Your daily dose of photovoltaic technology developments and solar news

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.

Charlie Gay has been thinking about the thinness of solar wafers since his days as a PhD researcher at Spectrolab. When he was offered the job to run the research group at Arco Solar nearly 30 years ago, Gay told Bill Yerkes that he needed a few months to finish a job involving a particular kind of thin silicon cell for the space program before he could join the new company. At least that’s how Yerkes remembers it in an archival video interview I have a copy of, a small part of many hours of conversations with PV pioneers compiled by the late Mark Fitzgerald, the founding editor of the original Photovoltaics International journal.

HAMBURG, GERMANY--Chip Shots hasn’t been AWOL this week, but engaged on the frontlines and back corridors of the annual European Photovoltaic Solar Energy Conference and Exhibition here. The weather has been mild in Germany’s main port and second-biggest city, and the energy and information flow at the 24th edition of EU PVSEC intense.

Intersolar North America may have drawn record crowds this year, but the horse that got us there, Semicon West, did not fare so well in San Francisco. While the PV exhibits filled up three floors of Moscone West and traffic was brisk, the venerable semiconductor equipment and materials show featured far fewer booths than the expected norm, and attendance ranged from decent to deadly. A couple of photos tell this tale of two trade shows.

When it comes to their knowledge about solar power, many Americans are both exuberant in their desire to see solar more quickly become a larger part of the country's energy portfolio and ignorant of just how much sun-based electricity is being generated by their utilities. A slim majority would pay more on their monthly energy bills if their utility ramped up the percentage of its power provided by renewables, but a significant minority would not. Many think the U.S. leads the world in solar, and most believe that the optimal, most efficient way to deploy solar power is on private homes. Those are some of the findings in the "Summer Solstice" thought leadership survey of the U.S. public's "understanding and opinions about solar energy," designed and analyzed by Ketchum Global Research Network and carried out by Braun Research on behalf of Applied Materials.