Your daily dose of photovoltaic technology developments and solar news

It’s official: First Solar is now the first in solar. The just-released financials of the company that made thin-film PV bankable find 2009 revenues passing $2 billion, annual output hitting 1.1GW, and production costs dropping to 84 cents per watt. The executive team’s 2010 guidance doesn’t deviate from the numbers they offered in mid-December, with the high end of revenue expectations coming up just short of $3 billion. A few data points and assumptions in the latest presentation warrant closer scrutiny and extrapolation.

Intel likes to talk the green talk and walk it too with ever-smaller carbon footprints, buying copious amounts of renewable energy credits, investing millions of dollars in cleantech startups through its development fund, spinning off solar cell start-up Spectrawatt, and researching organic photovoltaics in its labs. The microprocessor mavens will soon increase their own direct use of solar energy, having recently announced plans for eight PV systems, collectively capable of generating about 2.5MW of electricity, to be built on several sites in the western United States. Some additional digging reveals a few new details about Intel’s latest PV projects, including the brand of modules to be deployed—First Solar.

The eyes and ears of PV market watchers will be on First Solar Wednesday afternoon, Dec. 16, as the thin-film kingpins deliver their 2010 guidance Webcast. Aside from the stock market practitioners’ hand-waving over how the update will effect their models and forecasts, one element of keen interest to the photovoltaic manufacturing community is whether the company that made CadTel famous will announce plans for adding production capacity to its existing 1GW base, specifically in North America, where the utility market’s siren song certainly has First’s attention across its internal value chain. Whatever the company decides, the larger issue may be whether most thin-film PV companies are at a capacity disadvantage compared to cheap silicon module producers.

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.

If you want to get into the thin-film PV game as a serious player, you have to benchmark your costs against First Solar and beat them. That’s a recurring theme among some TFPV start-ups I’ve talked to recently, companies that put as much emphasis on their cost and performance models as they do on touting their enhanced manufacturing of existing approaches (like CIGS) or new-fangled, next-gen technologies (like nanocomposite cells). One such firm gearing up for the long haul is Solexant, which hopes to leverage its inorganic semiconductor nanocrystalline secret sauce(s) with very-low-cost, monolithically integrated roll-to-roll processing and improved balance-of-system schemes.

One of the key tenets in First Solar’s cost-cutting and continuous improvement mantras is the ever-increasing conversion efficiency of its cadmium telluride thin-film panels.  "A tremendous amount of our ability to drive down cost has to do with improving the efficiency, one of the fundamental metrics that drives our technology," said company president Bruce Sohn during last week’s analysts meet. Given how progress has gone so far, 11% CdTe module efficiency should be right around the corner, with management exuding confidence that the magic number will pop to 12.5% within a few years. Beyond that, First says it will surpass the NREL "hero cell" efficiency of 16.5% with its production modules. But how?

The market watchers have already parsed, pared, and pontificated on First Solar’s newly modified business models, the nuts and bolts of what chairman/CEO Mike Ahearn calls the company’s "sustainable competitive cost advantage." But the updates on the manufacturing and technology sides of the business warrant some additional scrutiny. On the module side, company president Bruce Sohn outlined how the new five-year plan calls for 56-68% reductions in the cost per manufactured watt, driving down to a targeted range of 52 to 63 cents per watt by 2014. The largest portion of the cost cutting will be facilitated by conversion efficiency improvements (about 18-25% of the weight, with better throughputs, plant scaling, etc. also contributing). The impact of building factories in low-cost locations such as Malaysia has been much reduced in the current roadmap, dropping from accounting for 15-17% of the cost reduction improvements to 3-4% in the company’s new gameplan.

Although First Solar has indeed ramped 23 module production lines across its three manufacturing sites (with the 24th soon to follow), the company remains notoriously guarded about the inner workings of its processes and manufacturing facilities as well as its R&D activities. Not coming close to taking the bait, Sohn won’t answer any specific questions about film thickness uniformities or process temperature ranges or whether the research team is working on next-generation tandem-junction CdTe or even its own version of copper-indium-gallium-(di)selenide (CIGS). Nevertheless, he does shed some light on the company’s overall approach.

At First Solar’s corporate headquarters in Tempe, Arizona, a morale-boosting slogan adorns posters stuck to the outside of cubicle partitions: “MILESTONE MADE! TEN ONE ONE.” That’s “Ten,” for 10 years in business--at least in the company’s First Solar incarnation. The original firm Glasstech Solar, led by visionary Harold McMaster, actually set up shop in 1984, then became Solar Cells, Inc. in 1992, which begat the present entity in 1999. The middle “One” stands for the gigawatt’s worth of panels produced in the solar module factories in Ohio, Germany, and Malaysia - as well as the annual production capacity that will be ramped by the end of 2009. The final “One” stands for perhaps the biggest accomplishment of all--the dollar-per-manufactured-watt standard beaten by two cents by First Solar in the final quarter of 2008, a cost that has since shrunk to 93 cents per watt in the first quarter of 2009. But then, “Ten/One/0.93” doesn’t quite have the same ring.

Without John Walton and his generous funding, there might not be any First Solar--at least in its current form. The son of Sam (Walton, that is) parlayed a chunk of his multibillions in Wal-Mart wealth, via his True North Partners VC firm, and made a sizeable bet in February 1999 on what was then a thin-film PV start-up known as Solar Cells Inc., or SCI. After sinking somewhere north of $150 million over the next six years to turn the renamed First Solar's cadmium-telluride technology into a volume manufacturable process and put the firm on the path to success, Walton met an untimely end in late June 2005, when the plane he was piloting crashed in Jackson, WY. Because of Walton's indispensable role in keeping the company alive--and no doubt some shrewd lawyering and deal-making--his estate and trusts hold more First Solar stock than any other entities, individual or institutional. But since April 30, that huge portfolio has been steadily shrinking.