermal company BrightSource Energy has shored up an additional $115 million in Series C financing. Investors included Google.org, VantagePoint Venture Partners, BP Alternative Energy, Statoil Hydro Venture, and Cargill subsidiary Black River. Existing investors DBL Investors, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, and Chevron Technology Ventures also participated.

BrightSource's "distributed power tower" technology uses an array of mirrors or lenses known as "heliostats" that concentrate sunlight onto a liquid housed in a "solar boiler." The heated liquid in turn makes steam that turns an electricity turbine. For more on BrightSource's technology, go here. As a testament to BrightSource's technology, California utility Pacific Gas and Electric Company recently signed a contract with BrightSource for up to 900 megawatts (MW) of solar thermal power.

Polysilicon Shortage --> Think Film + mSi

2008-05-05T22:19:00.001-07:00

With polysilicon shortages extending at least through the rest of the year, it is not surprising that we are thin film technologies continue to buzz. Another alternative has emerged--metallurgical silicon. But a little more on that later.

Some analysts forecasts explosive growth of 70% CAGR in the thin film sector from 2007 through 2010. Indeed, not only did thin film behemoth First Solar report record earnings last week, we have also seen a flurry of thin film deal announcements:

Oerlikon Solar and Chinese company Baoding Tianwei sign a deal for a turnkey thin-film PV module production line in Bao Ding, China.
China Nuvo establishes a pilot copper indium gallium selenium thin film plant in Chengdu, China.
Peng Xiaogend, the CEO of LDK So lar is starting his own separate thin film venture.
Xunlight announces it has received $22 million in investments. Although its thin film technology is, unlike most thin film technologies, silicon-based, it has plans to commercialize cadmium telluride-based thinn film.
Vertically-integrated OptiSolar received $38.3 million in funding earlier this year.
Sencera raises $3.6 million to build a 1MW PV manufacturing platform.
Suniva raised $50 million and recently made it to the Greentech Media's Top Ten list.
Sunovia, a cadmium-telluride specialist, raised $12 million and some say this is the company that may give First Solar a run for its money.

A European engineer at the 6th Solar Silicon Conference in Munich, Germany, April 1-3, 2008 says it best:

People have laughed about thin film, now they don't laugh anymore, and in two to three years you will see First Solar as biggest thin film producer going through the roof. Imagine the decline in silicon usage with thin film.

Metallurgical Silicon
Rather than discard silicon altogether, some companies are replacing polysilcion with metallurgical grade silicon (mSi). Q-cells, among the word's top solar module manufacturers, is taking a step in that direction by using mSi , almost exclusively at an upcoming 160 MW Line VII of its 300 MW solar cell facility in Malaysia. The mSi will be supplied by Becancour Silicon, a division of Timminco.

Metallurgical-grade Silicon

According to this article,

Metallurgical-grade silicon is vastly cheaper to produce and ramp than polysilicon. Granted, the purity levels are lower and efficiencies suffer, but development work at Becancour Silicon has shown that impurity levels have been reduced dramatically in only a few years, especially in relation to boron, carbon and oxygen levels.

Besides Timminco, this piece on Seeking Alpha highlights other companies, such as Dow Corning, Elkem Solar and Global Speciality Metals, that are also getting into the mSi game.

Just how what kind of efficiencies do mSi-based solar panels have? I can't say for sure yet; my canvass of abstracts of scientific articles on the web suggest anywhere between the 8 to 10% range (which is comparable to thin film cells in real-life, i.e. non-lab, conditions), but I have not been able to confirm if these are in lab or real-life conditions. I hope to uncover more insight for you in future posts.

SUNRGI and the Promise of 5 cents/kwh Solar Power

2008-05-04T07:03:00.000-07:00

Utility-scale solar power continues to make the news. The U.S. Department of Energy has announced a US$60 million, five-year R&D grant package for the development of concentrated solar power. In the past few weeks, the likes of SkyFuel, eSolar, Infinia and Stirling Energy Systems have all received some high profile financing. Earth2Tech also has two great articles--one on the 11 leading players in solar thermal seeking to operate in the southwest USA, and another on 8 obstacles facing the industry.

But amidst the solar storm of news, one potentially game-changing company caught my attention--SUNRGI, a Reno, Nevada company that says it is 12 to 15 months away from commercializing large scale solar power at 5 cents per Kwh, which make it easily competitive with coal.

So game-changing, in fact, that Sunrgi has created its own category of technology that it dubs Xtreme Concentrated Photovoltaics (XCPV). As the name implies, it combines the best of both concentrated solar power technology and photovoltaics, a technology combination shared by the likes of SolFocus and Energy Innovations. The likes of eSolar, Infinia and Sterling Systems are solar thermal systems and do not have the PV component, but instead rely on the concentrated heat to heat a liquid that is then used to heat water to run conventional electricity steam turbines.

Here's how SUNRGI claims it can achieve the goals that that Google shares:

1. The XCPV system can concentrate sunlight more than 1,600 times its normal intensity. According to Greentech Media, this is almost twice what Energy Innovations is able to achieve (823 times), and more than three times what Soliant can achive (500 times).

2. This extreme concentration reduces the amount of costly solar cell material needed to generate any given amount of electricity.

3. It boasts a PV efficiency of 37.5% (compared to about 20% of the top-performing PV cells without concentration, or 7 to 9% of most thin-film technologies). The company website suggests it is using PV technology developed from Boeing's spectrolab, and another blog source suggests that it is a triple-junction PV cell.

4. Its proprietary COOLMOVE heat transport technology swiftly prevents this undesirable heat buildup to that the PV cells are actually kept cooler than their nominal operating temperature, thus extending their useful life.

5. The XCPV system tracks the sun as it moves across the sky from sunrise to sunset. The company claims that in any given day, its tracking system "will capture and convert 175% more sunlight than a fixed system at the same advertised peak power rating."

Furthermore, the XCPV system touts its modular design as key feature that allows for distribution over multiple sub-stations over suitable pieces of land, and its upgradeability, which allows for its systems to take advantage of advances in technology (although few details are provided as to how upgrading of XCPV modules actually work).

If SUNRGI is truly able to deliver this product in the next year or so that it promises to, the solar industry will blow past the cautiously optimistic expectations that this Platts article has for the industry.

I’ve Got One Hand in My Pocket and the Other is Holding a Solar Panel

2008-04-24T10:46:00.001-07:00

This post is published simultaneously in The Green Leap Forward.

Ecopowered Solutions (EPS), a Beijing and Colorado based startup, aims to bring pocket-sized solar cell batteries, especially to the remote areas of the developing world. EPS’ product, dubbed the SunCell, is a portable solar chargeable battery device that can recharge a whole host of consumer electronics including mobile phones, mp3 players, digital cameras and bluetooth devices (but not laptops as laptops charge at a much higher voltage than SunCell’s maximum voltage setting of 9 volts).

Measuring 5.1 by 3.4 by 0.9 inches and weigh just half a pound (225 kg), SunCell consists of 1.5 watts of monocrystalline photovoltaic panels coupled with an internal lithium ion battery. The SunCell requires 8 to 12 hours of direct sunlight to be fully recharged and when fully charged can typically recharge mobile phone batteries of average capacities three complete times before the SunCell itself requires a recharge.

One of the drivers of growing electricity demand worldwide is the proliferation of portable consumer electronics. A report by In-Sat forecasts the market of portable consumer electronic devices to grow from 2.7 billion units in 2007 to 3.1 billion in 2011. Harnessing solar power to power these portable devices addresses two major issues–first, it relieves electricity demand from an already overstrained electricity grid. Second, it allows users in remote areas without access to grid-based electricity (read, people in much of the developing world) to recharge their mobile phones.

Indeed, besides being a clean tech company, EPS has a social mission to bring clean solar power to the developing world. Kip Stringfellow, the founder and CEO of EPS sat down with The Green Leap Forward to talk about his business, his product and his vision.

GLF: How did the idea for creating a portable solar powered battery charger come about?

KS: Basically, when I first started I felt that there is a lot of potential out there for products that can be really useful and also utilize renewable energy. People are starting to care more and more about renewable energy and everyone always seems to be running out of power for their various electronic devices like cell phones, cameras, and mp3 players. I though a solar powered battery charger would really be a unique product to fill this demand and solar products also allow me to focus on another area I’m really passionate about, international development. There are billions of people in the world without access to electricity and by providing a power source, a whole new range of opportunities become available. Lighting systems, cell phone use in off grid locations, and many other applications open up once you have a reusable power source. I’m trying to find as many ways as possible to get my products into the hands of people that could really use them to change their lives by donation programs I am setting up and also through partnerships I am trying to form to distribute the SunCell in developing countries.

GLF: There are other competing products now in the market. How does the SunCell distinguish itself from other solar powered batter chargers?

KS: There are two main differences between the SunCell and other solar chargers. The SunCell features an internal lithium-ion battery that has over twice the battery capacity of many of the other solar chargers on the market. This means that you don’t have to recharge it as frequently and you can have more power available for when you need it the most. Also, the SunCell has a built-in LED flashlight that comes in handy at night. It can run nonstop for about 6 days so you always have backup light source if you need one.

GLF: What is the biggest market for SunCell currently, and where else are you seeking to expand?

KS: Right now our largest market is in the US but we are actively trying to expand into Europe and other locations around the world. We have received a lot of interest so we are working hard to set up partnerships in different countries in order to distribute and sell as many SunCells as possible. It’s a win-win situation because by expanding sales we do better as a company but we also provide more and more people with a portable power source charged from renewable solar energy.

We are also really trying to expand our donation program by working with international education and health organizations that focus on communities with no access to an electricity grid. So far, donated SunCells have been sent to Haiti, Malawi, Rwanda, Lesotho, and Panama.

GLF: And what about China?

KS: China is an enormous market and like many countries in the world, it is obviously a place where renewable energy is definitely needed. We are working on trying to get a sales program going in China even though this currently presents more challenges than operating a business in the US.

GLF: How is the SunCell priced? How does this compare to competing products in the market?

KS: The SunCell currently retails for about $120 in the US. I believe the SunCell is well priced because of its advantages over other solar chargers. Some other solar chargers in the market are cheaper and others are more expensive. From all the competition I have seen though, I believe the SunCell is definitely the best value and it has better capabilities than some other products that are more expensive.

We also have special pricing for countries where we feel the full $120 retail value will prohibit people from being able to buy the SunCell. I am really focused on trying to get as many SunCells out there as possible so in developing countries, a lower retail price may be the only way for the SunCell to make a real impact. We also have special prices for NGOs and other international organizations that want to purchase the SunCell to distribute them in developing countries.

GLF: Tell us a little more of the donation program.

