Your daily dose of photovoltaic technology developments and solar news

One solar firm will soon have a shot at the kind of brand recognition that most photovoltaics players can only dream of. Yingli Green Energy will accompany the likes of Budweiser, McDonald’s, Castrol, and Satyam as one of the official sponsors of the upcoming FIFA World Cup 2010, the global championship of football (what we Yanks call “soccer”) starting June 11 in South Africa. As historic as it is, Yingli’s successful wooing of Sepp Blatter and his FIFA minions does not lack for irony.

Intel likes to talk the green talk and walk it too with ever-smaller carbon footprints, buying copious amounts of renewable energy credits, investing millions of dollars in cleantech startups through its development fund, spinning off solar cell start-up Spectrawatt, and researching organic photovoltaics in its labs. The microprocessor mavens will soon increase their own direct use of solar energy, having recently announced plans for eight PV systems, collectively capable of generating about 2.5MW of electricity, to be built on several sites in the western United States. Some additional digging reveals a few new details about Intel’s latest PV projects, including the brand of modules to be deployed—First Solar.

After a week away from the blog, I noticed a few items apart from the German feed-in tariff controversy that merited discussion. The first Solar Short Takes edition of the new year recognizes an emerging solar materials powerhouse region, ponders a Hong Kong company that seems to be in it for the long haul, and examines a recent CIS/CIGS conversion efficiency report.

In case you’ve been asleep and not checking on the progress made in the research community, here’s a news flash: nanotechnology will be one of the key enablers of the next (AKA third, fourth) generation(s) of photovoltaic cells and modules. Whether done in solution/print processing in atmospheric conditions, a more standard vacuum process, or some sort of sci-fi scenario to be deciphered later, the scaling down of materials could quite possibly lead to the scaling up of efficiencies, at costs competitive with or better than what the first- and second-gen PV crowd can muster.

Whose information should you trust more, an agency of the Federal government or a major solar company? In the case of the recently announced U.S. Advanced Energy Manufacturing Investment Tax Credits, the advantage goes to the private sector. Because of an error in the Department of Energy’s spreadsheet of credit recipients, a $153.3 million discrepancy has propelled REC Silicon from well down the list of tax credit recipients to the top of the charts.