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Over the past year or two, rarely does a lunar cycle go by without yet another announcement of First Solar adding to its European, North American, or even Australian project pipeline or having an installation completed using megawatts of their ebony glass-on-glass laminate PV modules. The rate of growth of its U.S. utility business has been especially impressive, with big wins scored with Sempra, Southern California Edison, and Tri-State in New Mexico. But the biggest fishes in the project barrel are the development assets acquired by First from OptiSolar, including the massive proposed 550MW (AC) Topaz Farm PV power station site to be built to feed electricity to Pacific Gas & Electric in central California’s Carrizo Plain area in eastern San Luis Obispo County.

Don’t expect to see any “Welcome to Future Home of Topaz Solar Farm” signage out on Bitterwater Road off California Highway 58 though (see accompanying photos). The miles of flat farm and ranch land are anything but shovel-ready for solar, and the location raises questions like the ability of the two-lane highways to handle fleets of trucks carrying million of panels, hundreds of inverters, and other balance of system components.

“Those are the kinds of logistics that we still need to be working on,” admits Sohn. “The Opti team really had not gotten into the detail on the engineering side of the project, so we’re starting to do that. I think that our organization already does have a lot of that sort of competence; handling logistics, the flow of materials; we’re starting to learn that, the layout and the design, the optimization on a particular property.

“That’s real important from a utility company’s perspective,” he posits. "Utility companies are really not interested in buying solar modules, at least that’s been my experience. They have very little interest in buying a solar module but they are perfectly happy buying millions of them if they’re buying a solar power plant. That’s what we’re delivering to them - a power plant.”

The company plans to start development of the Topaz site “sometime next year,” says Sohn. “We’re still working out the details. There’s quite a bit of permitting and things like that we have to go through. It won’t be limited by engineering, it will be limited by permitting and regulatory processes, which unfortunately is typically the issue with these projects.

“That’s one of those things that slow things down in the United States in particular,” he grouses. ”It’s common to take 18-24 months from the time that you start to develop a project to the time you put the first shovel in the ground in the U.S. Whether it’s dealing with the property and the real estate acquisition, the general technical permitting, the environmental permitting, the transmission approval processes, or the power purchase agreements that go along with these projects, all those things have a lot of regulatory requirements associated with them. That’s a real challenge for us, and it’s something that’s significantly different from what we see in Europe.”

By contrast, Sohn points out that “you can go and talk about a project and in the course of a few months, you can start the construction over there.  What can take 8, 10, 12 weeks over in Germany can take the same number of quarters in the U.S. That’s really a reflection of the effectiveness that was coded into the EEG. There’s no need for a utility company or any of the regulatory bodies to be slow about permitting these projects. It’s to their advantage to get it going quicker over there.”

Applying copy smart to the EPC side

First Solar’s manufacturing and technology scalability mantra is now being applied to the construction side, explains Sohn. “What our strategy is with engineering and construction is to do in the field what we’ve done in our factories. So we use terms like ‘copy smart’ out in the field. We talk about installing these arrays in a very reproducible sort of manner, so we can teach someone how to do these installations, and then be able to install them very rapidly.

“Two of the parameters that we use internally are ‘velocity of installing,’ in kilowatts a day, and the other is  ‘time to energy,’ from the time you start a portion of the array to the time that that part of the array is actually generating energy. Obviously, we want to increase the velocity and shorten that time to energy. Because that’s the objective – again, we’re not selling modules, we’re selling energy, and if it’s not producing energy, we really haven’t sold anything, both in a figurative sense and in a revenue recognition sense.

“That’s a lot of our focus right now,” he continues. “We apply theory of constraints in the field, we apply logistics management, just-in-time inventory management control, MIS utilized to maintain communications in the field, apply our safety methodologies in the field, all of those sorts of things, the kind of things we learned in building a factory and replicating a factory, we’re putting out in the field.”

‘You gotta think big’

As the interview winds down, Sohn waxes passionate about what’s needed from the solar energy industry to help ameliorate the intertwined geopolitical, socioeconomic, and climate change issues. “If you’re going to solve those problems, it’s gotta be much bigger. We gotta talk multigigawatts going out there, because that’s really where we’re headed. It can’t but be just one gigawatt here and one gigawatt there. We gotta be thinking about what’s the 5GW company, what’s the 10GW company, and what limits us from getting up to 2 and 5 and 10?

“It quickly gets to the point where it’s not necessarily the technology, it’s not necessarily the supply chain, it’s the things related to the development of the projects, the governmental policies. Those are the kinds of things that may significantly limit the industry’s ability to scale to those levels where we can solve those world problems.”

(Photos by Tom Cheyney)

Click here to go to the first part of the interview, and here to go to the second part. Click here to go to the archive page link to the entire article as it appears in Photovoltaics International’s fourth edition.