KS: EPS’ mission is to promote the use of alternative energy technologies and also to provide a vehicle for donating SunCells to people and organizations that can utilize the device to dramatically improve the quality of life in the communities where they are used. There is a link on our website that accepts donations that we pool together, and then we use the donated money to send SunCells and other products to programs in developing countries at cost. Currently, we are donating all SunCells to Partners in Health, one of the largest and most effective international health organizations. SunCells are currently being used by Partners in Health in many of the countries it has operations in such as Haiti and Malawi. They are used by the communities they work in to power cell phones in remote areas and they can be used as lighting systems for people that have no access to electricity.

GLF: It would seem that the needs of the customer in say a mature developed market like the US full of affluent eletronic gadget collectors would differ from that of low-income villagers in Kenya. The practical use of SunCells in developing countries with no grid electricity is pretty obvious. But how do you sell these to urbanites in well developed cities?

KS: You are right, we are really trying to address very different markets in very different countries. The SunCell clearly has a more vital use in places with no grid system but its versatility makes it a great product for those urbanites you mentioned in developed countries. The SunCell, at its core, is a portable battery that has the additional functionality of being able to recharge itself from the Sun. Its internal battery can be recharged with a power adapter that is included with the SunCell so it can be used as just a portable battery. So for urbanites it may be easier to recharge the SunCell from the wall, but with its solar panels the SunCell still provides a lot of value as an emergency power source and can also be extremely useful if those urbanites head out for a camping trip or spend some time off grid.

GLF: And I suppose there is also a symbolic value…

KS: Absolutely! EcoPowered Solutions is trying to combine two areas of focus into one. We are trying to promote clean, renewable solar energy and also improve the quality of life for people with no access to electricity. Solar power is currently one of the best and most effective ways for people in developing countries to have access to electricity and it’s just as easy for people to use in developed countries. All you have to do is put the SunCell in sunlight and everything else takes care of itself! We are really trying to provide simple, cost effective power solutions that anyone on the planet can use and enjoy. The idea is about everyone being able to have access to electricity no matter where they are or where they live.

Solar beats in India

2008-04-19T23:35:00.000-07:00

I've hinted before that India is an emerging solar hub. In the estimation of leading venture capitalist, Vinod Khosla, the concentration of engineering talent emerging from India is poised to help India grow into a serious clean tech player. I've noticed quite a bit of solar business action this month on the Indian front, so I thought it would be worth compiling some these stories here:

Orb Energy, a provider of solar energy systems in India, a received a prestigious award for US$1 million from the U.S. State Department in support of the goals of the Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate.

Moser Baer India Limited, a global technology company, recently announced that its subsidiary, Moser Baer Photo Voltaic Limited has signed an agreement with China-based LDK Solar for sale and delivery of high quality multicrystalline silicon wafers to MBPV over a ten-year period commencing in mid-2008 through 2017.

Clear Skies Solar, Inc. (OTCBB: CSKH.OB) announced a $20 million agreement, subject to financing, with Power Cube, a company located in Utter Pradesh, India to develop and construct the first of several solar energy projects in India.

Spire Corporation (Nasdaq: SPIR), a global solar company providing turnkey solar factories and capital equipment to manufacture photovoltaic modules worldwide, will provide Alpex Exports Pvt. Ltd. a photovoltaic module assembly line for that company's operations in New Delhi, India.

6N Silicon and the search for more polysilicon

2008-04-18T00:41:00.000-07:00

As promised last post, we'll talk a little more about the silicon supply situation today. Over the past year, we've seen the stock price of listed solar module companies rise with each announcement of a long term polysilicon supply contract. The explosion of the solar industry has created an unprecedented demand for polysilicon, the raw ingredient to crystalline-based photovoltaic solar cells.

Until recently, polysilicon supply was adequately met by the scrap silicon from the semiconductor industry. But such supplies were very soon outstripped by the demands imposed by the solar boom, which bring us to where we are now. We are seeing similar kinds bottlenecks in other alternative energy sectors--the wind industry is experiencing a parts shortage, while the nuclear industry (which by my book is NOT part of the clean energy industry) is also facing a shortage of reactor parts.

There are inefficiencies in relying on semiconductor grade silicon for making crystalline solar panels. Semiconductor grade silicon is 99.999999% pure (nine 9's), whereas solar grade silicon requires a slightly lower purity of 99.9999% (six 9's). Till recently, very few plants specialize is making polysilicon specially for the solar market. Moreover, as discussed previously, the rush to meet polysilicon demand has brought about some environmentally adverse practices. But some companies, like Canadian-based 6N Silicon Inc. (what's in a name? 6N = six 9's of the purity solar grade silicon), are taking novel approaches to address the silicon problem.

6N is located in the greater Toronto area, considered the heart of Canada's metal processing industry. It is also led by its founder Scott Nichol and CEO, Paolo Maccario, both with extensive experience in the metallurgical industry. It is no wonder that 6N's approach applies metal processing techniques to silicon production. The following Q&A taken from 6N's FAQ on its website summarizes its approach:

4. What makes 6N Silicon different?

We take the most basic form of commercially available, impure silicon known as metallurgical grade silicon, and then we apply metal processing techniques to refine it into a very pure form. We utilize equipment that is commonly used in other metal processing industries. This is dramatically different from the current standard vapor deposition process and its high energy requirements.

5. What are 6N Silicon's competitive advantages?

Our primary competitive advantages are related to speed and cost. We are distinguished by dramatically lower capital equipment costs, very low production costs, rapid expansion capability, and our wide flexibility in location. Our process has a much smaller footprint and very low environmental impact. These strengths allow us to utilize conventional warehouse-type facilities rather than highly specialized industrial plants.

6N just received a second-round $20 million investment led by Good Energies, one of the top investors in the clean tech space.

So just how long can we expect the silicon shortage to persist? Some expect the polysilicon shortage to ease in 2009, while a report by Frost & Sullivan indicates that the polysilicon supply will open up this year. Elsewhere, a move by Trina Solar, a Chinese PV manufacturer, to cancel its plans to build its own polysilicon factory left industry observers speculating if such move should be construed as the company's belief that the end of the polysilicon shortage is closer in sight (or if it is merely a reflection of Trina's internal situation).

For additional insights into the silicon situation in China today, click here, here and here.

Germany and the High Price of FITness

2008-04-14T08:39:00.000-07:00

This interesting article in The Economist on Germany's renewable energy laws talks about how successful Germany's feed-in tariff scheme has been in catapulting Germany's solar industry, and how it has the ironic effect of increasing the price of solar and channeling investments away from possibly more effective renewable energy technologies, causing some backlash amongst politicians who seek to scale back on some of the cross-subsidies afforded to solar.

The feed-in tariff essentially works like this: utilities are required to purchase power form renewable energy sources at a fixed higher-than-market rate that decreases gradually in fixed amounts over a 20 year period. Such fixed rates provides certainty to investors to calculate their returns. The utilities are permitted to pass on the extra costs of purchasing renewable power to its customers by "smearing" such extra costs across the the price of all electricity generated--renewable or not. Because of the relatively small percentage of renewable power compared to overall electricity generation (some 6.7% in Germany for 2006), such a cross-subsidy added a mere 3 euros per month, to the typical German household power bill.

But as the article points out, the feed-in tariff has been so successful that it has had unintended effects:

Cheerleaders for solar had hoped that the increased demand for panels would help manufacturers reduce unit costs, and thus make solar more competitive in the long run. Instead, the rush into solar has led to a shortage of the high-grade silicon used to make the cells, which has soared in price from $25 per kilogram in 2003 to around $400 today. Indeed, such is the demand for solar panels in Germany that it has kept prices high globally. This is wonderful for manufacturers, but makes it more expensive to install solar capacity in sunnier parts of the world, where it would generate more electricity...A euro in cross-subsidies spent on wind power, rather than solar, produces more generating capacity and a larger reduction in carbon emissions.

In my view, we have to keep the longer term view of the silicon shortage in perspective. New capacity for polysilicon will come online within the next two years, and that, hopefully will ease the bottleneck. My next post will delve a little more into the silicon situation.

SolarCity to Bring 3P-Financing to the Mass Market

2008-04-07T21:46:00.000-07:00

When asked the question of what stands in the way of solar power adoption, I've often answered that among the barriers is the lack of innovative financing techniques to make the installation of solar panels affordable for the homeowner.

SolarCity, in collaboration with Morgan Stanley, is answering the call to bring such innovative financing to the mass market through its SolarLease program, under which homeowners need only to put $2,000 down, and subsequently pay a fixed monthly fee (not a rate) for a fixed amount of solar power. In other words, SolarCity will arrange for the installation of the solar panels, continue to own such panels, but lease it to the homeowner for the provision of clean solar energy. More importantly, it significantly reduces the upfront costs of purchasing an entire home solar system.

Makes a lot of sense. Afterall, which homeowner really wants to fork out $25,000 for an entire solar system (more than 10 times the upfront fee for the SolarLease program) and physically own those solar panels? Its the power that these panels generate that the homeowner is interested in. SunCity, as the owner of the solar panels, will take advantage of commercial solar tax credits (which are higher than residential solar tax credits) and pass the savings down to the customer. According to the SolarLease webpage, the monthly fixed fee that SolarCity charges would be less than what a homeowner would expect to pay from its utility.

As this article from Greentech Media points out, SolarCity is not the first company to introduce "third-party financing" (or 3P-finaning) to the solar world. The likes of Tioga Energy, MMA Renewable Ventures and SunEdison have been doing it for a while for larger commercial projects. But SolarCity maybe among the first, if not the first, to provide 3P-financing directly to homeowners.

CSP Heats Up

2008-04-05T00:43:00.000-07:00

There has been a beehive of activity on the concentrated solar power (CSP, aka big solar) front over the past week. Lets start with a comprehensive 145 page report on CSP by the Prometheus Institute and Greentech Media. The executive summary accompanies this press release. The report provides an excellent overview on the state of the various kinds of CSP technologies, the current market conditions, and Here are some key findings of the report, as presented in the press release:

CSP clearly has a role to play over the next decade. With the current plants, those in construction, those under consideration, and the pace of development, it is clear that some tens of GW of cumulative production over the next decade - possibly as much as 50 GW - of CSP capacity will be installed by 2020.
PV will remain dominant in the distributed market. That said, flat plate PV for distributed applications and some fixed or single-axis tracking systems for central systems will remain economically competitive. Unless CSP technologies can match those of PV, the distributed market will be tough for CSP technology to penetrate.
Centralized generation market up for grabs. While each of the technologies has core markets that they best serve, it is where these markets overlap that is most interesting for evaluating competition for solar technologies.

The report indicates that it will be at least another decade before centralized CSP achieves "grid parity," and that in the meantime, distributed PV will continue to be dominant. So why the flurry of investment activity in CSP recently (see list of some recent deals below)? One explanation for all the utility-scale CSP deal making of late is the adoption of Renewable Portfolio Standards throughout the increasing majority of states in the U.S., that require utilities to distribute a certain minimum percentage of their power from renewable energy sources.

