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Global Solar’s CIGS solar PV field may be big, but is it the biggest?
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Global Solar Energy is rightly proud of the rows of gleaming panels that make up the new 750-KW solar photovoltaic electric power system sitting on a little more than seven acres of desert across the parking lot and alongside its headquarters production facility in south Tucson, AZ. The copper-indium-gallium-(di)selenide thin-film PV purveyor's own strings of flexible CIGS cells reside in each of the 6600 ground-mounted modules, which were assembled nearby at Solon's 60-MW North American manufacturing site.
The system will generate an annual juice flow of about 1.1 million kilowatt-hours (AC), which calculates to approximately 1.46 kilowatt-hours per installed kilowatt (DC) of PV, given the 110-120-watt power specs of the CIGS modules. Since the system is expected to turn photons into electrons for 25 years, Global's CIGS field should have a lifetime comparable to other thin-film and crystalline-silicon PV installations.
Solon designed the array and installed its modules, while MMA Renewable Ventures finances, owns, and operates the system. Satcon provided 13 inverters for the project, according to sources at MMA (who also told me the system was turned on in October--so why the wait in announcing its activation?). Global buys the power generated from MMA under the constructs of long-term commercial financing deal AKA the proverbial power purchase agreement.
The project also got a boost from Tucson Electric Power, which "helped fund the project through its agreement to purchase the renewable energy credits generated by the array’s clean energy," credits which will "help TEP pursue goals established under Arizona’s Renewable Energy Standard, which calls on electric utilities to work toward securing 15% of their power from renewable resources by 2015," according to the press release.
It's a sweet renewable-energy circle-of-life story, where products made at Global Solar's plant are now helping handle as much as a quarter of the factory's electrical load, and the employees can see the fruits of their labors in living color, up close and personal. In the process, the company will garner valuable commercial-scale data on peak power ratings, module stabilization and efficiencies, and overall system behavior of the CIGS array--a real-world/real-time product performance feedback loop right on Global's doorstep.
As impressive as Global's new system might be, one of the company's claims deserves further scrutiny--that of being the "world's largest CIGS thin-film solar array." Mike Gering, the no-nonsense president/CEO of Global, stated in the announcement that "we are proud to be instrumental in this industry first and excited to be a part of one of MMA’s cutting-edge projects. As the only CIGS provider to have its technology powering a commercial-scale solar array, Global Solar Energy continues to prove itself as a solar industry leader."
Let's stipulate to Global's position as industry leaders. The company is one of a handful of concerns that have actually shipped megawatts of CIGS-based product and is well on its way to volume-production levels in its Tucson and new Berlin fabs. But is Global the only CIGS outfit with its cells/modules providing sun-juice for a commercial-scale array?
It depends on how you define CIGS and whether one of the quarternary compound's cousins, CIS (copper indium selenide) should be considered in any Guinness Book-like comparisons.
There's actually a much bigger CIS PV-powered array operating in Albacete, Spain, according to a recent report published on the solarserver.de site. Würth Solar has about 41,600 of its CIS modules deployed in a 3.26-MW system in the Spanish countryside, a project undertaken with its Swiss partner, Sputnik Engineering, who installed 30 of its central inverters there. The article says that the farm produces about 1.6 kilowatt-hours per kilowatt of installed nominal output--a slightly better spec than Global's.
When I put this question (via email through an intermediary) to Global's Tim Teich, the company's VP of sales and marketing replied: "I saw this, but this (meaning Global's array) is CIGS, not CIS on glass-–this is flex film in a panel as opposed to direct deposition on glass."
There's the rub. CIS is not CIGS, and flex cells strung up discretely in module boxes are not the same as the monolithic integration approach used by Würth where the various films are deposited right on a glass substrate.
That's true enough in a narrowly defined sense, but the industry--including the likes of the National Renewable Energy Lab and Fraunhofer Institute, just about every analyst and researcher, and much of the TFPV community--tends to group CIS together with CIGS (as well as with their other absorber-layered cousin, CIGSSe).
So is Global correct in calling its CIGS field the biggest PV power system of its kind on the planet? Strictly speaking, yes; generally speaking, not quite.
But then, "world's largest CIGS-on-flex cells strung in glass modules thin-film solar array" just doesn't have the same ring to it.
(Photo courtesy of MMA Renewable Ventures)
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