Solar Power & Renewables Update - By: Dale Cozort

Here are two amazing statistics: (1) About 30% of new US generating capacity last year was from wind power.

While a lot of people are focusing on solar, wind power is really taking off. You've probably heard that T Boone Pickens recently ordered enough wind turbines to generate a gigawatt of power. He's going to put them in a giant wind farm in the Texas panhandle. I believe that will be the biggest wind farm yet, but that's just the first stage. By 2014 he plans to be producing 4 gigawatts. That's starting to get substantial--the equivalent of at least four coal or nuclear plants.

""The Global Wind Energy Council (GWEC) has confirmed earlier estimates that more than 20 GW of wind power was installed in 2007, led by the US, China and Spain.

This is an increase of 31% compared with the 2006 market, and represents an overall increase in global installed capacity, now at 94,112 MW, of about 27%.

The top five countries in terms of installed capacity are Germany at 22.3 GW, the US with 16.8 GW, Spain at 15.1 GW, India with 8 GW and China at 6.1 GW. In terms of economic value, the global wind market in 2007 was worth about €25 billion in new generating equipment, GWEC says.

In terms of new installations, the US leads the pack, reporting a record 5244 MW installed in 2007, more than double the 2006 figure and accounting for about 30% of the country's new power-producing capacity in 2007. Overall US wind power generating capacity grew 45% in 2007, with total installed capacity now standing at 16.8 GW. The US is expected to overtake Germany as the leader on wind energy by the end of 2009."

http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/reworld/story?id=52085

(2) World solar cell production appears to be set to grow from on the order of 3.8 gigawatts in 2007 to around 18 gigawatts in 2010.

There is so much money going into alternate energy that I'm starting to get afraid of a bubble—solar.com or alternate energy.com. Some of the money going into the industry is smart money though. T. Boone Pickens jis no dummy. One of the Gulf Oil sheikdoms is investing $2 billion to build up their capacity to produce thin-film solar cells. Several of the dotcom millinaires are betting heavily on solar or wind.

There are a LOT of companies in the solar cell business. I suspect that most of them will go away in a few years, or find a little niche to excel in while a few of them get very big. That seems to be the pattern with new industries.

I've always thought that the early, highly competitive phase of an industry is the exciting time. Time is sort of like a river. Some time periods are like a broad plains where history could change course with a relatively small push. Other time periods are like deep ravines where it would be almost impossible to change the course. Industries have those same kinds of periods—ones where the course of a technology can go any one of several ways with just a minor push, and other periods where the amount of money needed to challenge entrenched companies with entrenched technologies make it very difficult for any technology other than the dominant one to win out. The automobile industry went through a wild and exciting period of rapid innovation that tried out electric cars, steam cars, and several configurations of cars driven by internal combustion engines before settling into a relatively mundane seventy or eight years of minor incremental improvements on the same theme by an ever-dwindling number of very large companies.

The computer industry went through that same kind of evolution, from the wild days where Commodore, Apple, Tandy, Ohio Scientific, North Star, Cromemco, Atari, Coleco, Fortune, Sage, Victor, IBM, Sanyo, Acorn, Sinclair and dozens of others competed against one another for the computer market, not just with different computers but with very different and incompatible concepts of what a computer should be.

Now we're going through that same kind of wild exciting time with not just solar cells but alternative energy as a whole. Solar cells look set to break out into a huge market, and we are either at or approaching the time where the different concepts dual it out for consumer dollars. If the pattern of the other industries hold, we should see maybe ten years of rapid innovation and a very wild ride, followed by a consolidation as successful companies out compete the rest and become entrenched enough that it is difficult for newcomers to enter the market. The energy market is large enough and diverse enough that the wild innovation period may go on longe than it did with the computer industry—maybe 15 to 20 years.

In any case, we're probably entering the period where the decisions may get made as to where societies get their energy for the next fifty years or more. That's exciting.

The big obstacle to widespread adoption of solar cells is cost. Electricity from solar cells still averages somewhat over four times the average for electricity from traditional sources, though that varies enormously depending on the amount of sun an area gets and the local cost of electricity. Solar cells will be competitive in California long before they're competitive in northern Illinois or especially rainy parts of the Pacific northwest. Cut the average price per peak watt of a solar cell from the current $4.80 to around $2.50 and the market will grow substantially. Cut it to around $1 per watt and suddenly the market is almost infinite because then solar cells can compete with coal or nuclear power on price over an awful lot of the world.

So why are solar cells so expensive? Because most of them are currently made from extremely pure silicon—the same silicon that is used to make computer chips. Manufacturers create silicon ingots and then saw them into thin slices called wafers. The sawing process wastes a substantial part of the rather expensive silicon. Wafers are then soldered together to form solar modules. So far its an expensive process, especially since the supply of polysilicon, the raw material needed for this process, has fallen behind the growth of solar cell production capacity. As solar cell manufacturers scrambled to grab the scarce supplies they bid up the price to several times the pre-shortage level. That temporarily reversed the long decline in prices of solar cells.