Reported utility-scale CSP projects reported over the last week:

Brightsource and PG&E sign a 900MW solar thermal deal.
Florida-based FPL to build a $1 billion, 250MW solar power plant in the California Mojave Desert.
Israeli-based Solel to build a 140 million manufacturing facility in southern Spain.

NREL and Mitsubishi boast new efficiency records

2008-04-03T05:03:00.000-07:00

Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) have achieved conversion efficiency world record for a CIGS (copper indium gallium diselenide) thin-film solar cell of 19.9 percent in testing at a lab. This compares favorably to a conversion efficiency in certain multi-crystalline solar cells of 20.3 percent, providing an important milestone for the coming-of-age of the newer technologies of thin-film vis-a-vis silicon based solar cells. According to NREL, the record was achieved by improvements in the quality of the material applied during the manufacturing process, boosting the power output from the cell.

Meanwhile, Mitsubishi Electric Corporation claims it has set a new world record with a photoelectric conversion efficiency rate of 18.6 percent in a 150-millimeter square practical use multi-crystalline silicon solar cell, an improvement of 0.6 percent over the company's previous record. The company claims it achieved the new record by (1) adding a low reflectivity surface texture on the multi-crystalline silicon wafer, (2) optimizing the p-n junction to increase electric current generation and (3) developing a process to print electrodes on the surface of the silicon (metallization) to reduce shade loss of front grid electrodes. Such technological adaptations contribute to higher efficiency in small installations such as narrow roofs.

The Road to Grid Parity may be through Route 1366

2008-03-27T04:26:00.000-07:00

1366 Technologies (what's in a name?), a spin-off company of MIT, has received $12.4 million in seed money. The company is co-founded by Ely Sachs, the father of the string ribbon solar manufacturing process that has been the hallmark of Evergreen Solar.

1366 aims to be bring the costs of solar power down to $1 a watt (the price which many agree will make solar competitive with fossil fuel energy) by employing its light ribbon technology. The beauty of the technology is that it does so not by tinkering with the solar wafer itself, but but replacing the interconnect wire between solar panels with a grooved light-capturing ribbon strip, which as the schematic below illustrates, reflects incoming light back onto the surface of the solar cell.Apart from the light ribbon technology, 1366 is also developing "new [solar]cell architecture that uses innovative, low-cost fabrication methods"that can increase the polycrystalline efficiency by 25%. According to MIT Technology Review, 1366's design includes two other key innovations in addition to its light-capture ribbons:

The first is a method for adding texture to the surface of the cells that allows the silicon to absorb more light, a trick that's been used before with single-crystalline devices but has been difficult to implement with multicrystalline silicon. The rough surface causes light to bend as it enters the cell so that when it encounters the back of the cell, it doesn't reflect right back out; rather, it bounces off at a low angle and remains inside the slab of silicon. The longer the light remains within the silicon, the greater the chance that it will be absorbed and converted into electricity.

The second innovation involves the silver wires that harvest electrical current generated by the silicon. Sachs has developed a method for making these wires as small as one-fifth the width of the wires that are typically used, while improving their conductivity. The thinner wires use less silver, which cuts down costs. Also, because the wires are thinner, they can be spaced closer together and still block less light than ordinary wires can. The closer spacing makes the wires more efficient at collecting electrical current generated in the silicon.

The company plans to build its pilot solar cell manufacturing facility in Lexington, Massachusetts. .

AES and Riverstone also go Big on Solar

2008-03-26T02:36:00.001-07:00

Yet another wealth fund and energy company are pairing up to build utility-scale solar power plants. A hint of deja vu (see earlier post on the Torresol joint-venture)? Global diversified energy giant and Virginia-based AES and New York private equity firm Riverstone, an affiliate of the Carlyle Group are forming a joint venture in the name of AES Solar. AES and Riverstone will each "provide up to $500 million of capital over five years to invest in PV solar projects around the world, ranging from fewer than two to more than 50 megawatts in size."

In my view, this is a significant announcement. What sets this venture apart from the Torresol venture is that AES and Carlyle are both powerhouses in their respective industries of energy (although much has been made of AES' sustainability push, they have traditionally been, and still are, very much vested in fossil fuels) and private equity and very much represent the status quo. As this Washington Post article notes, this investment represents AES's first venture into solar. For the two giants to come together and make a billion dollar bet on big solar is a major validation on the outlook of the role utility-scale solar will play in our global energy mix.

Torresol: The New Kid on the CSP Block

2008-03-19T21:42:00.000-07:00

Credit to the Green Wombat for first covering this company, and for the graphic below.

Torresol Energy, a 60-40 joint venture between Masdar, Abu Dhabi's $15 billion renewable energy initiative, and Sener, a Spanish engineering company, aims to build a series of utility-scale power plants using concentrated solar power (CSP) technologies, starting with projects in Spain and Abu Dhabi.

Torresol aims to build two solar plants a year in order to reach 320 MW in total capacity by 2010, and 1,000 MW by 2018. Their target geographic areas consist of Southern Europe (especially Spain), Northern Africa, the Middle East and eventually, southeastern USA, constituting a de facto "global sunbelt". I for one would be thrilled if the likes of China and other Asian markets are eventually included.

I'd like to take a closer look at Torresol’s technologies:

The prototypical Torresol solar plant structure consists of multiple rows of heliostats circling a central receiving tower filled with molten salt. The heliostats consist of parabolic troughs that pivot around an axis to track the changing position of the sun through the day. The heliostats concentrate and reflect the sunlight onto the central receiving tower filled with molten salt, which acts as an energy storage conduit. Though the technology was conceived in the 1970s, the company claims to be the first company in the world to apply this molten salt energy storage technology in a commercial plant.

According to the Sandia National Laboratory National Solar Thermal Test Facility, the molten salt, also known as saltpeter, is a mixture of 60% sodium nitrate and 40% potassium-nitrate. Sodium has a high heat capacity and hence, saltpeter serves as an effective medium to store the solar power in the form of heat. Heated saltpeter is channeled into insulated storage tanks where they can be released into a conventional steam-generating system to boil water to generate steam to cycle through turbines to produce electricity.

The upshot of thermal storage is that the ability of the solar plant is no longer subject to the intermittency of solar irradiation—surplus solar energy collected on the sunny days can be stored in the molten salt for discharge on cloudy days or at night. According to Torresol’s website, molten salt storage allows for 15 hours of independent electricity generation without sun irradiation, resulting in electricity production during 6,500 hours a year, 2.5 to 3 times more than other renewable energies such as wind or photovoltaic energy.

More Singapore solar milestones

2008-03-14T01:38:00.000-07:00

A few more solar milestones for Singapore's burgeoning solar industry have been achieved (see previous posts on Singapore's solar scene here and here):

Norwegian solar wafer manufacturer, NorSun, is the latest major solar company to announce plans to set up shop in Singapore. Norsun plans to build a US$300 million mono-crystalline solar wafer manufacturing facility, which will be NorSun's largest production centre in the world. The facility is expected to produce at least 120 million mono-crystalline wafers every year and will account for 60% of NorSun's global output, making it its biggest facility. The first phase of the new plant in Singapore is scheduled to be completed in the third quarter of 2010 and is expected to require 300 new hires.

The Norsun news comes close on the heels of last month's announcement that a National Research Institute on Solar Energy. More importantly, Singapore lured world renown solar expert Professor Joachim Luther, former director of the renown Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems - Europe's largest solar energy R&D institute - to head NRISE for an initial two-year tenure. This research and educational component is an important ingredient in the solar ecology that the tiny island-city hopes to build up.

The Dark Side of Solar

2008-03-12T09:55:00.000-07:00

As if to rebut my last blog post on the positive environmental performance of PV generated electricity vis-a-vis fossil fuel derived power, the Washing Post has run an excellent expose on the collateral damage of polysilicon (a raw ingredient to crystalline-based PV solar cells) production in China. Silicon tetrachloride, a highly toxic byproduct of polysilicon processing, is being dumped by Chinese polysilicon factories into the soil rather than being reprocessed, so as to cut investment costs and time.

The result? The global solar boom in the likes of Germany and the US is creating a toxic legacy of silicon tetrachloride dumping by Chinese polysilicon factories.

Ironic and depressing. Kinda like this story in the New York Times about glycerol dumping by biofuel plant operators, or this piece in an old blog I used to maintain on tropical rainforest deforestation in Indonesia for the sake of planting oil palm for biodiesel.

All this means that we'll soon be needing certification systems for the audit of the supply chain of our clean energy.

Life-Cycle Assessment results in thumbs up for solar!

2008-03-09T01:24:00.000-08:00

A new study that measures the life-cycle greenhouse-gas, pollutant and heavy metal emissions of four types of photovoltaic (PV) technologies--multicrystalline silicon, monocrystalline silicon, ribbon silicon, and thin-film cadmium telluride (CdTe)--reveals certain findings that are predictable and others that are surprising.

Simplified process-flow diagrams from mining to system manufacturing stages, namely
cradle-to-gate for (a) mono-, ribbon-, and multi-Si PVs, and (b) thinfilm CdTe PVs. Source: Study

Predictably, the authors of the study concluded that "all PV technologies generate far less life-cycle air emissions per GWh than conventional fossil-fuel-based electricity generation technologies." Despite concerns that the manufacture process of PV panels may be energy intensive, PV technologies harness a clean and ubiquitous source of energy, whereas fossil-fuel or nuclear generate electricity requires capital-intensive (i.e. energy and emissions intensive) plant infrastructure and significant transportation of fuel from its source to the location it is used.

The authors go on to say that at least 89% of emissions can be reduced if electricty from "central PV systems" replaces those from the grid, and that even more emissions can be reduces with decentralized PV systems due to the reduction in energy loss as the need for electricity transmission is reduced.

In an article in Scientific American reviewing this same study, it is suggested that if solar power can be used to start powering the production of PV cells--a so-called "PV breeder cycle"--then the emissions reductions will be even more dramatic.

Among the four PV technologies, CdTe came out tops, against conventional concerns of the toxicity of cadmium (cadmium in its metallic form is a toxic substance that has the tendency to accumulate in ecological food chains). CdTe thin-film PV technologies outperforms silicon-based PV technologies because less energy is required in the manufacture of the former (indeed, the purification of solar-grade silicon is a energy-intensive process), resulting in lower emissions of GHG, criteria pollutants and heavy metals.

More:
Click here if you are interested in other comparative life-cycle studies of PV technologies. by the Columbia University Center for Life Cycle Analysis.

