Alternate Energy Blog - March - April 2008

April 23: Eighteen Gigawatt of Solar Cell Production By 2010?: I hope so, though I'm a little bit skeptical.  Here's one on-line magazine's take on it:

"In the next three years global cell production capacities are to be expanded to 18 GW; 14 GW are planned in wafer-based PV, four GW in thin-film. The industry is in a hurry because solar power is still much too expensive and far short of competitiveness with other energy sources. Mass production and technical improvements are to bring fast change.

However, the ambitious intentions of the firms are raising questions. Will there be enough silicon to go round? Who is to buy the 18 GW? In 2006 only two GW of solar power capacity were installed. But the most fundamental of all questions is whether the PV component suppliers are able to put in place gigantic high-tech production fast enough. Standard factory sizes are now 80 to 100 megawatts (MW). The future demand will be for plants with more than a GW, i.e. factories as large as car plants."

New Energy - The Magazine For Renewable Energy  http://www.newenergy.info/index.php?id=1595

April 23: Luz II: Luz II is a revival of Luz International, a company that built several large solar thermal to electric power plants back in the 1980s and early 1990's.  They went bankrupt in the early 1990s due partly to the temporary (but over a decade long) drop in the prices of fossil fuels, and partly due to govenment bungling on subsidies to the solar energy market.  Essentially congress always approved solar subsidies, but only after a period of uncertainty that investors wary, and only for time periods too short to fit a major solar project into.  That's happening again even as we speak.  Lesson to be learned: It's better to have low-level but consistent help for the solar industry than higher levels that are subject to annual uncertainty.  Of course generous AND consistent help would be even better, though it would  need to be carefully structured so that companies don't become dependent on it.

In any case, much of the old Luz International gang is back, with improved technology and a new shot at making solar thermal electric power plants work.

http://www.luz2.com/index.php?sid=412&lang=en act=static 20news

April 8, 2008: Evergreen Solar Expansion: Evergreen Solar is a promising mid-sized US solar cell manufacturer.  They've figured out how to create single crystal silicon solar cells by creating a ribbon of silicon, which is then cut into the desired size.  That saves quite a bit of silicon compared to the tradition approach.  In any case, they have been in relatively small-scale production themselves for quite a while, and have also built larger plants in a joint venture with a German company.  They are now expanding their own production into the hundred megawatt plus range.  They plan to ramp production up to 160 megawatt per year at a new plant by the end of 2009.

This is the kind  of thing that really impresses me about the current growth of solar cell production.  When I hear about some breakthrough in the lab somewhere I'm usualy skeptical.  Over the years I've learned that the move from lab to manufacturing is tough.  It can take ten to fifteen years, or not happen at all.  When a company gets innovative technology into production, gets a track record, and starts expanding, that's when you can figure that something important is happening.  Evergreen is doing all of that, and hopefully we'll hear more about them over the next few years.

http://www.evergreensolar.com/app/en/home/
April 1, 2008:  Solar America Grants: A few weeks ago the DOE announced $168 million in grants to 13 organizations involved in solar cell or related activities.  The grants have to be matched by company or university funds.  The goal of the program is:

"...to bring down the cost of solar energy to make it competitive with conventional electricity sources in the U.S. by 2015.

In addition, the projects announced today are to enable the expansion of the annual U.S. manufacturing capacity of PV systems from 240 MW in 2005 to as much as 2,850 MW by 2010, representing more than a ten-fold increase in three years."

Further details are available in this article from CleanTech.

At least one US manufacturer (Nanosolar) is already in production with a solar cell they claim they can sell at a price competitive with coal, but it's still good to see other alternatives getting support.

The production goal is ambitious, but probably doable.  It doesn't mean that we can instantly turn off the coal-fired and nuclear power plants.  The 2010 goals would mean we would be producing enough solar cells to replace one or two big nuke or coal-fired plants, or more likely make it unnecessary to build them.  In other words it'll be a start and a good one, but only a start.  Production will need to expand another order of magnitude before solar cells can start making a serious dent in the energy picture, and expanding from 2850 Megawatts to 25,000 or 30,000 megawatt annual production will take a serious effort--close to ten times the amount of effort it will take to get to the 2010 goal.  It will take billions of dollars for the factories, plus trained people to operate them, plus increased supplies of every raw material that goes into the finished panels, plus trained people to actually put them on roofs.  That will all take time, but at least we're moving in the right direction.

One good thing I've noticed is that several manufacturing plants for "solar grade" silicon are in various stages of construction or initial production.  The feedstock for solar cells doesn't need to be as pure as the stock for semi-conductors, but solar cells have been using that unnecessarily high-purity feedstock because up until lately there hasn't been enough demand for solar-grade silicon to justify building the plants to produce it.  That has changed now that solar cells are using more of the silicon feedstock than semi-conductors, and plants are being built which will hopefully allow traditional solar cells to be made more cheaply.

March 27,2008: Two very expensive reports on the state of solar cells: Solarbuzz publishes a very thorough and very expensive (several hundred dollars) annual report on the solar cell industry, as do a couple of other organizations.  These are intended for industry professionals and the price reflects that.  I didn't shell out the bucks to read the whole thing, but the summary of the Solarbuzz report has some interesting figures:

Solar cells installed in 2007: 2,826 Megawatts, up 62% since 2006.
Solar cells produced: 3,436 Megawatts, up from 2,204 in 2006.

Markets: 70% of solar cells sold in 2007 went to Germany and Spain.  Japan and the US had around 8% apiece.  That's a rise of 57% for the US and a drop of 23% for Japan.

Production:  Chinese produced 35% of the world's solar cells in 2007.  The Japanese produced 26%.  The report doesn't list the US or Germany. I'm guessing that the US is at 10-15% if that.  Hopefully Nanosolar will help with that.

Another report this one by Navigant Consulting, adds this tidbit:

"Industry capacity utilization, at 56%, was low due to the ongoing silicon feedstock shortage and a softening of demand at the end of the year."  I'm not quite sure what to make of the 'softening of demand' part of that.  Hopefully just a blip.

http://www.solarbuzz.com/Marketbuzz2008-intro.htm

http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/partner/story?id=51978

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MarcH 27,2008: ScienceDaily talks about a very large solar photovoltaic project from a California Utility:
"Utility Southern California Edison said on Thursday it would spend $875 million to build a network of 250 megawatts of photovoltaic solar power generation, making it the biggest solar cell project in the nation."

That works out to about $3.50 per watt, apparently including installation, which is not at all bad.  The company says that recent advances have "cut in half the traditional cost of installed solar generation in California."  They'll be installing the panels at the rate of a megawatt per week, starting immediately.  Hopefully that will give solar manufacturers a shot in the arm.    To put this into perspective, the largest solar cell-based power plant in the world so far is apparently a 23 megawatt installation in Spain.  The biggest in the US is 14 Megawatts.  There are bigger solar power installations out there, but they use solar heat rather than solar cells to generate electricity.  "Edison's order is roughly equal to all the solar cells produced in the United States last year."

Unfortunately, none of the articles I've found mention who is manufacturing the cells involved.  There were some photovoltaic panels in the background of the PR video, but one of them looked like a traditional silicon solar cell panel.  Couldn't tell if it was single crystal or multi-crystalline.  The other one looked like it might have been a thin-film of some kind, but I couldn't tell for sure.

http://www.newsdaily.com/stories/n27389311-edison-solar/

http://biz.yahoo.com/nytimes/080327/1194759723796.html?.v=1