Your daily dose of photovoltaic technology developments and solar news

One of the key tenets in First Solar’s cost-cutting and continuous improvement mantras is the ever-increasing conversion efficiency of its cadmium telluride thin-film panels.  "A tremendous amount of our ability to drive down cost has to do with improving the efficiency, one of the fundamental metrics that drives our technology," said company president Bruce Sohn during last week’s analysts meet. Given how progress has gone so far, 11% CdTe module efficiency should be right around the corner, with management exuding confidence that the magic number will pop to 12.5% within a few years. Beyond that, First says it will surpass the NREL "hero cell" efficiency of 16.5% with its production modules. But how?

The market watchers have already parsed, pared, and pontificated on First Solar’s newly modified business models, the nuts and bolts of what chairman/CEO Mike Ahearn calls the company’s "sustainable competitive cost advantage." But the updates on the manufacturing and technology sides of the business warrant some additional scrutiny. On the module side, company president Bruce Sohn outlined how the new five-year plan calls for 56-68% reductions in the cost per manufactured watt, driving down to a targeted range of 52 to 63 cents per watt by 2014. The largest portion of the cost cutting will be facilitated by conversion efficiency improvements (about 18-25% of the weight, with better throughputs, plant scaling, etc. also contributing). The impact of building factories in low-cost locations such as Malaysia has been much reduced in the current roadmap, dropping from accounting for 15-17% of the cost reduction improvements to 3-4% in the company’s new gameplan.

The solar industry has yet to have an "Intel Inside" marketing moment, but it's not for lack of trying--at least in some quarters. Remember the kinda-cool Sharp TV and newspaper ads that started running last fall? One of the latest efforts in increasing the public's photovoltaic awareness--and hopefully system sales--comes from SunPower, and its "Seize Today" campaign launched in early June. While waiting on my flight and strolling the San Jose International Airport earlier today, I came across two examples of the U.S. solar company's PVangelism on the terminal walls.

When it comes to their knowledge about solar power, many Americans are both exuberant in their desire to see solar more quickly become a larger part of the country's energy portfolio and ignorant of just how much sun-based electricity is being generated by their utilities. A slim majority would pay more on their monthly energy bills if their utility ramped up the percentage of its power provided by renewables, but a significant minority would not. Many think the U.S. leads the world in solar, and most believe that the optimal, most efficient way to deploy solar power is on private homes. Those are some of the findings in the "Summer Solstice" thought leadership survey of the U.S. public's "understanding and opinions about solar energy," designed and analyzed by Ketchum Global Research Network and carried out by Braun Research on behalf of Applied Materials.

PHILADELPHIA—No one was jonesing for CIGS at last week's IEEE Photovoltaic Specialists Conference—copper-indium-gallium-(di)selenide thin film-related programming, that is. Several oral and poster sessions were dedicated to the technology (or, in some cases, its copper-indium-sulfide cousin), while CIGS-specific presentations on window and contact layers as well as characterization and analysis approaches were also prevalent in other sessions. For a PV food group with less than 1% market share of the installed system base, CIGS had a mighty presence at the annual event.