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Although no trade show can really be seen as marking a paradigm-shifting, game-changing turning point for an industry, this year’s Intersolar North America 2010 certainly benefited from good timing.

As I wrote in the introduction to the Photovoltaics International Lite edition distributed at the event: “Megawatts of new power systems are being installed every week, from residential rooftops to commercial/industrial/governmental sites to larger fields in the U.S. southwest, Ontario, and elsewhere. On the manufacturing front, module factories are under construction or ramping across the continent, with many more nearing shovel-ready status. Key start-up/early-stage companies are pushing hard into production mode, well aware they need to expedite the execution of their commercial gameplan. Generous local, state, and federal grants, tax breaks, and other incentives have stimulated the market....”

I spoke with and listened to scores of companies and individuals at the San Francisco show and have begun to digest some of those discussions and presentations. Here’s an appetizer, with more blog courses to be served in coming weeks.   

Familiar faces from my days as an editor covering the semiconductor manufacturing industry continued to pop up with photovoltaic makeovers during the course of the week.

Tokyo Electron, long one of the leading process equipment suppliers to the chipmaking and flat panel display industries, has been sticking its toe in the PV waters for a few years. TEL makes a fair amount of deposition tools for its partner Sharp Solar’s tandem-junction amorphous-silicon thin-film production line, has a sales and customer support deal with Oerlikon Solar for much of Asia, and has invested in next-gen materials startups such as Nanogram, Unidym, and Nanoco and that might have a role to play in PV gens 2.5, 3.0 and beyond. But the venerable Japanese company is not quite ready to spill the beans on its emerging solar strategy.

I spoke briefly with TEL America’s Harvey Frye at the firm’s elegant reception at the St. Regis Hotel. He told me he splits his time between semiconductor and energy concerns, describing the company’s PV approach as a “three-legged stool,” with Sharp, Oerlikon, and what he called the “incubators” as the respective legs.

He also offered an outdoorsman’s analogy for where the company currently plays in PV:  “We’re still fishing from the bank, but we have our waders on.” Once the company decides to get deeper into that ever-flowing river and really start to net some fish, it could very well become a serious player in the PV technology and production sector. 

Downstream from TEL, Gordon Brinser, Solar World Industries America’s VP of operations (who used to work in the semi materials biz), presented at the PV Fab Managers Forum—where he was the only solar factory manager or reasonable facsimile on the conference’s program. During his talk, he said that the supply chain strategy for products that feed the bill of materials must change in order to hammer down costs, as that BOM comprises 60-70% of the total system cost.

On the innovation front, he put the onus on the crystallization and wafering folks to accelerate their technological efforts. He noted how those areas are lagging the cell and module sector’s recent advances and called for more focus on crystallization/wafering because of those production steps’ potential to greatly reduce the cost of the c-Si bill of materials.

I ran into the SolarWorld VP again at the company’s now-(in)famous press conference (at least in terms of search engine interest), where “former oilman” Larry “J.R. Ewing” Hagman (who has a 663-panel, 94kw [DC] PV system at his ranch in Ojai, CA) was trotted out as the new SolarWorld pitchman for its “Shine, Baby, Shine!” marketing campaign. (For those not clued into why the company chose its playfully pointed slogan, it’s in direct response to the likes of Sarah Palin, who have used the phrase “drill, baby, drill!” when calling for more domestic petroleum exploration/exploitation in the U.S., even in wildlife refuges and other environmentally sensitive areas.)

After the hoopla subsided, Brinser shared some information of a more technical nature concerning an efficiency-enhancing technology where just about every crystalline-silicon cell manufacturer worth its salt is devoting R&D resources—selective emitters.  The firm is working on six different SE approaches, he said, emphasizing that whatever emitter-processing technique is chosen must be easy to produce, reliable for the lifetime of the cell/module, and not add cost. 

Another familiar face from the semiconductor equipment realm—Varian SEA—is ratcheting up efforts to provide a defect-free junction-formation solution for selective emitter and other cell architectures. Biz dev VP Paul Sullivan [NAME CORRECTED FROM EARLIER VERSION OF BLOG] briefed me on the company’s new cell-processing system known as Solion. The toolset uses a variant of the company’s ion implantation technology called “precision patterned implant,” or PPI (not to be confused with the “producer price index,” although certainly it is being touted as a low-cost approach).

Noting how it seems to be “the year of the selective emitter although it’s a 30-year old idea,” Sullivan shared data where Solion’s process has been shown to achieve efficiencies of 18.8% with module costs of $1.38 per watt-peak, numbers that top other techniques by a half to full percentage point in efficiency and several cents of mod costs.

He described how the solar cell wafer is implanted with a mask process that creates the selective emitter in one step, which is followed by an annealing step that activates the dopant. One of the key talking points for Solion is process simplification, since the single-pass Varian approach replaces the current PSG clean and edge isolation steps, effectively eliminating the role of standard diffusion furnaces.

Varian faces a steep acceptance path ahead, since risk-averse manufacturers are notoriously uneager to switch out incumbent tools and processes unless they hear a very, very convincing case to do so—especially for a retrofit of an existing line. The company will be shipping several production systems to customers by year’s end, according to Sullivan.

The blasts from my semiconductor past also included a company that has entered the solar PV space through acquisition—silicon-on-insulator pioneers Soitec and its concentrator PV subsidiary,
Concentrix Solar. CEO Hansjörg Lerchenmüller enthusiastically described to me how his firm (which spun off from Fraunhofer ISE in 2005 before being bought by Soitec last year) has the “most straightforward, simplest CPV” (no secondary optics in the design), the “slimmest bill of materials of any CPV system,” and high confidence of reaching 50% cell conversion efficiencies because of the parent company’s expertise in engineering substrates and manipulating nanolayers. 

Although the technical discussion was intriguing, Lerchenmüller’s comments about that most necessary of project prerequisites—bankability—caught my attention. The term is not something one usually associates with the concentrator photovoltaics crowd, given the paucity of CPV projects producing electricity and the reticence of the money guys to place bets on what many see as an unproven, risky technology.

But that could be changing, as companies such as Amonix, SolFocus, and Concentrix start to deploy megawatt-scale systems, ramp manufacturing capacities, and bolster their data sets to prove that CPV is a viable, bankable option.

He told me that the company addressed the bankability question in earnest in 2009, establishing close contact with several project-financing banks in Europe. A third-party report published after a tough due-diligence/quality assessment of Concentrix led two of those banks to confirm late last year that they would finance projects using the company’s CPV systems (although any project would still have to be evaluated on an individual basis).

Lerchenmüller called the banks’ decision the “single biggest milestone in Concentrix’s life.” One country where the emerging financial confidence in Concentrix and the concentrator crowd in general could get a kick-start is Italy, because of a CPV-specific feed-in tariff of 150MW-200MW in preparation there, according to the CEO.

The CPV Consortium (of which Concentrix is a member) believes the market will reach around 20MW this year, but sees 2011 as the beginning of a major growth spurt, with the sector moving toward 150MW installed; by 2015, the sky could be the limit, as projections range as high as 2GW.

“From the manufacturing point of view, there’s no issue—scaling production is not an issue,” said Lerchenmuller of meeting the demand. “From the installation point of view, there’s no issue. The issues are site development, permitting, and financing.”

With promising signs that the bankability challenge may be less daunting, the PV technology with the best energy density per square meter installed (at least in those regions with the highest direct irradiation) may finally be getting the traction that its proponents have sought for years.