Your daily dose of Photovoltaic Technology Developments and Solar News

The Edenvale area of San Jose is becoming a little hotbed of photovoltaic activity, but the latest company set to move there remains in stealth-mode information lockdown. As the San Jose Mercury News reported Wednesday, Stion has become the third PV firm over the past year or so, joining CIGS concerns Nanosolar and SoloPower, to succumb to the city of San Jose's offer of redevelopment monies for manufacturing tooling ($700,000) and workforce training ($100,000) as part of Mayor Chuck Reed's "green vision"/emerging technologies fund agenda. The company will move from its current Menlo Park location into a one-time IBM building in the south San Jose neighborhood. Read more >>

Few places cry out more for the widepsread implementation of solar energy solutions than the desert state of Arizona. Can you imagine the sweet irony of all those air conditioners working overtime during the blazing summer months, eventually getting their power from household PV modules, building-integrated arrays, or even from solar power channeled through the grid? Read more >>

It's the end of week and time to follow up on a couple of recent stories, including First Solar's latest results and cautionary tales about the Chinese semiconductor industry. Read more >>

If you've looked at Applied Materials' 1QFY08 results announced yesterday, your eyes are not deceiving you: the equipment company booked more new orders from its global services, display, and energy and environment solutions units combined than from its silicon segment---$1.385 billion for the threesome compared with $1.075 billion for the core semi equipment business. Read more >>

How do flexible electronics, American football, financial and market results, politics, and photovoltaics go together? They don't, except as fodder for some Monday morning perspectives on Chip Shots. Read more >>

Although they both participate in the emerging copper indium gallium (di)selenide (CIGS) thin-film photovoltaics sector, Ascent Solar Technology and International Solar Electric Technology (ISET) have at least as many differences between them as things in common. Read more >>

Few solar photovoltaic sectors exhibit as volatile a combination of hype and promise as the copper indium gallium (di)selenide (CIGS) thin-film segment. A handful of companies--Global Solar, Wurth, Showa Shell, for example---are already manufacturing relatively modest amounts of commercial products using CIGS (or its cousin, CIS) films on glass, stainless steel, or flexible substrates, while a larger number are just developing (or trying to develop) processes, building and characterizing (or trying to build and characterize) pilot or initial manufacturing lines, or talking (and talking) about building volume-manufacturing facilities. Read more >>

One of the original purposes of blogs, once known as Weblogs, was to offer links to interesting tidbits all over the World Wide Interweb (sic), something Chip Shots does from time to time in addition to the usual onslaught of rants, musings, analyses, and news coverage. Here are a few interesting reads from the first days of the new year. Read more >>

As we reported in Fabtech's pair o' blogs last week, Nanosolar announced it had shipped its first CIGS-based solar panels and put its second roll-to-roll manufactured panel up for auction on eBay, with the proceeds destined for charity. Because of some regulations on the auction site about using it for charitable fundraising purposes, eBay canceled the Nanosolar activity late last week, so don't try and join in the bidding fun (which, btw, had skyrocketed from the starting price of 99 cents past $13,000 with almost a week to go). For now, panel no. 2 will stay at the thin-film photovoltaic upstart's Silicon Valley HQ, where it will keep panel no. 1 company. Read more >>

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