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This edition of Solar Short Takes does a bit of number crunching of the recent project sell-off news from First Solar, checks progress by Solarion on the CIGS-on-plastic front, notes MiaSole’s recent re-emergence from the PR closet, finds Trina saying yes to MES, questions Applied Materials’ buy of Advent Solar, and offers the aloha lowdown on next year’s tropically inclined IEEE PVSC event.

The sale of the 21MW (AC) Blythe PV power plant to NRG marks the second move by First Solar to cash in on some of its hundreds of millions of potential dollars in project assets, following the announcement in early October to sell off the 20MW Sarnia, Ontario, site to Enbridge.

Both projects, when completed by the end of 2009 (yup, that's right--First's Alan Bernheimer confirmed they'll be done next month), will be among the largest active PV systems--and certainly thelargest thin-film arrays--in North America. Florida Power & Light’s recently activated crystalline-silicon-powered 25MW DeSoto Next Generation Solar Energy Center--which made me smile even before I had my morning coffee when I saw President Obama speaking at the center on CNN last month, with its thousands of solar panels lined up behind him--is the biggest in the States, at least for now.

Two more projects in First Solar’s pipeline will come online by the end of 2010 that will dwarf the Florida installation—the 30MW (AC) ground-mounted system being built for electric power supplier Tri-State in New Mexico and the 48MW (AC) added to the existing 10MW at the Sempra Boulder City/Copper Mountain site in Nevada. Although double-digit megawatt-scale PV systems remain rare, especially in North America, in a few years they will become more commonplace and triple-digit beasts will start to colonize the earth.

Since a Short Takes blog would not be complete without mention of the copper-indium-gallium-(di)selenide TFPV community, congrats to German CIGS-on-plastic company Solarion for successfully (and internally) testing its flex cells under the rigors of the IEC 61646 damp-heat test regimen--a thousand hours at 85% relative humidity and 85°C. Solarion’s main polymeric competitor, Ascent Solar, made a similar announcement in August. These results as well as recent updates from Global Solar and several materials companies suggest serious progress is being made on the main bugaboo of flexible CIGS—a manufacturable, relatively inexpensive yet durable moisture encapsulation layer.

At the PVSEC show in Hamburg, I met with Solarion’s CEO Karsten Otte, who gave me a technology and business overview of the Leipzig-based company. Rather than go directly to market with a flexible plastic module like Ascent plans to do, the first product from the nearly 10-year-old German firm will be a 80cm × 130cm glass-glass panel, with nominal power ratings in the 70-90W range, incorporating some 246 polyimide CIGS cells from its roll-to-roll pilot line—not unlike the approach taken by Global with its CIGS strings lurking inside modules assembled by Solon.

Otte told me that the key difference between Solarion’s process and those of the other CIS/CIGS companies lies in its use of a proprietary process, ion-beam-assisted deposition (IBAD), to lay down the absorber materials, which he said is similar to a plasma etch or ion beam etch in semiconductor manufacturing.

The low-temperature process allows the polyimide substrate to be kept at much lower temps than other CIGS (how low it can go, we don’t know and they won’t say), and the use of the ion source concentrates the energy where it needs to go (after turning those pure selenium vapors into ions)—into growing the CIGS layer, not into the substrate. As a result of this supposedly incomparable absorber materials growth rate, Otte claims Solarion’s approach results in cost savings on thermal budget and materials utilization.

The German outfit, which early last month reported cell conversion efficiencies of 13.4% in tests conducted by Fraunhofer ISE, plans to ramp to at least 10MW of production next year. The tools have been developed (the company has already worked through several generations of coating gear to date), and key “industrial equipment makers,” Otte explained, adding that Solarion will also scale the width of the current 20cm substrate to at least 60cm at some point.

It still trails Ascent in the race to get to market (and in production status and efficiencies, for that matter), but like so many other CIGS and thin-film PV companies, the next year or two will be crucial in Solarion’s ability to achieve high-yielding volume manufacturing and opening commercial channels.

Speaking of CIGS’ companies actually getting product to customers, MiaSolé (a whipping boy of the “hundreds of millions invested, with no real return” crowd) has emerged from its self-imposed Stealth 2.0 mode with a triptych of news blurbs. The company has hired a new VP of manufacturing, its modules have passed UL and IEC certification, and the TFPV venture has shipped an unknown amount of modules to about 20 customers in the U.S. and Europe.

Based on what I saw during my own visit to the company in the summer of 2008, the recent news suggests that MiaSolé boss Joe Laia and his team have come a long way over the past year or so.

The factory floor then consisted of the one and only CIGS cell production line (OK, I’ll admit that watching the flexible metal foil substrate flip from horizontal to vertical as it rolled into the sputtering chambers was mesmerizing), but the moduling part of the facility had more empty space than equipment sets.

At the time, Laia pounded home the new corporate mantra: “For MiaSolé, over the next 6 to 12 months, it’s about execution. I think you need to demonstrate the technology, that you can take the technology that you have and make a compelling product at a compelling price. There’s no magic
in any of this."

Greentech Media’s Eric Wesoff blogged from Solar Power International that he spoke with a couple of MiaSolé company execs, who told him they had 60MW of capacity online with 60 more to come, and that efficiencies (module, I suspect) were at 10.5%, with a capex of 50 cents per watt in their plans. Watch this space for more details on the latest developments from the newly resurgent CIGS player.

On the crystalline front, one detail I neglected to include in my blog on the Chinese quintet of companies and their dramatic shipment surge comes from Trina Solar. During its conference call, company COO Sean Tzou noted the installation of MES software, or manufacturing execution systems, on the shop floor, calling it an advantageous method of bringing down costs and “realizing quite a lot of efficiency gains.” But he didn’t say which supplier’s MES package was used.

A head-scratcher from the crystalline realm is Applied Materials’ recent acquisition of the assets of Advent Solar. Although it’s been reported that the price tag amounted to pennies on the dollar, I wonder what about the deceased company’s admittedly cool yet apparently economically unviable (so far, at least if the tens of millions of dollars that Advent burned through are any indication) emitter wrap-through back-contact cell technology and so-called “monolithic module assembly” will “add value” to AMAT’s cSi PV toolkit.

Head honcho Mike Splinter said in the company’s recent conference call that the Advent tech won’t produce “meaningful sales” for AMAT before 2011, and even that may be a stretch. As one industry observer told me recently, Advent’s scheme “is not cheap enough or easy to make…and manufacturing [in PV] rules.”

Finally, you may want to start crafting your proposal memo for a very compelling expense-account boondoggle, because next year the 35th edition of the IEEE Photovoltaic Specialists Conference takes place June 20-25 in the capital of the Aloha State—Honolulu.

The main event for PV technologists will be adding two new topical areas to its traditional eight categories--one on organic PV, the other focusing on advances in PV characterization—and will have some 60,000 square feet of expo hall space.

For those with a mind to write a technical article for the conference, the call for papers has been officially issued. Abstracts are due by midnight Feb. 10, 2010, with acceptance notification happening by March 22.

As the Hawaiians say, a hui hou!