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It's been a long time since I've attended a trade show as mobbed as the Solar Power 2007 event convening in Long Beach, CA, this week. When the exhibit hall opened yesterday morning, a throng already gathered outside the doors. Within an hour of the opening surge, it was a struggle just to make one's way up and down the crowded aisles. In the convention center foyer, the registration line stretched most of the length of the adjoining hallway, as hundreds of attendees waited to get badged.

The upbeat show floor---which sold out months ago---represents just about all of the pieces of the solar photovoltaic value chain, from materials suppliers (though no pure-play polysilicon or wafer purveyors) to subsystems and capital equipment companies to cell and module fabricators, to inverter and concentrator manufacturers to full system producers and installers, to several big public utility outfits, and more.

Many of the marquee names---Sharp, Q-Cells, SunPower, BP Solar, Conergy, GE, Kyocera, SoCal Edison, Schott, ersol ---are exhibiting, but there's also a healthy percentage of new or up-and-coming concerns, such as Konarka, Solar Semiconductor, Advent, Xunlight (ex-MWOE Solar), Global, and Soliant. The growing family of vertically integrated Chinese PV manufacturers is also well represented by the likes of the anthropomorphically named Yingli and Trina.

Many nonexhibitors, such as First Solar, Miasole, HelioVolt, Solaria, and Nanosolar, have teams of people there, several of whom updated me---both on and off the record---about the latest happenings at their companies. (I will share a common theme among the thin-film crowd: conversion efficiencies are improving!)

Samples and spec sheets of cells, panels, and modules abound; in some cases, mounted panels lean impressively alongside the booth walls. Samples of flexible PV products at the Uni-Solar, Konarka, and Xunlight booths garner small crowds of the curious. Bold claims like Kaneka's---"Our thin film modules have caught up with polysilicon modules in conversion efficiencies[!]"---or snarky-clever slogans like Solon's---"Don't leave the planet to the stupid"--- popped from several booth's graphic and flat-screen displays.

The German Pavilion team becomes quite popular when they break out the bottles of Beck's, while Reis Robotics' biggish panel-handling robot mesmerizes more than a few attendees across the aisle from NBSolar's solar-panel-equipped R2D2 'bot. And what was up with the REC Solar employees' quasi-conga line that snaked down the carpet at one point?

Feedback from most of the exhibitors I spoke with yesterday was uniformly upbeat. "PV is the fastest growing part of our business," Bill Kneeland of Kurdex's thin-film equipment division told me, adding, "It's legit, unlike a lot of that other nano stuff." Edwards' Kathleen Hutchison said "solar is doing real well for us." Oerlikon's Juerg Steinmann remarked that the show's growth has been "very impressive" over the past few years.

Francoise Queromes, fearless leader of first-time exhibitor Technos, was thrilled by the level of interest shown in her company's XRF film thickness and composition tool. She hopes to proliferate the X-ray metrology system in the thin-film PV community, much as it has in the semiconductor and FPD manufacturing industries.

"I like this show," she smiled. "The people are more friendly, more open than what I'm used to at other shows."