The "Foolish" State of the Industry

2008-02-07T06:18:00.000-08:00

Here at the Solar Coaster, my policy has largely been to generate original content or at least original takes on the latest policy, business and technology solar developments available on the web. But every now and then, I get tempted to reproduce articles wholesale, and today is another example. The following is investor website, Motley Fool's industry survey on the state of solar today:

Innovation Series: Solar Energy, by Toby Shute, February 6, 2008

Over the next several years, industry analysts peg the growth of the solar market at around 50% per annum. In a market moving that fast, it's develop or die. Because of the pace of change, it's hard to imagine a more perfect match for the Fool's series on innovative business sectors.

To do justice to developments in the solar area, I'll break my overview into three parts. We'll begin with standard photovoltaics (PVs), before getting into the more exotic thin-film and concentrated solar stories.

Standard PV under the microscope
For a sense of where innovations in standard solar modules have and will come from, it's important to get a handle on the industry's economics and the stages of the production process.

Each management team in the space has its favorite cost metric, which invariably casts the company as the most competitive coal-slayer of the near future. First Solar (NYSE: FSLR) claims the industry's lowest manufacturing cost per watt. SunPower (Nasdaq: SPWR) focuses on minimizing the cost of an installed system. I'm not completely sold on either metric, but both point to the industry's motivating force: making solar power as cheap as possible. It bears repeating that solar's Holy Grail is "grid parity," or achieving costs per kilowatt-hour on par with fossil fuel-derived electricity.

There are as many opinions on how to achieve low costs as there are solar companies, but the many stages of the production process open multiple avenues for innovation. In the beginning, there is metallurgical silicon, supplied by Hemlock Semiconductor -- of which Corning (NYSE: GLW) is part-owner -- and others. That silicon is then gasified, refined, solidified, melted, crystallized, sliced, doped, coated, fitted with electrical contacts, tested, framed, and sealed. I'm sure I missed a few steps, but that gets us close to a solar panel.

With so many steps involved, leading companies have naturally found tons of ways to cut costs. REC Group uses a closed-loop process that eliminates feed gas inputs and slashes waste by-products. Q-Cells has automated its entire production process. SunPower uses monocrystalline rather than multicrystalline cells to achieve higher efficiency across the same surface area.

Fundamentally disruptive fare captures most of the venture capital dollars these days, but there are still major innovations occurring in the traditional silicon realm. To name but one, REC's fluidized bed reactor technology is poised to slash the company's polysilicon deposition costs. This would further REC's goal of slashing its 2005 per-watt module production cost nearly 50% by 2010, akin to SunPower's aim of halving its installed system cost by 2012, and a good reminder that the more traditional players aren't going down without a fight.

Thin-film throwdown
In the near-term, thin-film technology excites folks because it eschews polysilicon, which is really scarce these days. But there's a more disruptive element that makes me think thin-film might eventually dominate the solar market.

First Solar, which uses cadmium telluride, is the biggest and best-known thin-film player, but there is a veritable cornucopia of startups waiting in the wings.

CSG Solar is eschewing wafers by depositing a thin layer of amorphous silicon directly onto glass; Ascent Solar (Nasdaq: ASTI) and Miasole are attempting to commercialize thin-film solar solutions based on copper-indium-gallium-diselenide (CIGS).

Perhaps most promising, though, is Nanosolar, a company that prints CIGS nano-ink onto highly conductive foil. The company counts the Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) founders among its early investors, it's officially commercial (although their limited production run is sold out for 2008), and the panels are reportedly selling for less than $1 per watt.

Some people dismiss thin-film because of its lower efficiency. The panels are cheaper and less powerful than standard PVs, which sounds exactly like the sort of disruptive technology outlined by Motley Fool CAPS mentor Clayton Christensen in his work on innovation. This is why I can't shake the idea of these panels' eventual dominance.

Let's concentrate here, people
Another contender is arguably the hottest technology around. The terminology, yet to be standardized, is known alternately as concentrator, concentrated, or concentrating photovoltaics (CPV).

These systems use the most efficient cells there are -- the ones developed for satellite applications by EMCORE (Nasdaq: EMKR) and Boeing's (NYSE: BA) Spectrolab. When focused with low-cost lenses, the sun's rays can be magnified hundreds of times, resulting in industry-leading efficiency, and the amount of active semiconductor material is inversely related to the degree of magnification. Naturally, the super-efficient cells are super-expensive, but they're a tiny piece of the overall package.

A traditional problem has been offsetting the heat that results from this intense concentration (I told you this technology was hot). Both SolFocus and Concentrix, two leading start-ups in this field, indicate that heat sinking should not be a major issue.

But just as with the thin-film entrants, it would be premature to declare victory before these new technologies are battle-proven. Demonstrating efficiency in a lab is far different from decades of exposure to the elements, and it's fairly inevitable that some of these unproven applications will sputter out well in advance of their warranty.

SolFocus may actually best First Solar and SunPower's cost metrics with the more holistic concept of levelized cost of energy -- the lifetime value of energy produced divided by total costs. This means that any innovator will not only have to win in the realm of production and installation costs, but the product will have to perform at a high level for decades.

In other words, the race to grid parity is a marathon, not a sprint.

Biopolymerzing Solar in a World of High Oil Prices

2008-01-24T17:30:00.000-08:00

As autofuels go "bio", so does solar

PV's commercial potential hinges on getting PV-generated power to grid parity (i.e. ), where it hasn't already been achieved (for, e.g., in Japan, with some of the highest electricity rates, make PV power cost-effective even without subsidies). There are various ways to achieve this, including increasing subsidies for PV, reducing the costs of solar installation (see previous post), reducing the cost of producing PV panels. One company that is working on reducing the costs of PV panels, with a unique approach, is BioSolar (OTCBB: BSRC.OB), a Santa Clara, California-based company that I've previously blogged about.

Rather than focusing on increasing the efficiency of solar conversion of its cells, or streamlining the ingot manufacturing process, BioSolar is aims to replace oil-based plastic components in PV systems with bio-based components. In the current environment of sustained high oil prices, BioSolar represents a value proposition that makes a lot of sense. According to the company:

When using BioSolar materials, the cost reduction over the materials being replaced can be in excess of 50%. The current market for plastic components and layers exceeds $1 billion and growing rapidly. We estimate that the market for backsheet products alone is currently at $300 million.

Look here for more details (and cool diagrams!) on how BioSolar will introduce biopolymers into PV backsheets, thin film substrates, and other components traditionally made from plastic or glass.

BioSolar's shares trades on the U.S. OTC markets and is highly volatile (so trade with care!!), but the general trend upward of its share price in recent months reflects the anticipation of the commercialization of its products. A research report notes:

During the last three months, the Company has set the stage for the commercial launch of its products by implementing a tactical scenario to reduce the amount of time for attaining Underwriters Laboratory (UL) certification for PV modules incorporating its bioplastic backsheet material. UL certification is required to sell photovoltaic modules in the US.

Getting to Grid Parity

2008-01-06T00:44:00.000-08:00

Renewable Energy World magazine has an excellent piece on the prospects of the US solar industry reaching price parity with current sources of grid electricity (i.e. coal, natural gas and nuclear). I highly recommend everyone reading the full article, but I’d like to highlight a few points of enlightenment that struck a chord with me:

1. We need not solely rely on falling prices of PV; the rising prices of fossil/nuclear-based grid electricity can help us get to the promise land. The prices of coal, natural gas and uranium are going nowhere but up.

Source: US DOE, via REW
As the cost of PV electricity decreases, PV market penetration increases. But rising conventional grid electricity prices can also accelerate PV market penetration.

2. Real-time pricing of electricity, coupled with smart electricity meters to allow consumers to appreciate how peak period electricity (which is typically in midday, where air-conditioning use is greatest, and which coincides with peak PV production as the sun shines at its most) is in fact more expensive than PV generated electricity. Such smart metering devices are in fact already in the market. See, e.g., products byItron (Nasdaq: ITRI).

3. Developing renewable energy sources in a way that allows them to be predictable sources of electricity production, and enable utilities to integrate such renewable sources into their planning. Up to now, the stigma about renewable energy sources such as wind and PV is that they are intermittent and unreliable, and hence utilities plan their electricity production and distribution system assuming there is no wind or PV power on the system. Apart from achieving an critical mass of renewable power (i.e. the sheer quantity of renewable sources can allow planners to make conservative estimates of reliably available renewable power at any one time), the development of appropriate energy storage systems for PV and wind power systems will play an integral role in turning such renewable energy into predictable and reliable sources of power.

4. The price parity of PV must be assessed on a location-specific basis. Many variable affect the competitiveness of PV energy vis-à-vis conventional grid prices, such as the local price of electricity (which ranges from 6.15 cents/kWh in Idaho to 18.84 cents/kWh in Connecticut), degree of insolation (i.e. amount of sunshine), presence of regulatory incentives such as tax credits and renewable energy portfolio standards and net-metering, and availability of PV installers among other factors. Thus, it is simply disingenuous to assume that the answer to the question of whether PV electricity is competitive with coal or natural gas electricity. It all depends on where (and when). Indeed, in many states either with high electricity prices (typically the northeastern state) or high insolation (the southwester states), and especially at peak load periods on hot summer days, PV electricity is in fact clearly price cheaper than conventional grid energy.

China--the solar water heating capital of the world

2007-12-02T05:29:00.000-08:00

My friends at China's Green Beat did a podcast (click image on right) on solar thermal heating last month. According to the self-dubbed "Green Brothers" of China's Green Beat, China has 40 million solar water heating systems covering 90 million square meters and accounting for two-thirds of the world's market share. The Chinese government intends to more than triple such surface area to 300 million square meters by 2020. The podcast takes a closer look at the city of Rizhao (日照）(which literally means "sunshine") in the northeast province of Shandong, the producer of 15% of China's solar water heating systems. According to Worldchanging, solar water heaters are currently installed in 99% of all buildings in Rizhao’s urban area, and in more than 30% of residences in rural areas.

Often mentioned in the same breath as Rizhao is the city of Kunming in the southern province of Yunnan, as this Worldwatch Institute story describes.

Solar water heating systems in Kunming, Yunnan.
Source: Worlwatch Institute

Google's "RE less than C" Initiative

2007-11-29T00:24:00.000-08:00

Google has launched a new initiative to make renewable energy cheaper than energy derived from coal. The internet giant will invest "hundreds of millions" into solar thermal, wind and geothermal technologies and businesses, and hire its own engineers and researches for its own R&D team. Wall Street analysts who just don't know any better have quizzically scratched their heads and called into question this is a diversion at the expense of shareholder value. From a New York Times story on the initiative:

“My first reaction when I read about this was, ‘Is this a joke?’” said Jordan Rohan of RBC Capital Markets. “I’ve written off Google’s competition as a threat to Google’s long-term market share gains. But I haven’t written off Google’s own ability to stretch too far and try to do too much. Ultimately, that is the biggest risk in the Google story.”
Robert Peck of Bear Sterns agreed that “the headlines were a little scary at first” and said investors were initially worried that this was another example of Google “trying to bite off more than they can chew.”

