China solar giant Suntech falls back to Earth

China solar giant Suntech falls back to Earth (via AFP)

China's Suntech reached its zenith as the world's largest solar panel producer, but has plunged to the nadir of financial distress in just a year, highlighting the woes of the industry it shaped. The New York-listed company on Wednesday said its main subsidiary was facing bankruptcy and would be reorganised…

Biggest Solar Power Company in U.S. Could More than Double in Size

Biggest Solar Power Company in U.S. Could More than Double in Size (via Clean Technica)

  With control over 320 megawatts of solar power generating capacity, Florida-based NextEra Energy Resources already calls itself the biggest solar power company in the U.S. (at least for now), and it is about to add a whopping 750 more megawatts in one fell swoop if the Environmental Impact Statement…

Solar gets competitive

I can't get too excited about politics right now but this is exciting:
Solar cheaper than coal and falling
New developments in solar power make 'clean coal' look even dumber

Let me be the last in the greenosphere to note that Nanosolar has shipped its first panels, and it's no exaggeration to say that this moment will likely be seen as a historical turning point.

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Nanosolar's claim is that power from their panels will pencil out at about $0.99 a watt. The implications are pretty stunning:

"With a $1-per-watt panel," [CEO Martin Roscheisen] said, "it is possible to build $2-per-watt systems."

According to the Energy Department, building a new coal plant costs about $2.1 a watt, plus the cost of fuel and emissions, he said.

So what is Nanosolar and what do they do different?
The New Dawn of Solar

The company produces its PowerSheet solar cells with printing-press-style machines that set down a layer of solar-absorbing nano-ink onto metal sheets as thin as aluminum foil, so the panels can be made for about a tenth of what current panels cost and at a rate of several hundred feet per minute. With backing from Google’s founders and $20 million from the U.S. Department of Energy, Nanosolar’s first commercial cells rolled off the presses this year.

Cost has always been one of solar’s biggest problems. Traditional solar cells require silicon, and silicon is an expensive commodity (exacerbated currently by a global silicon shortage). What’s more, says Peter Harrop, chairman of electronics consulting firm IDTechEx, “it has to be put on glass, so it’s heavy, dangerous, expensive to ship and expensive to install because it has to be mounted.” And up to 70 percent of the silicon gets wasted in the manufacturing process. That means even the cheapest solar panels cost about $3 per watt of energy they go on to produce. To compete with coal, that figure has to shrink to just $1 per watt.

Nanosolar’s cells use no silicon, and the company’s manufacturing process allows it to create cells that are as efficient as most commercial cells for as little as 30 cents a watt. “You’re talking about printing rolls of the stuff—printing it on the roofs of 18-wheeler trailers, printing it on garages, printing it wherever you want it,” says Dan Kammen, founding director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory at the University of California at Berkeley. “It really is quite a big deal in terms of altering the way we think about solar and in inherently altering the economics of solar.”

This is perhaps the greatest threat the corporate energy industry has seen. Coal was seen as the only alternative to large scale energy production. Alternatives have been far too expensive - until now. It represents an even greater threat; it can be decentralized making those thousands of mile of transmission lines unnecessary and eliminating the monopoly that electric power has been. There are no big profits in roof top electrical generation. Look for the powerful to attempt to erect roadblocks to stop it's widespread use. This represents a bigger threat to big energy than global warming.

Bad news for Komatsu good news for SolarWorld

In 1998 Japan's Komatsu Silicon finished a 500 million dollar plant in Hillsboro, Oregon. It never opened. German company SolarWorld Group has purchased the plant for 40 million dollars and will spend another 400 million to configure the plant to build solar cells.
Solar plant may hire 1,000 .

Thursday's announcement that a German company will turn a high-tech white elephant into the nation's biggest solar plant is in key respects Oregon's most significant industrial development since the tech bust.

State officials hope a new generation of Oregon technology employment will spring from the unused Hillsboro chip factory, where SolarWorld Group will invest $400 million, hiring as many as 1,000.

The publicly held company is buying the plant for $40 million -- a bargain in comparison with the $500 million spent by Japan's Komatsu Silicon America, which finished the factory in 1998 but never opened it because of forecasts of declining chip sales.

As projections soar for alternative energy demand, more solar companies are scouting the state, officials say. Solar manufacturing, ranging from silicon to wafers to cells to panels, could pick up where semiconductors leave off as chipmakers move offshore, they say.

Indeed, semiconductor workers here have skills that translate easily into solar cell manufacturing.

Quick sale

Only last fall, SolarWorld acquired the solar business of oil giant Royal Dutch Shell, which had taken it over from Siemens AG. The deal gave SolarWorld, founded in 1998, plants in Vancouver as well as in Camarillo, Calif.

Robust demand for solar panels quickly pushed SolarWorld to expand. In December, company representatives toured the 422,000-square-foot former Komatsu plant.

"It was amazing to see such a huge site in that good condition after 10 years, and to imagine that the company wasted more-or-less a half a billion dollars for just building it," said Boris Klebensberger, SolarWorld chief operating officer. "It will fit all our needs."

The plant will hold at least 1,000 workers by 2010, SolarWorld CEO Frank Asbeck said Thursday in Germany, according to The Associated Press. But Klebensberger said "some hundreds" of workers would be hired for the first phase and "several hundred" thereafter.

The solar cell business is growing.

The Hillsboro plant will be able to produce solar silicon wafers and cells capable of generating 500 megawatts of electricity a year.

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Solar industry sales have grown by about 35 percent in each of the past five years, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association. Last year, worldwide sales of photovoltaic cells and modules exceeded $15 billion as prices went up for conventionally generated energy, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association.