Solar

By Jeff Siegel This past Saturday afternoon, Rick Diaz locked in another customer. A former roofing contractor, Rick is now a sales rep and installation manager for a small roofing and solar company in Maryland. He tells me most people he talks to about solar have pretty much already made up their minds before he even walks in the door: The investment works out for young couples who are going to be in these homes for more than ten years. But most seem more concerned about the environment than the return on investment. Either way, it's a...

Privately held Konarka Technologies, Inc., announced the California Energy Commission is earmarking funds from its Energy Innovations Small Grant Program for Konarka. The grant will be used to accelerate Konarka's efforts to bring aesthetically integrated plastic photovoltaics to the roofing market. Over the next 12 months, Konarka will apply this grant to examining the potential for coating patterned power plastic roofing materials that mimic the appearance of traditional roofing products. Aesthetics and cost have been key hurdles in increasing market penetration for renewable photovoltaic power in the residential roofing market, but Konarka's materials will look like a conventional...

Solar power equipment maker SunPower Corp., a unit of Cypress Semiconductor Corp. (CY) raised the expected price of its planned initial public offering to between $16 and $18 per share from a previous range of $12 to $14. The company expects to list its stock on the Nasdaq under the symbol "SPWR" sometime this week. I have always found the IPOHome.com website helpful tracking this type of information down. You can also find a great deal of info at NASDAQ.com as well for new IPO's.

FPL Group Inc (FPL) and affiliates of Carlyle/Riverstone announced today that they have purchased ownership interest for an effective 141 megawatts (MW) of solar power generation in California. Under terms of the agreement, FPL Energy, along with certain FPL Energy affiliates, and Carlyle/Riverstone purchased majority interest in five 30-megawatt Solar Energy Generating System (SEGS III-VII) assets in the Mojave Desert. FPL Energy will operate the SEGS plants and hold a 45 percent ownership interest in the projects. Carlyle/Riverstone, as co-general partner, will own a 49 percent interest in the projects with the remainder being held by a group...

Spire Corp (SPIR) announced the completion of Building Integrated Photovoltaic ("BIPV") Systems at the Bethel New Life Lake-Pulaski Commercial Center. The commercial center, located on the West Side of Chicago, will house a day care facility, commercial enterprises, a clinic and employment services. The Lake-Pulaski Commercial Center has two BIPV systems. One, approximately 25 kilowatts in size, is a roof-tile system; the other is a 7-kilowatt awning system. The BIPV awning system is the first commercial building appearance of clear back-sheet photovoltaic modules locally manufactured by Spire Solar for a greater appeal to aesthetics. The awnings will improve the...

XSUNX Inc. (XSNX) announced that it has expanded its business opportunities to include the product development of a new opaque solar cell device. This unique four-terminal solar cell design uses a combination of thin film transparent cell technology, derived from the company's Power Glass initiative, with that of a nano-crystalline solar cell. XsunX believes that the combination of these two technologies into a single device holds a promising opportunity to deliver low cost, high efficiency, flexible, and light weight solar cells providing performance characteristics commonly found only in various forms of expensive crystalline wafer technologies. The decision to...

Joe Romm, at the influential Climate Progress blog, has hit on a formula for countering the coal industry's claims that we need baseload power sources.  Since Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) in conjunction with thermal storage can be used to generate 24/7 or baseload power Joe has renamed it "Solar Baseload."   This is win-the-battle-lose-the-war thinking.  While it does neatly counter the argument we need coal or nuclear, since there are renewable power sources which can produce baseload, such as CSP, Geothermal, and Biomass.  I fell into this coal-industry trap myself in a 2007 article about Geothermal, as did AltEnergyStocks...

Acciona's financing of Nevada Solar One, and a recent series of a financing, a prominent hire, and a big announcement from Concentrating Linear Fresnel Reflector (CLFR) developer Ausra has been keeping long-underappreciated Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) technology in the news recently.  I consider this great news, because the potential for cheap thermal storage of CSP and the gigantic size of the available resource means that CSP is likely to provide the backbone of reliability for any future decarbonized electric grid where the clear skies which it requires to operate properly and sufficient transmission are available. But CSP is...

SatCon Technology Corporation (SATC) nnounced that it has entered into a strategic supply agreement and has received a purchase order from New Vision Technologies, an affiliate of Sun Edison, LLC, to initially deliver up to 10 megawatts of PowerGate(TM) photovoltaic inverters through the end of the year. Sun Edison has multiple photovoltaic projects around the U.S. already under contract and the 500kW inverter, recently unveiled by SatCon, is a particularly good fit to meet their demands for high efficiency power conversion.

Right on the heels of Colorado passing Amendment 37, Pennsylvania is waiting for State House approval on the passage of their own legislation mandating clean energy production. This new bill states that by 2020, utilities would be required to provide 18 percent of the electricity used in Pennsylvania from alternative sources, like wind, solar and waste coal. Wind should be the big winner for this region.

Solarworld AG (SWV.DE) will buy businesses from Shell to take over as the top maker of solar power equipment in the United States. The news prompted a leap in Solarworld shares, already buoyed by President Bush's pledge to promote new technology to make the United States less dependent on imported oil. The agreement covered Shell factories in Germany and the U.S. and sales operations in Germany, Singapore and South Africa. The price of the deal was not released and is still waiting for regulatory approval.

Aug 11-09 Solar PV Charles Morand A couple of weeks ago, I noted the importance of examining parameters other than module costs when gauging the economic competitiveness of solar PV energy. I noted how multiple factors influence the levelized cost of energy produced by solar PV systems, and thus its relative cost position on the grid. Nothing new here.   However, besides standard test conditions (STC) conversion efficiency, or nameplate conversion efficiency, public data on parameters other than cost per watt-peak is not always easy to come by. That's...

Energy Conversion Devices Inc (ENER) announced today that it has signed a two-year distribution agreement with Conergy AG of Germany for 1.5 MW of photovoltaic (PV) products. Conergy AG, a supplier of solar systems based in Hamburg, will distribute UNI-SOLAR(R) products in France, Greece, Spain, and Switzerland through its main subsidiaries.

SunPower Corporation (SPWR) announced its largest ever product supply contract. The supply agreement with PowerLight Corp., a global solar systems provider, calls for the delivery of $330 million of solar panels from 2005 through 2009. SunPower's industry-leading products will be incorporated into PowerLight's advanced solar power systems for commercial, government and new home residential customers worldwide. SunPower is trading up over 6% today on the news.

James Montgomery Sun emerging behind saguaro by Tom Konrad Scanning the new crop of reports from IHS, NPD Solarbuzz, and Navigant, here are a few key themes that emerge: Demand Is Shifting to Asia. Global solar PV demand reached 9 GW in 3Q13, up 6 percent from the prior quarter and nearly 20 percent from a year ago, according to Solarbuzz. China's share of that 3Q demand exceeded 25 percent, compared to 10 percent just two years ago. Meanwhile, the National Energy Administration reportedly has increased its 2014 targets for...