Those of us who have followed Google's green ways know better. The company has had a fine tradition of green:

Founder's Sergey Brin and Larry Page were early investors in Nanosolar, one of the hottest Silicon Valley solar startups, and in Tesla Motors (which incidentally was named by Greentechmedia as one of the Top 10 clean tech startups of the year)
Google has developed cutting-edge energy efficiency technology to power and cool its data centers in the U.S. and around the world and joined other industry leaders to form the Climate Savers Computing Initiative, a consortium that advocates the design and use of more energy-efficient computers and servers.
Generating electricity for its Mountain View campus from a 1.6 Megawatt corporate solar panel installation, at the time the largest, and still one of the largest in the U.S.
Accelerating development and adoption of plug-in vehicles through the RechargeIT initiative. (See also previous post)
Working on policies that encourage renewable energy development and deployment, such as a U.S. Renewable Energy Standard, through Google.org, its philanthropic arm.

Bottom line, renewable energy, while admittedly not Google's core business, is a tune that the Company and its founders have been singing consistently for some time. And to those who think the internet and renewable energy have tenuous links at best, try telling that to Tom Friedman or Fat Spaniel (which also incidentally made Greentechmedia's list)

Let's cut the justifications and get down to what this blog is about--Solar. One of Google's flagship partnerships under this initiative is with eSolar, California-based company developing solar thermal technology for utility-scale deployment, which boasts ease of transportation and installment, modularity, scalability, redundancy, and resilience against wind tear.

An eSolar windfarm (source: eSolar)

India Starts to Shine

2007-11-26T00:20:00.000-08:00

China has received much attention for its emergence as a leading player in the solar industry, but its important to start paying attention to India, and specifically, the high-tech cluster of Hyderabad. The world's most famous venture capital fund, Kleiner Perkins, is targeting India for its next green tech opportunities (including solar). And 50% of the commercial space available in the new "Fab City" in Hyderabad has been taken up by solar companies (at the expense of semiconductor companies, the article explains).

Indeed, the authors of Clean Tech Revolution, a book I've highlighted previously, list Hyderabad as one of the ten emerging clean tech hubs of the world, noting that it is home to the likes of solar-power lantern maker, NEST, and seller of solar hot-water systems known as solar geysers, Photon Energy Systems.

Finally, it should be mentioned that India is also a destination for several notable rural electrification projects, as this one by the German energy company, Conergy, the Solar Electrific Light Fund (SELF), and the UNEP India Solar Loan Programme, demonstrating the usel of microfinance to achieve sustainable development.

Nov 30, 2007 follow up:

A German company thinks India has the chance to become one of the top four generators of solar energy after Germany, Japan and China.

Arup to Build Solar City

2007-11-25T05:40:00.000-08:00

Arup, the global design and engineering firm which has garnered headlines in the sustainability world in recent years for its ambitious and ground-breaking eco-city project in Dongtan (东滩）near Shanghai, China, has announced plans to build the world's first solar city in Phoenix, Arizona, USA. The solar city will consist of a 33,000-acre mixed-use development of housing for 300,000 people as well as high-tech and commercial schemes. As the article points out, it will be interesting to see how Arup deals with the efficiency limitation that the PV panels will run into with the high ambient temperatures in Arizona. This is really the paradox of PV--while conventional wisdom would suggest that the sunniest regions are ideal for the utilization of PV, there exists a trade-off as PV efficiencies decline when ambient temperatures,which are high in sunny regions, exceed a certain point.

Saving on Silicon

2007-11-15T08:26:00.000-08:00

IBM is tapping on solar's door again (see previous story about IBM's flirtations with entering the solar industry). This time, IBM has devised a way to recycle slicon from discarded semiconductor wafers for ultimate utilization in solar cells. From IBM's website:

The new wafer reclamation process produces monitor wafers from scrap product wafers - generating an overall energy savings of up to 90% because repurposing scrap means that IBM no longer has to procure the usual volume of net new wafers to meet manufacturing needs. When monitors wafers reach end of life they are sold to the solar industry. Depending on how a specific solar cell manufacturer chooses to process a batch of reclaimed wafers - they could save between 30 - 90% of the energy that they would have needed if they'd used a new silicon material source. These estimated energy savings translate into an overall reduction of the carbon footprint -- the measure of the total amount of carbon dioxide (CO₂) and other greenhouse gases emitted over the full life cycle of a product or service -- for both the Semiconductor and Solar industries.

Separately, MIT Technology Review reports that Clean Venture 21, a Kyoto, Japan-based has developed a novel way of making solar cells that cuts production costs by as much as 50 percent by reducing the amount of silicon needed. The photovoltaic (PV) cells are made up of arrays of thousands of tiny silicon spheres surrounded by hexagonal reflectors. These spheres work like car headlights but in reverse, ensuring that any light hitting the reflector is directed toward the sphere--essentially acting as mini-concentrators. The hexagonal shape of the reflectors allows them to be slotted together without dead space between them.

Source: Clean Venture 21 website

Of course, the whole basis of the thin-film solar boom is the avoidance of silicon as a raw material. This piece by Popular Science (it has a cool slide show and animation too!) talks about Silicon Valley-based Nanosolar's silicon-free thin film technology.

Singapore's Green Ambitions

2007-11-03T01:26:00.001-07:00

We were waiting for this to happen...or at least I was. Finally, an announcement that signifies that the island-state is ready to leverage its strengths as an international business center, source of highly educated and skilled labor, and perhaps a little more symbolically, a place with abundant sunshine...the Singapore government has successfully court Renewable Energy Corporation of Norway to build the world's largest solar wafer manufacturing facility with a production capacity of 1.5 gigawatts a year, or three-quarters of the world's total output last year. Singapore was reportedly chosen from over 200 possible global locations.

The announcement is part of Singapore's larger ambitions of becoming a clean tech leader, as it enacts a slew of energy efficiency initiatives described in this article. Also take a look at this government website (the Economic Development Board) outlines the country's clean tech plans. Finally, this other article in IHT discusses Singapore's joining of the second generation biofuels race.

Solar Power 2007 and Chinese Solar

2007-10-03T09:06:00.000-07:00

The Solar Power 2007 conference in Long Beach, California recently concluded. I wasn't there, but some people, like John Addison and Ed Gunther (Parts one, two, three and four).

A little bit about China...

Separately, this article discusses the China solar boom on the US stock market, observing that unlike that tech bubble, solar companies are able to ramp up production quickly, produce real products, and earn real profits. The article does a great job of summarizing the different specialties of the various U.S.-listed Chinese solar companies, however, perhaps inaccurately attributes this proliferation of Far Eastern solar enterprises to the enormity of China's environmental problems ("This [long list of U.S.-listed Chinese solar companies] is no coincidence. A mad rush to clean up the country before the Olympic games isn’t going to be enough to permanently squelch China’s pollution epidemic. If the country is going to get the problem under control it’s going to have to count on alternative energy technologies like solar power for contributions").

The fact is that the main markets of most of these Chinese companies are in the west, predominantly Europe, not its domestic market. Until the proper micro-incentives for renewable energy implementation (and proliferation) are set in place, such as solar tax credits and preferential feed-in tariffs for solar-generated electricity, then only can Beijing's macro policy aspirations (such as their proposed renewable portfolio standard of generating 20% of their energy from renewable sources) be realized. Just imagine how great these Chinese solar companies will do if and when the domestic market gets going....Throw in you life savings into these companies now!!

The Chinese should get there...I am cautiously hopeful. They have to...the costs of environmental degradation to human welfare will start to take their toll. In Hong Kong where I am currently at, I've been noticing an increasing number of newspaper articles on climate change and clean energy, and high level central government officials pledging to get tough on greenhouse gases.

Then again, as a counterpoint, I've also seen a fair number of articles in the business section about large coal companies having successful public share offerings...against a backdrop of increased incidents of mining disasters.

Will the real China please stand up?

I'm Back!

2007-09-29T20:59:00.000-07:00

I'm back! Sorry for the extended absence, but I've had to deal with a continental shift (literally and metaphorically!). I am now back in Asia, ready as ever to cover the solar beat in this important market and the rest of the world.

But first, some tidbits about the latest in large scale solar thermal (aka Big Solar) in the US. PG&E, FPL and venture-backed Ausra are all are bullish on Big Solar and getting into the game, particularly in the open desert regions of California, as this article reports. Look, too, at the Green Wombat's September '07 postings, as he covers in more details the projects that the likes of the above and others like BrightSource are looking at in California, the "Saudi Arabia of solar" and Florida, the self-billed (and increasingly fittingly so) "Sunshine State."

Here's the wiki on what solar thermal is all about.

In the meantime, U.S.-listed Chinese solar companies--LDK, Yingli and Trina--were busy striking deals and other arrangements over the past week. Its worth noting that solar plays, at least on on the NYSE and Nasdaq, have been doing particularly well over the past month.

Non Solars Going Solar

2007-08-17T21:16:00.000-07:00

Wells Fargo said it has made the largest equity investment in solar energy in the company's history -- in Nevada Solar One, a 64-megawatt Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) plant southeast of Las Vegas. The $266 million project developed by Acciona Energy is the largest solar energy facility built in the world in 16 years.

Last month, we caught wind of IBM's possible foray into PV. Now, murmurings are swirling that chip maker Intel and electronics manufacturer Samsung are seeking to expand into the solar business. Intel is reportedly looking at acquisitions in Germany, while Samsung plans to open a solar power plant in Greece by the end of the year.

Solar Boom, All Over the World

2007-08-16T16:23:00.001-07:00

A Chinese company has entered into a Sh9 billion partnership with a Kenyan firm to build the first solar panel factory in East Africa. The move is expected to reposition solar as a key source of energy in Kenya by making it more affordable to millions of consumers who depend on the national electricity grid for their energy needs. It is estimated that the Beijing Tianpu Xianxing Enterprises and Electrogen Technologies venture could see the prices of solar panels drop by up to 65 per cent. The project will be implemented through Pan African Technologies, a jointly owned company in which Beijing Tianpu has a 70 per cent interest and will raise $100 million (Sh7 billion) from internal resources. Its local partner is expected take up the remaining fraction of the financing plan in cash and kind, including $40 million (Sh2.8 billion) in cash and three acres of land along Nairobi's Mombasa Road where the factory is to be erected by a local company of Chinese origin. Construction of the facility is set to start in October for completion in March 2008. Once built, the factory will source the materials required locally and employ a minimum of 100 Chinese trained staff.

In the Czech Republic, a 2005 renewable energy law modeled after Germany's has spurred on the Czech solar industry. Last year, the country as a whole generated only 540 MWh of solar energy. Korowatt’s solar plant, which began operating in January, is expected to outdo this total on its own, with 628 MWh expected this year. Another Czech-based company, HiTecSolar, announced completion of its own “largest solar power station in Central Europe,” located in east Moravia.