In spite of the problems, the vast majority of solar cells are still made from high-purity silicon sawed from grown or cast wafers. The wild innovation part of the next ten to fifteen years will probably come from efforts to change that.

Here are a few bits of news that illustrate my point about the wild and innovative part of these times. Six solar-related announcements within the last month or two each illustrate a radically different approach to solar cells:

Signet Solar: Make it cheap. Make it big. Make it out of silicon. From a Signet Solar press release: "Signet Solar, a manufacturer of silicon thin film photovoltaic (PV) modules, today, announced the fabrication of the industry's first ever Gen 8.5 (5.7 m2) silicon thin film solar PV module at its new factory near Dresden, Germany in a record setting ten months from the start of construction.

After finishing construction of the 200,000 square foot production facility in only seven months, Signet Solar completed installation of equipment and started initial fabrication in less than three months. Signet Solar's technology lowers the cost of photovoltaic (PV) modules by combining proven silicon thin film technology, with very large area manufacturing and an industry standard equipment set. The initial modules from the fully automated module manufacturing line met the specification of the product and were confirmed by independent testing by Fraunhofer Institute. Signet will start prototype production in early June."

Production is scheduled to go from a few prototypes now to 100 megawatts in 2009. Instead of making individual cells and wiring them together, Signet (and quite a few other companies, are making large (over seven foot by seven foot) solar panels directly by depositing two thin layers of silicon (one amorphous and one microcrystalline) on a substrate. The efficiency of the cells is low compared to traditional cells—8-10 percent versus 15-20 percent or a little more, but the idea is to make the cost enough lower to more than offset the lower efficiencies. Another company called Optisolar is taking a similar approach. It is building a huge thin-film solar cell plant in California. Where are all these companies coming from? They are also planning a huge solar farm in California, and have 120 megawatts worth of solar cell farms on tap for Ontario.

http://www.industryweek.com/ReadArticle.aspx?ArticleID=16043

SunPower:Make it really efficient, make it out of silicon, make a lot of solar cells. SunPower's strategy is to just keep tweaking traditional silicon solar cells to make them cheaper and more efficient, then make a lot of them, betting that economies of scale will drop the cost.

"SunPower Corporation will build its next solar cell fabrication plant in Malaysia. When fully operational, Fab 3 is expected to have a nameplate rating in excess of 1-gigawatt of annual production capacity.

The new manufacturing facility is expected to be constructed in two phases, with the first phase comprised of 14 solar cell production lines with a nameplate capacity of 40 megawatts each. After completion of phase two, at a scale in excess of 1-gigawatt, Fab 3 is estimated to achieve materially lower capital cost per watt compared to SunPower's Fab 1 and Fab 2.

Solar cell production in Fab 3 is likely to begin in 2010, with the integrated site development planned to start later this year. SunPower will launch its manufacturing operations with its industry-leading 22 percent minimum rated Gen 2 solar cells, and expects to add production of its recently announced, higher-efficiency Gen 3 solar cells at a later date.

"The scale and breadth of our Fab 3 campus in Malaysia will be a core element of our technology and manufacturing roadmap that drives us to our 50 percent cost reduction plan by 2012," said Tom Werner, CEO of SunPower Corp. "Malaysia offers us highly educated workers, a receptive business investment climate and the opportunity to significantly expand our production as the demand for our solar systems continues to escalate worldwide.""

A year or two ago a 1 gigawatt plant would have been huge—more than three times the size of the biggest one in existence. Now it's still big, but one of the big Chinese solar cell companies is well on it's way to building one with twice the capacity. Still, gigawatt-sized plants will have an impact. For comparison, 1 gigawatt is equivalent to a good-sized coal or nuclear power plant, but since the sun doesn't shine all of the time the rule of thumb is to divide solar cell output by around 4 to get the equivalent in traditional power plant capacity. So they'll be able to displace a coal or nuclear power plant every four years.

I believe that SunPower also has the most efficient non-concentrated silicon solar cells in large-scale production, with a next generation in the wings to bring efficiency up to 23.4% in a couple of years. Between efficiency and economy of scale they hope to cut their cost of production in half.

http://www.solarbuzz.com/news/NewsASMA159.htm

Timminco: Make the silicon cheaper: There is a company called Timminco up in Canada that claims that they have figured out a way to inexpensively upgrade cheap metallurgical grade silicon to the point where it is just pure enough for solar cells without having to go through the steps to make it pure enough for semiconductors. They claim to have it in pilot production, with large-scale production coming soon. If that's true and it looks like it may be, then traditional solar cells may get a lot less expensive even without any big breakthroughs. http://www.timminco.com/. By the way, this company is publicly traded and the stock has gone up a lot on this news, but short-sellers have started circling around the stock, so I don't know what the outcome will be there. If they are able to do what the claim to be able to do, they could bypass the silicon shortage and the current high costs, making cheaper solar cells possible without much in the way of addition breakthroughs.

