Your daily dose of photovoltaic technology developments and solar news

In the words of the inimitable Yogi Berra, “it’s déjà vu all over again,” as yet another announcement has been made by a solar company about plans for a new PV module assembly plant in the United States. This time, Solar Power, Inc., an up-and-coming vertically integrated firm based in Roseville, CA (with module manufacturing in Shenzhen, China), will build a 50MW factory on its home turf in Sacramento County. A big reason for the move is an initial pledge of $24.7 million in American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funds coming SPI’s way, in the form of an RZFB, or Recovery Zone Facility Bond, from the county. SPI exec VP Jeff Pontius filled me in on some of the details.

Kyocera Solar and Heliene Canada are among those companies hoping to tap into one of the fastest-growing markets on Planet Photovoltaica--North America. Joining the increasing number of firms pursuing a distributed-manufacturing model, each outfit has recently announced plans for building module-making facilities in hotbed areas for renewables--Kyocera in San Diego, CA, and Heliene in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario—with an eye toward getting product to market later this year. Although both plants will be manufacturing crystalline-silicon-type modules, it turns out the two enterprises have differences and commonalities in their approaches. In recent interviews with PV Tech, executives from both companies shared more details about the respective factories.

The “press embargo” is a fact of life in the media biz. It usually comes in the form of a press release that a trusted journalist receives in advance from a company, PR agency, or other organization, with strict instructions not to breathe a word of it before the agreed-to date and time.

There’s only a handful of industry veterans who have invested as much blood, sweat, tears, and time into the development of flexible thin-film solar photovoltaics as Jeff Britt. He joined Global Solar Energy in 1998, when the company’s copper-indium-gallium-(di)selenide technology was an R&D project, and any product commercialization years away.

It’s official: First Solar is now the first in solar. The just-released financials of the company that made thin-film PV bankable find 2009 revenues passing $2 billion, annual output hitting 1.1GW, and production costs dropping to 84 cents per watt. The executive team’s 2010 guidance doesn’t deviate from the numbers they offered in mid-December, with the high end of revenue expectations coming up just short of $3 billion. A few data points and assumptions in the latest presentation warrant closer scrutiny and extrapolation.

One of Silicon Valley’s CIGS thin-film PV contingent that has been flying off the radar since the middle of 2009 is SoloPower. After I spoke with CTO Bulent Basol at the IEEE PVSC in early June, the company went through a change of command later that month. Lou DiNardo took over the CEO reins from contentious cofounder Houmayoun Talieh, with Basol, the other cofounder, also exiting.

New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson likes to say that his state is “becoming the center of North America’s solar industry,” but California, Ontario, and others might take issue with his understandable boosterism. Still, you’ll get no argument that the so-called “Land of Enchantment” can lay claim to being among the leaders in the solar revolution taking hold across the country.

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.