Japan, already amongst the world's leaders in solar cell production and where solar adoption exist without subsidies, may need to increase reliance on solar, particularly thin-film solar, to fight its pollution woes.

In the mean time, despite turbulence in the stock markets, publicly listed solar names do not seem to be experiencing a slowdown, but are instead ramping up with expansions plans. SunPower (Nasdaq: SPWR) inked up new ingot, wafer and polysilicon deals; LDK Solar secured a three year wafer supply agreement; and China-based Canadian Solar (Nasdaq: CSIQ) set up its new U.S. head office in Phoenix, Arizona.

U.S. House Passes RPS and Extends Solar Tax Credits

2007-08-06T21:01:00.000-07:00

The U.S. House of Representatives passed a tax bill (HR 969) Saturday that would extend renewable energy tax credits and encourage energy efficiency, paying for itself by repealing $16 billion in tax breaks to oil and gas companies. The House passed the tax provisions by a vote of 221-189. Earlier it had approved, 241-172, a companion energy package (HR 969) aimed at boosting energy efficiency and expanding use of biofuels, wind power and other renewable energy sources through a federal Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS). The two bills, passed at an unusual Saturday session as lawmakers prepared to leave town for their month-long summer recess, will be merged with legislation passed by the Senate in June.

HR 2776 extends renewable energy production tax credits to 2012, costing around $6.6 billion over 10 years, and extends a 30% tax credit for solar energy and fuel cell investment for eight years to 2016, costing around $563 million.

On one of the most contentious and heavily lobbied issues, the House voted for HR 969 to require investor-owned electric utilities nationwide to generate at least 11% of their electricity from renewable energy sources such as wind or biofuels and a maximum of 4% for energy efficiency for a combined 15% RPS, or perhaps more accurately a "REPS" (Renewable energy and Efficiency Portfolio Standard). More than 20 states have similar standards in place (see the Database for State Incentives for Renewable Energy or DSIRE) or under development, but proponents say a federal standard is needed to rapidly drive increased use of renewable energy.

With the Senate version of the legislation already complete (but lacking an RPS or solar tax credit provisions), passage in the House leads to a conference committee stage in the fall and possible final passage of a reconciled bill in late October or early November.

IBM Solar: the next "Big" thing

2007-07-29T10:00:00.000-07:00

Big Blue is going Big Green. According to Neal Dikeman on Cleantechblog, all signs are pointing to IBM (NYSE: IBM) entering into the solar market in the next 18 months or so. Based on conversations with insiders and research which has uncovered (i) a number of vague references to solar research in recent press, (ii) sophisticated scientific journal articles on solar dating way back to 1978, and (iii) a string of solar-related patents filed by IBM, it looks like IBM is poised to leverage its competency in semiconductor manufacturing (reminiscent of Cypress Semiconductor's, NYSE: CY, foray into solar with its SunPower unit that was eventually spun off in the currently publicly listed SunPower Holdings, NASDAQ: SPWR) to achieve breakthroughs in PV manufacturing in advanced crystalline, thin-film/nano/CIGS technologies.

I am looking forward to it.

Israel-based Solel to build world largest solar farm

2007-07-28T20:37:00.000-07:00

Spurred by state mandates for utilities to product 20% of generated power from renewable sources, California-based Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) entered into a landmark renewable energy agreement with Solel-MSP-1 (subsidiary of Israel-based Solel Thermal Systems) to purchase renewable energy from the Mojave Solar Park, to be constructed in California’s Mojave Desert. The project will deliver 553 megawatts of solar power, the equivalent of powering 400,000 homes, to PG&E’s customers in northern and central California. The Mojave Solar Park project is now the world’s largest single solar commitment.

The plant utilizes Solel’s patented and commercially-proven solar thermal parabolic trough technology to concentrate solar energy onto solar thermal receivers that contain a fluid that is heated and circulated used to generate steam that powers a turbine to produce electricity. When fully operational in 2011, the Mojave Solar Park plant will cover up to 6,000 acres, or nine square miles in the Mojave Desert. Solel is working closely with URS Corporation in the development of the Mojave Solar Park, which when commercial will rely on 1.2 million mirrors and 317 miles of vacuum tubing to capture the desert sun’s heat.

Perhaps the most environmentally satisfying aspect of the project is that the electricity generated by Mojave Solar Park will use some of the transmission infrastructure originally built for the now dormant coal-fired Mojave Generation Station to deliver the power to PG&E’s customers.

This Red Herring article considers the PG&E-Solel agreement as a signal of the of a CSP (concentrate solar power) boom, as PG&E seeks to make other utility-scale solar farm deals with the likes of BrightSource Energy, Green Volts and Cleantech America (here's an interesting expose on Cleantech America and the ambitions of this 2-year-old startup to capitalize on the solar farm boom).

Elsewhere, PG&E is also making aggressive moves in wind and wave energy, reports the Green Wombat.

New Efficiency Record of 42.8% Achieved

2007-07-24T10:38:00.000-07:00

A Univeristy of Delware(UD)-led consortium has achieved a record-breaking combined solar cell efficiency of 42.8% from sunlight at standard terrestrial conditions, eclipsing the previous record of 40.7% set last December by Boeing's Spectrolab. In November 2005, the UD-led consortium received approximately $13 million in funding for the initial phases of the DARPA Very High Efficiency Solar Cell (VHESC) program to develop affordable portable solar cell battery chargers. As a result of the consortium's technical performance, DARPA is initiating the next phase of the program by funding the newly formed DuPont-University of Delaware VHESC Consortium to transition the lab-scale work to an engineering and manufacturing prototype model. This three-year effort could be worth as much as $100 million, including industry cost-share. According to the article in the first link above:

The consortium's goal is to create solar cells that operate at 50 percent in production, Barnett said. With the fresh funding and cooperative efforts of the DuPont-UD consortium, he said it is expected new high efficiency solar cells could be in production by 2010.
The highly efficient VHESC solar cell uses a novel lateral optical concentrating system that splits solar light into three different energy bins of high, medium and low, and directs them onto cells of various light sensitive materials to cover the solar spectrum. The system delivers variable concentrations to the different solar cell elements. The concentrator is stationary with a wide acceptance angle optical system that captures large amounts of light and eliminates the need for complicated tracking devices.
The VHESC would have immediate application in the high-technology military, which increasingly relies upon a variety of electronics for individual soldiers and the equipment that supports them. As well, it is hoped the solar cells will have a large number of commercial applications.

Separately, a US-Korea team announced an efficiency record for organic solar cells at 6.5%.

Who's side is the government (and private equity) on???

2007-07-16T17:57:00.000-07:00

Andrew Revkin of the New York times had a big splash on the promises and perils (with emphasis on the latter) of relying on solar as a solution to our global energy pickle. The problem cited is of the often heard, "broken record"variety--that solar technology is too expensive for mass market. If you had to point fingers, you would think that the U.S. government (underinvesting in renewable R&D and oversubsidizing fossil/nuclear energy) is in bed with the fossil/nuclear lobby:

In the current fiscal year, the Energy Department plans to spend $159 million on solar research and development. It will spend nearly double, $303 million, on nuclear energy research and development, and nearly triple, $427 million, on coal, as well as $167 million on other fossil fuel research and development...“Coal and nuclear count their lobbying budgets in the tens of millions,” said Rhone Resch, president of the Solar Energy Industries Association. “We count ours in the tens of thousands.”

The New York times also had interesting side bars on solar thermal and storage of solar power.

A rural solar initiative in the Phillipines faces the challenges of the high costs of solar panels and realted maintenance.

A little more good news to ease the pain of the global polysilicon (feed stock of conventional silicon-based solar cells) shortage--Wacker Chemie (talk about a wonder stock!), one of the world's leading producers of polysilicon, is planning to build a new granular solar polysilicon site in Burghausen, Germany.

In terms of state policies, solar power prosptects are looking sunny in Arizona (read also Vote Solar's analysis on Arizona) and Oregon (50% solar tax credit).

Finally, some recent venture capital transactions: SoloPower (thin filim CIGS) raises $30 million; MWOE Solar (thin film amorphous silicon) raises $7 million; Solaire Direct (French designer and installer) raised €6.1 million and Heliatek (organic solar cells) raises €3.2 million. But this article warns that private equity money directed to solar is drying up due to slow development of certain startups, slow shift towards higher solar conversion efficiencies, the threat of China entrants producing cheap yet high quality solar cells, and the continued expansion and increasing market share of the public solar companies (e.g. BP Solar's Frederick expansion). This is substantiated by a Red Herring article describing the increased caution that venture capitalists are taking towards cleantech investments.. Are we entering a PE/VC money dry spell?

China Sunergy Announces Approval of N-type Cell Patent

2007-07-12T07:25:00.000-07:00

China Sunergy's (NASDAQ: CSUN) shares were trading up 6% within the first hour of trading this morning on the announcement that has received N-type cell patent approval from China's State Intellectual Property Office. The approval covers a period of 20 years and further solidifies China Sunergy's unique position in commercializing N-type cell on top of its existing technological capabilities. China Sunergy has also submitted a patent application to SIPO for P-type selective emitter cell technology and currently expects to get the approval in 2009.

Sunny Days in Singapore

2007-07-09T18:53:00.000-07:00

Singapore, my homeland, is entering the solar manufacturing race. Two deals for thin-film solar manufacturing facilities were announced in the past few days.

It is reported that SGX Sesdaq-listed Equation Corp Limited through its newly-acquired subsidiary Solar Morph Pte. Ltd., a Singapore-registered company will undertake the construction and operation of a thin-film amorphous silicon plant in Singapore, commencing with establishing a 20MW manufacturing line by mid-2008 and continue to expand to its full 60MW annual capacity by 2010

Separately, Germany's SolarTec AG is firming up plans to gain a presence in Singapore, including the setting up of a $100 million 45 MW thin-film solar module manufacturing plant and a listing via a reverse takeover on the Singapore Stock Exchante.

The Solar Bulls are Raging!!!

2007-07-09T17:03:00.000-07:00

Solar stocks on the U.S. markets surged across the board today.

First Solar (NASDAQ: FSLR) closed at $119.34, up an unbelievable 23.95% (after an already torrid year!--it has quadrupled since the start of the year) in the wake of announcing 5 new contracts worth $1.3 billion, its board approval of new a new Malaysian plant.

Trina Solar (NYSE: TSL) closed at $67.37, up 16.0%, on the announcement of several contracts to supply European customers with 99 MW worth of PV modules over the next 2-3 years.

JA Solar (NASDAQ: JASO) surged 14.8% to $42.76 after announcing that it has commenced production on four additional 25 MW per annum solar cell production lines in its Ningjin, Hebei, China site increasing its manufacturing capacity from 75 MW to 175 MW per annum.