Konarka:. Make it cheap. Make it out of something other than silicon, put it on everything. Konarka is trying to get plastic solar cells into production. The idea is that you can basically print you solar cells on just about anything plastic—the back of your laptop's screen, your cellphone, your iPod, or your tent. So far the efficiency is low—generally under 5% for practical cells and the durability is questionable. On the other hand, there is probably a market for low-efficiency cells if they are cheap and light enough. Most electronic gadget become obsolete fast enough that solar cells for that market don't really need to last 20 or more years like solar cells for other markets do.

First Solar: Make it cheap. Make it out of something other than silicon, but make it efficient enough to go on roofs. Quite a few other solar cell companies are trying some variation of the "make it cheap, make it out of something other than silicon" part of this formula. First Solar and Nanosolar have somewhat more efficient solar cells based on cadmium telluride and CIGS (a blend of several materials including Cadmium and Indium) respectively. Those cells are efficient enough for rooftop or solar farm applications, so they're in a slightly different market niche than Konarka is initially aiming for. First Solar claims to have one of the lowest production costs in the industry. "First Solar, which already has one of the lowest costs in the industry at $1.10 per watt, expects to be able to compete with lower prices in the future. It already has set contracts with steadily declining prices through 2012, said Jeff Osborne, a managing director of research for Thomas Weisel Partners. The pricing pressure will result in even greater development of low-cost solutions, which today are thin-film-based, Osborne said"

http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/thin-film-to-survive-solar-shakeout-943.html.

Sungri:Make it out of something expensive and then focus a lot of sunlight on it. This sounds like a simple idea: If solar cells are so expensive, why don't they focus more sunlight on them. Good idea, but unfortunately not that simple. Why not? Heat. If you've ever used a magnifying glass to focus sun on something you've probably noticed that it didn't take long before that something started smoking. Standard solar cells can't take the heat of magnifying the sun by very much without elaborate cooling systems which add back in a lot of the cost that you were trying to get rid of.

Solar cell manufacturers have struggled for decades to find the right combination of the right solar cell material, the right amount of concentration for the sunlight, and the right cooling method. A startup called Sungri thinks they've found it. From their press release: "A new solar energy system will soon make it possible to produce electricity at a wholesale cost of 5-cents per kWh (kilowatt hour). This price is competitive with the wholesale cost of producing electricity using fossil fuels and a fraction of the current cost of solar energy.

XCPV (Xtreme Concentrated Photovoltaics), a system that concentrates the equivalent of more than 1,600 times the sun's energy onto the world's most efficient solar cells, was announced today by SUNRGI, a solar energy system designer and developer, at the National Energy Marketers Association's 11th Annual Global Energy Forum in Washington, DC. The technology will enable power companies, businesses, and residents to produce electricity from solar energy at a lower cost than ever before.

"Solar Power at 5 cents per kWh would be a world-changing breakthrough," said Craig Goodman, president, National Energy Marketers Association. "It would make solar generation of electricity as affordable as generation from coal, natural gas or other non-renewable sources, without requiring a subsidy""

http://www.sunrgi.com/press20080429.html

http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/sunrgi-keeps-solar-cool-841.html

http://www.wral.com/business/local_tech_wire/venture/story/2807151/

http://www.autobloggreen.com/2008/05/02/sunrgi-tempts-us-with-solar-power-for-5kwh/

Their solar cells are 37% efficient, and they expect to have a commercial product in 12 to 15 months. I would expect this to primarily be used in commercial solar farms. I personally wouldn't want to be the first person on the block to put something with that kind of solar power concentration on my roof—3000 degrees absent the cooling.

There isn't much out there on the type of solar cell they are using, but one source claims that the actual cells are made by Spectrolab, a company that produces very high efficiency solar cells for space power uses. They stack layers of different photovoltaic material to grab different parts of the solar spectrum.

So are solar cells finally catching up with the hype that has been swirling around them for the past thirty years? I hope so. If production costs keep coming down the future impact is going to be huge. A lot of the dot.com/personal computer millionaires decided that green energy is the next big thing. Even if most of them are wrong and they lose money on the deals they are putting together, at the very least hundreds of millions of dollars worth of research and production capacity is being created. Hopefully that will at lest put a cap on how high more traditional fuel costs can go, and give us a head start on switching over once fuel costs rise too high for fossil fuels to be usable for energy.