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HAMBURG, GERMANY--Chip Shots hasn’t been AWOL this week, but engaged on the frontlines and back corridors of the annual European Photovoltaic Solar Energy Conference and Exhibition here. The weather has been mild in Germany’s main port and second-biggest city, and the energy and information flow at the 24th edition of EU PVSEC intense. The mood was relatively buoyant among the attendees and exhibitors, their cautious optimism tempered by the continuing travails of the global economy, scarce (though less so) financing, cheap modules, and the lack of visibility for the industry’s near-term prospects.

There will be much to muse about in the blog in the coming weeks (also look for a fresh drip-feed of video interviews at PV-Tech Solar Leaders TV), but for now, here are a few stories from one of the PV biz’s main events.

A recurring theme of my week was the European copper-indium-gallium-(di)selenide thin-film PV sector. One unexpected turn in that thematic journey came when I met with a hot-shot sales director from the CIGS team at centrotherm photovoltaics (they of the lower-case corporate name). I don’t usually meet for a booth briefing with someone from the sales division—C- and V-level execs, process engineers and managers, product gurus, and marketing folks are the usual suspects. But after a few minutes with Sohaila Setayesh, I was almost ready to sign on the dotted line for one of the company’s turnkey module lines.

The former Oerlikon deal-maker told me how she had closed a couple of multimillion-euro turnkey contracts in Asia and Europe over the past eight months (she’s only been with centrotherm for less than a year), with another deal soon to be finalized. Setayesh is no technical slouch. She racked up experience as a process engineer during her years at Philips Semiconductor before getting her MBA in Florida.

During our conversation, she touted the turnkey’s TAKT time (60 seconds), pitched its low capex and opex, pointed out the contract line’s simplicity and cost effectiveness, detailed its nontoxic sequential/two-step CIGS absorber process (including the proprietary atmospheric selenium evaporative capping and phase-transformative annealing steps), and talked up the turnkey model’s path to gigawatt-scale production.

Centrotherm is the first to offer a turnkey solution for CIGS, and its early success in a down economic climate (helped, no doubt, by Setayesh’s considerable sales chops) bodes well for the offering’s market penetration. And did I mention the guarantees of 12% conversion efficiencies (at a contracted 50MW output) and 85% yield?

Another CIGS moment involved one of the more controversial and intriguing companies in the sector. I ran into Global Solar’s Mark McIntyre at his company’s booth, and he told me that there was a new Nanosolar utility-scale panels at the Blitzstrom stand. I ambled over there and could see the sizeable module leaning against the wall behind the glass door of the booth’s private meeting room. I asked Beck Energy’s Frank Bechmann if I could get a closer look—no problem--and he walked me to the room for a peek.

Getting a close look at the 6 horizontal and 14 vertical rows of specially “stitched” together printed flex-foil CIGS cells was pretty cool—it doesn’t look like anything else on the market. Bechmann told me of plans to install a sizeable array of Nanos next to the CIGS company’s new 640MWp panel assembly plant near Berlin, and that Blitzstrom/Beck (which also uses lots of First Solar CdTe modules) expects to be installing CIGS TFPV panels in earnest in 2010.

CIGS and Applied Materials don’t usually get mentioned in the same breath, but for the first time that I can remember the four-letter TFPV acronym showed up in one of the company’s presentations. During its analyst/press dog-and-pony briefing at the Hotel Kempinski not far from the Hamburg Messe, Applied’s Mark Pinto showed a slide titled “Additional opportunities in TF coatings.” The foil listed stand-alone rigid and flexible coating systems (which came with the Applied Films acquisition) as being in play for top- and back-contact deposition for CIGS, CdTe, and a-Si as well as other applications that all add up to a projected $200 million-plus market by 2012, according to Applied’s calculations.

Pinto’s boss, Mike Splinter, had kicked things off with an overview that sounded the company’s latest clarion call – “industrializing solar,” what Applied’s big kahuna called “the essence of our mission in solar.” Toward the end of his talk, Splinter cracked mildly wise, but his point bears repeating.

“Today I heard the words ‘mature’ and ‘solar’ in the same sentence. I didn’t think that those two things could go together at this point in this technology’s development,” he smiled. “I’ve made the analogy that the stage that we’re in in this industry is much more like the ‘70s in the semiconductor industry. That was a time when different technologies were being tried, different memory technologies were out there. As those technologies moved down to one and standards were set, the industry was able to grow very very quickly in the ‘80s and ‘90s into the mature industry that we know today.”

Although it’s hard to dispute Splinter’s general point that the photovoltaic manufacturing value chain and solar industry in general are far from “mature,” the wares and services on display in the PVSEC expo halls—as well as the technological presentations at the conference--reflected the accelerated evolutionary progress being made by many of the exhibiting companies.

WUERTH SOLAR'S CIGS PANEL WATERFALL, EU PVSEC 09

TOP AND BOTTOM PHOTOS BY TOM CHEYNEY