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PHILADELPHIA--The IEEE Photovoltaic Specialists Conference has come a long way since its humble beginnings in the early 1960s. As conference chair Tim Anderson explained at the Monday morning keynote session, this year’s event is the first time that the symposium has been held in a consecutive-year sequence and, along with SEIA’s colocated PV America tradeshow at the convention center, expects to draw about 4000 technologists and other solar professionals. He said that about 680 oral and poster technical presentations will be offered at PVSC during the week, as well as various tutorials and keynote talks--and PV America has a few dozen panels and speeches on its own, more business-oriented schedule.

Here are a few short takes from the conference sessions and exhibit hall.

John Byrne, director of the University of Delaware’s Center for Energy and Environmental Policy, who shared the Nobel Prize also given to some guy named Gore a few years back, delivered a thought-provoking keynote titled "New Energy for New Weather."  He deftly paired the challenges of global climate change (it is accelerating faster than the existing models have indicated) with suggestions/directives for how to promulgate energy efficiency, carbon cap and trade and other policies, and the "rapid diffusion of solar" to turn the tide before it’s too late and there is no polar icecap melt left to measure.

One of Byrne’s ideas centered on the notion of creating new  21st century organizations known as  "sustainable (solar?) energy utilities," or SEUs. These SEUs would partner with existing 20th century type utilities, building and investing in sustainable energy infrastructures--including massive amounts of solar and other green power and the smart grid necessary to go with it.

Bringing the notion close to the heart of downtown Philly, he claimed that within three blocks of the meeting site there was about 1 MW of solar potential on the rooftops of buildings, and about 5 MW within 10 blocks—in a city covering thousands of blocks.

Staying in the greater Philadelphia region (New Jersey, eastern Pennsylvania, Delaware), a local solar integrator/installer told me as we munched our cheesesteak-free lunches that despite the continuing difficulties in the credit and capital markets, their residential and commercial PV business is going quite well, replete with a backlog. They told me they are about to close the deal on a couple of megawatt project—their biggest yet.

On the opposite side of the practicality spectrum, I had to chuckle when I perused a poster titled "Photovoltaic Performance in the Venus Environment" written by a NASA research team. While space technologies have always been a integral component of the PVSC and certainly solar power has played a huge part in making the recent Mars missions successful and keeping satellites aloft, the challenges of making PV survive in the cell-melting temperatures of our other sister planet are daunting—and extremely esoteric.

Increasingly less esoteric is the emerging organic or plastic PV space. Therese "Terri" Jordan, Konarka’s biz dev VP and a plastics engineer in a previous life, showed me the various form factors they had on hand at the company’s PV America booth. From a half-watt panel to a 26-watt device, she and her colleague Jeff Aghjayan told me that the number of potential applications for the flexible, transparent solar panels just keeps growing—especially in the portable (handhelds) and outdoor (tents, awnings) markets as well as emerging sectors such as indoor sensors (remember that OPV works inside and outdoors, and at all kinds of angles to the light), smart cards (which need renewable power sources) and even disaster relief.

"Everything we do is new and emerging," she quipped.

Jordan said the company is making product on the continuous roll-to-roll process line at the repurposed old Polaroid plant in Massachusetts that Konarka acquired last year, though not in volumes close to full capacity. The spools of PV are segmented into what the company calls "lanes," which is Konarka-speak for the cells, so they call their devices "20-lane products" or "40-lane products" and so forth. (Please insert bowling alley and superhighway metaphors here.)

She said they add to the length of the material to get more current and increase the width to squeeze out more voltage.  Although lab conversion efficiencies are about 6.4%, production-level conversion efficiencies are around 3% now, with 4% likely by year’s end, with a goal of hitting 5% by 2010. That may not seem like much, but remember that this spectrum-spanning PV works just about anywhere there’s light.

Lifetimes are an issue for flexible OPV, with current spans in the 3-5 year range. Since the photoactive layers are sensitive to oxygen and moisture, the key to extending those lifetimes is improving the barrier encapsulation materials (sound familiar, CIGS folks?). Of course, Jordan, who generally had kind words for Konarka’s upstream suppliers, said they would like development work on the necessary material modifications to move faster.

One outfit that has been moving fast of late is cadmium-telluride upstart Abound Solar. In his presentation during the afternoon session on large-scale thin-film manufacturing, company cofounder and chief technologist Kurt Barth provided a bit of granularity on the Colorado-based firm’s manufacturing methods and product rollout.

Although not exactly giving away (m)any of the company’s crown jewels, Barth described Abound’s new automated 65-MW  production facility, where glass comes in at one end of the line and 2.5 hours later the finished module is getting boxed up for shipment. Aside from a few details of its "heated pocket deposition (HPD)" CdTe process and module encapsulation design that uses neither PVA nor lamination (a clever low-permeability edge-seal, UV-resistant, capital cost-reducing approach), I was struck by the rapidity of a couple of Abound’s timelines.

After some 15 years of research and development work at Colorado State University on this flavor of CadTel, Barth and the rest of the team formerly known as AVA have gone from a university-type pilot line to commercial production in about 30 months, and from signing the lease on an empty building to commissioning the facility for production in 14 months or so.

But Abound’s production-ramp work is not finished quite yet. During the Q&A following his presentation, Barth was  asked about yields (like he’s going to cite specifics). He got some laughs when he said that "automated systems are fabulous and a curse. When they run, they run great. When they don’t run, they don’t make anything."

But he did say that yields are scaling as expected.