The combined news created for a bullish sentiment across the solar board, lifting up other solar stocks which did not have any announcements of their own, including Yingli Green (NYSE: YGE, up 15.9%), Solarfun (NASDAQ: SOLF, up 11.4%), Hoku Scientific (NASDAQ: HOKU, up 13.7%), Canadian Solar (NASDAQ: CSIQ, up 8.9%), LDK Solar (NYSE: LDK, up 8.5%), Evergreen Solar (NASDAQ: ESLR, up 6.1%) and Suntech Power (NYSE: STP, up a "mere" 4.1%).

As a Forbes article explains, First Solar and Trina Solar's new contracts target end users in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal and Canada, among others, reflecting the continued growth of solar in these markets as the European Union and the Canadian province of Ontario enact legislation and standards to replace their fossil fuel based energy sources with renewable power.

Full Disclosure: The author owns some shares in First Solar and Suntech Power.

Polysilicon Shortage Exerts Pressure on China Sunergy

2007-07-04T21:08:00.000-07:00

Shares of China Sunergy Co., Ltd. (Nasdaq: CSUN) tumbled 19.26% or $2.69 to $11.28 in Tuesday (June 3) trading after the specialized solar cell manufacturer announced before the opening bell that it continued to experience tight polysilicon supplies in China's solar market in the second quarter ended June 30, 2007. This bring's CSUN's share price back nearly to its IPO price of $11 after hitting a peak of $16.70 shortly after it went public in May. Read this Forbes report.

Bioplastics and Quantum Dots: The Next Generation in Thin Film

2007-07-01T20:40:00.000-07:00

The world's first thin-film solar cell built with bio-based components has been developed by BioSolar, Inc, the company announced last week. The bio-plastic components developed by BioSolar replace petroleum-based plastics, that not only bear the burden of its environmental implications, but also lead to upward pressures in PV panels as the price of crude oil escalates. Previously, bio-plastics made from renewable plant sources have not been able to withstand the high temperature involved in the manufacture of PV systems. BioSolar has developed a proprietary process to produce bio-plastics that are not only able to withstand the high temperatures, but also possess all the physical and eletromaganetic characteristics of conventional petroleum-based plastics.

Also reported last week, Menlo Park-based Stion raised $15 million in Series B financing. The company is keeping its thin-film technology under wraps, but a CNET article speculates that the basis of Stion's technology lies in quantum dots--nano particles that are sensitive to physical phenomena and can be used to trap electrons.

$60 Million Solar Grant by U.S. DOE

2007-06-24T20:01:00.000-07:00

The DOE will make available nearly $60M to increase the use of solar power across the country. Secretary Bodman announced: up to $2.5 million for Solar America Cities cooperative agreements, in which thirteen selected cities will receive awards to promote increased use of solar-powered technologies throughout each city; the issuance of a Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) for up to $30 million for universities to research near-term improvements in solar products; and the competitive selection of ten cost-shared Photovoltaic (PV) Module Incubator projects that will receive up to $27 million in DOE funding over 18 months. Click here for more.

Third Party Financing Gains Traction
Morgan Stanley has gotten into the solar third party financing game. Last week, it was announced that Morgan Stanley has agreed to own and finance solar electric power systems totaling more than four megawatts that SunPower will deploy on seven Wal-Mart facilities in California. Wal-Mart will purchase electricity generated from the solar power systems from Morgan Stanley through a long term purchase power agreement. Click here for more.

The Red Herring reports that San Francisco-based solar-energy services company Recurrent Energy received $10 million in a first round of funding from venture capitalists. Like Tioga Energy (see previous post), Recurrent installs, owns, and operates the solar power systems for property owners and sells the solar-generated electricity through a PPA.

...and So Does Thin Film
New Jersey-based Energy Photovoltaics, a manufacturer of amorphous silicon thin-film solar modules has raised $77.5 million in its Series B financing.

According to this story, GE's foray into the thin-film market has it purchasing thin film products from two California-based companies, DayStar Technologies and Miasole, both specialists of CIGS thin-film technology.

SANYO Electric Achieves 22% Solar Cell Efficiency in the Laboratory

2007-06-19T18:40:00.000-07:00

A smattering of solar news...

Solarbuzz reports that SANYO Electric has broken its own record for what the company says is the world’s highest energy conversion efficiency in practical sized (100 cm2 or more) crystalline silicon-type solar cells, by achieving an efficiency of 22% at the research level for its proprietary HIT solar photovoltaic cells. The previous highest efficiency had been 21.8%.

Action on Capital Hill: The Gavel reports that the House Committee on Science and Technology’s Subcommittee on Energy and Environment today explored means to advance solar energy research and technologies. The Subcommittee addressed the topic in the context of pending “The Solar Energy Research and Advancement Act of 2007” bill, authored by Subcommittee Vice-Chair Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ), which will soon be introduced to establish several important research, education and training programs to facilitate the adoption of such technologies.

A number of financing deals were announced:

Advent Solar (adopter of "emitter-wrap-through" technology) raises $70 million in Series D financing;
Silicon Valley Solar (manufacturer of cells with internal concentrator technology to amplifies the effect of the sun) raised $10.2 million for its acquisition of NuEdison;
Deli Solar (USA), Inc. (OTC BB: DLSL.OB) (seller of hot water and space heating devices in China) raised $2.75 million in Series A financing.
Engine manufacturer Infinia announced it has raised $9.5 million in venture funding to develop solar-based, non-combustible stirling engines.

In other news, San Francisco is set to launch a solar mapping web portal, using Google Maps as a visual platform, that estimates solar energy potential for commercial/residential structures in San Francisco, and allows building owners to visualize the potential environmental benefits and monetary savings resulting from installing solar energy panels on their property. Click here for the San Francisco Solar Map!

Google and Ascent

2007-06-18T20:35:00.000-07:00

It was reported today that Google turned on the switches on their 1.6 MW rooftop solar infrastructure that will power up to one third of its Mountain View, California campus' energy needs. Learn more about Google's solar panel project.

On the same day, its philanthropic arm, Google.org, as part of its climate change initiatives, launched its RechargeIT program to beta test new plug-in hybrid and vehicle-to-grid car technologies. One angle Google is exploring is the use of renewable energy sources such as solar in plug-in hybrids; it will be connecting its test fleet of plug-in cars to solar charging stations on campus to demonstrate the role that renewable electricity can play in replacing gasoline and other fossil fuels in the transportation sector.

Relatedly, Akeena Solar, one of the U.S.'s biggest solar system integrators, announced that this Thursday on June 21 it would unveil solar-powered electric car-charging stations, the equivalent of gas stations dispensing solar energy instead of gasoline.

Ascent Ascending

Meanwhile, shares of Ascent Solar (Nasdaq: ASTI) edged up 9% last Friday after shareholders approved the options Ascent granted to Norsk Hydro (NYSE:NHY) which will enable Hydro, the third-largest integrated aluminum supplier in the world, to increase its equity stake in Ascent Solar from its current 23% to up to 35%. Ascent's stock price rose to $8.02 today, up substantially from $2.45 earlier this year. Hydro's relationship with Ascent is expected to be enhanced. Already, it is reported that the two companies are collaborating in the joint development of a building integrated photovoltaic (BIPV) product line

A Haiku for Hoku

2007-06-14T20:46:00.000-07:00

Polysilicon
Build it and they will cometh
Sanyo then Suntech!

I admit, the above haiku is not exactly mindblowing...but Kapolei, Hawaii-based Hoku Scientific's (NASDAQ: HOKU) 46% surge in the stock market earlier today certainly is!!

The reason for the surge? Hoku signed up a 10 year agreement to supply Suntech Power (NASDAQ: SPWR), one of the world's leading manufacturers of PV panels, with polysilicon, the raw ingredient to crstalline-based PV panels that is currently in short supply, starting mid-2009, for a total contract value of $678 million (read press release for more details of the agreement). The Bard I am not, but Hoku's energy transformation is poetic to solar bulls like me.

Hoku has historically been in the fuel cell business. The Company is currently expanding its business to manufacture polysilicon and install solar modules for the solar market. Hoku doesn’t currently make silicon and doesn’t operate any silicon plants but according to Red Herring, Hoku estimates it will cost $260 million to build its first polysilicon factory, which is scheduled to begin operations in Pocatello, Idaho next year. T he company also said it wants to raise $150 million in debt capital to finance construction. The plant will be capable of producing 2,000 metric tons of polysilicon per year in Pocatello, Idaho.

This news comes on the heel of Hoku's annoucement in January of the signing of a seven-year polysilicon supply contract with SANYO Electric Co., Ltd. that would provide for approximately $370 million in payments to Hoku over the term of the agreement.

The polysilicon bottleneck has forced the hand of leading solar players like Suntech and Sanyo to enter into long-term supply contracts and locking in the price for polysilicon at today's prices.

This strategy may or may not pan out to be wise in light of the forecasts that polysilicon shortages will start to ease as early as 2008 as more production capacity come online, such as that from Hoku's, start to come on line. But it is precisely such long-term contracts that spur investment in polysilicon production and entice enterprising companies like Hoku to be part of the solar solution.

Europe's Solar Manifesto

2007-06-13T13:28:00.000-07:00

RenewableEnergyAccess.com reports of the release by the European Photovoltaic Technology Platform of an authoritative report dubbed the Strategic Research Agenda (SRA) , which will serve as a roadmap for short-, medium- and long-term research priorities for Europe in order to consolidate its global leadership position in the solar industry. The overarching goal is to make photovoltaic solar electricity competitive with conventional electricity in Southern Europe by 2015 and in most of Europe by 2020.

The SRA states in no uncertain terms that it is afraid of China's emerging success in the PV industry and the threat it poses to Europe's solar industry. Specifically, it describes China as the second country (after Japan) with an industrial policy specifically focused in the solar industry, with a goal of covering the solar value chain from silicon feedstock to complete systems. Hence, the SRA outlines the R&D priorities across the full spectrum of PV technologies, including crystalline-based, thin-film and concentrated solar technologies, as well as balance-of-system components.

The SRA also discusses non-technological issues such as standards, quality assurance and government R&D policy, although not to the same degree of detail and thoughtfulness as Solartech's white paper for turning the Silicon Valley into Solar Valley.

Fat Spaniel: Increasing Solar Adoption by Reducing Information Asymmetry

2007-06-12T19:37:00.000-07:00

In the advocacy of renewable energy, it is useful to think about the market failures which stand as obstacles to the adoption of renewable energy such as solar. One notable market failure in solar adoption is the lack of information in the hands of consumers, installers and utilities on just how productive solar panels are at producing electricity (and accordingly, how cost-effective solar power is compared to conventional power).

But one San Jose, California start-up, Fat Spaniel, which recently announced a strategic alliance with DRI Energy, aims to change all that with a small device that links up to existing solar equipment and monitors energy collection. The data the device gathers is fed into servers at Fat Spaniel, where it's digested and distributed live via PC or cell phone to the consumer, the utility company, the solar installer and/or others who need to know the information. User can get real-time and historical information about amount of solar power produced by their solar systems, and even what that translates to in terms of avoidance of greenhouse gas emissions (see above pictured example of web interface).

With this technology, utilities of solar financiers like SunEdison can more accurately better monitor a solar energy system's productivity and more accurately monetize their power purchase agreements in an arrangement where it purchases, installs, owns and maintains the systems while charging its customers periodically simply for the purchase of solar power.

System installers can use the technology to ensure that the systems have been properly installed and remain effective and productive throughout its lifespan, or undertake necessary maintenance work if it is not. In an interview with Green Wombat, founder of Fat Spaniel, Chris Beekhuis accounts:"[Our clients] want to be able to forecast and guarantee performance. But it is very difficult to monitor those remote sites. We have an installer in Southern California who is approaching 100 installations. They can see a problem online and then go out and fix it. They leave a door hanger that says, 'I’ve improved performance of your array.' "

Individual users of the technology can benefit by becoming more conscious about their energy usage in the context of the supply of power generated from their PV systems. As Chris Beekhius, founder of Fat Spaniels, explains in his article in RenewableEnergyAccess, "real-time access to these types of data helps maximize system efficiency—you can't improve the efficiency of a system for which you have no data."

Ultimately, the increased information serves to heighten transparency in the renewable energy markets, and reduces the risk premiums for investments in such technologies. This is best described by Beekhuis himself, in the following excerpt from his article:

As the U.S. moves into a national regime of renewable energy standards and regulated carbon markets, system owners and operators will want to maximize the financial value of their investments in renewable generation. The best way to track a system's real energy output to ensure accurate Performance Based Incentive Payments, protect ratepayer investments in capacity-based or expected performance-based rebate programs, and to grow vibrant and trusted financial markets for Renewable Energy Credits and Carbon Credits, is through independent metering and monitoring.
While no one would question the good intentions of the clean energy community, financial markets do not run on good intentions. In fact, a fundamental economic tenet is that markets don't function at all without meaningful, verifiable information that comes from trusted sources. If buyers and sellers are uncertain about the products they're trading, or can't reliably compare apples to apples and oranges to oranges, they have no way to accurately assign a value to those products.

Tioga Energy and Enervision

2007-06-09T22:46:00.000-07:00

Two innovative solar companies made venture financing news this past week. The Red Herring reported that California-based Tioga Energy launched operations with $10 million in venture financing from NGEN Partners, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Rockport Capital Partner, DFJ Frontier and Kirland Ventures. Tioga Energy's business model is to serve as an intermediary by financi Posting ng, purchasing, installing, owning and operating solar panels while bringing solar power to its customers through 20 year power purchase contracts, thereby reducing the upfront capital costs of solar panels that have made it so prohibitive for prospective solar power consumers. As mentioned before, MMA Renwewable Ventures and SunEdison are other notable companies that engage in this form of third party financing, which will further SolarTech's goal of encouraging solar adoption.

San Diego based Envision Solar has one of the coolest solar array concepts that I've seen in a while--"Solar Groves." According to Rob Day, author of blog Cleantech Investing, Envision raised $600,000 as part of a $2 million Series A round. Partnering with PV module maker Kyocera, architectural firm Tucker Sadler, and construction firm Midwest General, Inc., Envision Solar provides solar shading structures composed of "Solar Trees" from design through construction. A "Solar Tree" consists of a central pole that supports a "canopy" of solar panels, which are designed to be built above cars in parking lots to create shade and generate solar power without encumbering the parking spaces. The first Solar Grove was completed in May 2005 in San Diego at the car park of Kyocera (see picture). Consisting of 25 Solar Trees, the Solar Grove has produced more energy than predicted, about 427,000-kilowatt hours the first year, the equivalent requirement for 68 average homes for a full year.

Non-Technological Cost Reductions to Solar Power

2007-06-07T12:58:00.000-07:00

Last week, SolarTech, a collaborative initiative of a dozen solar technology companies in the Silicon Valley, launched the Solar Center of Excellence, with the goal of transforming the Silicon Valley into a Solar Valley, and serve as a model of solar power adoption to the rest of the U.S. and the world. It released a highly informative white paper outlining the areas and issues where opportunities for cost reductions exist.

Most interestingly, the paper starts with the proposition that PV installation costs in the US are twice of that in Germany and Japan, and that building permit and utility interconnection costs in the U.S. are also significantly higher than in Germany and Japan, and proceeds to focus on primarily on non-technology issues (i.e. the price of silicon or increasing conversion efficiencies) such as harmonizing standards for PV performance installation, utility interconnections and building permits; promoting workforce training in the PV industry; and promoting third-party financing mechanisms (through power purchase agreements) to reduce upfront capital costs of solar installation for consumers. It is the hope that the combination of these measures will substantially reduce installation costs and also reduce installation times from 29-50 weeks (as is the case now) to as little as 9 weeks. [See related blog post by the Spicy Solar Guy on why solar installation in Germany significantly lower than that of the U.S.]

An interesting side note is that solar modules only account for 50-60% of the costs of a solar system's price. The remainder consists of installation, as well as various "balance of system" components such as the inverter and mounting systems. Thus, apart from increasing conversion efficiencies of PV cells and reducing installation costs through the above measures, a meaningful opportunity exists in reducing the costs of inverters and mounting systems, components that are hardly as sexy or get the press attention as solar modules themselves. Indeed, the white paper reports that the "learning rate" for inverters is only about 10%, compared to 20-25% of PV modules and other balance if system components. One of the paper's recommendations is thus increased R&D in inverters.

Another paper (titled "What the Solar Industry can learn from Googel and Salesforce.com"; free registration required) by The Topline Strategy Group discusses the challenges that must be overcome to make solar power a "short fuse technology" (i.e. a technology that has a shorter early adopter period and achieves widespread mainstream adoption far faster than traditionally thought possible). This paper covers makes many of the same proposals as the SolarTech white paper, including harmonizing standards, streamlining utility interconnection and permitting processes, and increasing innovative financing mechanisms to reduce upfront capital costs of installation. Another proposal unique to the Topline paper is to create a secondary market for solar equipment (this way a homeowner won't feel stuck with fixed costs of a PV system which lasts 30 or more years when such homeowner doesn't think he'll stay in the home for that long a time) by making the accompanying warranties to the PV system transferable (currently they are not transferable).

All these kinks suggest how very much in infancy the solar industry is (even thought the technology has been around for decades), and how much opportunity lies ahead to proliferate PV's use.

I'm salivating.

Note: Thanks to the Green Wombat for first bringing Solartech's efforts to my attention.

Last one there is a rotten egg!!

2007-06-06T14:21:00.001-07:00

Everybody's doing it!!

In what's becoming a trend of retailers, Macy's announced today that 26 of its stores in California will be going solar, with the help of PowerLight, subsidiary of Sunpower Corp (Nasdaq: SPWR). According to the press release:

For 15 of the 26 stores, Macy’s will purchase solar-generated electricity under
the SunPower Access™ program, a solar services agreement that allows the
retailer to purchase just the electricity generated at its stores – not the
solar power systems themselves — from a third-party financier. At the end of a
10-year term, Macy’s will have the option to renew the agreement, transfer the
equipment to a new site, or buy the system. Macy’s will buy solar power systems
for the remaining 11 stores through an outright system purchase.

According to greenblog Environmental Leader, other retailers going yellow recently include Kohls, Target, BJ's Wholsale Club, Costco, Staples, Tesco and of course, Walmart.

Automaker Nissan also announced today that it will install 606 solar panels (480 PV, 126 solar thermal) in its Barcelona plant. This is part of Nissan's plant to reduce its carbon dioxide emisssions by 7% of 2005 levels.

But if a clearer message about solar being the right thing to do needed to be sent, then the Vatican's move to go solar will be heard loud and clear.

The Dawn of Big Solar?

2007-06-04T21:26:00.001-07:00

Utility-scale solar farms seem to be making the news more and more. Just yesterday, Canadian Solar (Nasdaq: CSIQ) announced that it has begin delivering solar modules to City Solar AG for the construction of 7 different large-scale solar farms in Spain and Germany totaling a solar capacity of 31 MW in all.

An article in Business 2.0 provides a great overview on the state of large-scale solar, the major players, and the evolving economics and technologies that make it increasingly attractive.

But query if such solar farms nullify one of the main advantages of renewable energy--that of an off-grid and autonomous source of distributed power. Utility-scale power just puts electricity production back in the hands of big companies (which are the only ones that can afford the huge capital outlay of a large-scale solar farm), increasing their political clout because they control such a vital resource, and setting them down the path of Big Oil and Big Coal...would love to hear thoughts of anyone out there...

Book Alert: The Clean Tech Revolution

2007-06-02T09:55:00.000-07:00

A forthcoming book "The Clean Tech Revolution" by two staff members of Clean Edge, the leading authority in clean tech market research, highlights, amongst other technologies, the latest trends and future opportunities of solar power. In fact, the complete chapter on solar is available on the book's website as a preview for a free download. It reviews the declining price and increaseing competitiveness of solar power, identifies the break-through solar technologies and applications such as concentrated solar power, building integrated photovoltaics (BIPV), thin-film solar, utility-scale solar farms, and innovative third-party financing techniques (see my blog posting on third party financing) that will power solar into a market breakthrough.

Additionally, the article highlights ten companies in the solar space that embody the above-mentioned technologies and trends to keep an eye on:
1. Applied Materials: Semiconductor powerhouse now venturing into solar, including thin-film technolologies
2. Miasole: Founders were technology pioneers in hard disk storage, which requires thin-film technology applications; now parlaying this knowledge to CIGS (copper, indium, gallium, selenium)-based thin-film technologies in solar
3. MMA Renewable Ventures: Innovative financier, operator and owner of renewable energy projects. See e.g.
4. Nanosolar: An innovator of "photovolatic ink", the next generation in thin-film technology
5. Q-Cells: A leading German crystalline player
6. REC : Diversified Norwegian wafer and module producer
7. Sharp: The global leader of solar module supply with a 25% market share.
8. Sun Edison: Systems integrater and installer, and provides third-party financing to make PV systems more affordable for the consumer.
9. Sunpower: Maker of the most efficient PV modules commercially available, and one of the first vertically-integrated solar companies.
10. Suntech Power: China's leading solar company, previously focused on crystalline-based modules, but now venturing into thin-film and BIPV (see report)

Mitsubishi Electric Raises Efficiency of Multi-Crystalline Solar Cells

2007-05-31T13:14:00.000-07:00

Solarbuzz reports today that Mitsubishi Electric has achieved a new record photoelectric conversion efficiency rate of 18.0% for 150mm square multi-crystalline silicon solar cells, an improvement of 1.2% over the company's previous level. Reade Mitsubishi's press release here.