Your daily dose of photovoltaic technology developments and solar news

One solar firm will soon have a shot at the kind of brand recognition that most photovoltaics players can only dream of. Yingli Green Energy will accompany the likes of Budweiser, McDonald’s, Castrol, and Satyam as one of the official sponsors of the upcoming FIFA World Cup 2010, the global championship of football (what we Yanks call “soccer”) starting June 11 in South Africa. As historic as it is, Yingli’s successful wooing of Sepp Blatter and his FIFA minions does not lack for irony.

After a week away from the blog, I noticed a few items apart from the German feed-in tariff controversy that merited discussion. The first Solar Short Takes edition of the new year recognizes an emerging solar materials powerhouse region, ponders a Hong Kong company that seems to be in it for the long haul, and examines a recent CIS/CIGS conversion efficiency report.

Ever wonder how many large-scale renewable energy projects might be on the drawing board in California? Thanks to the latest announcement from Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, we now have a round number—244. Although the “comprehensive list” of proposed projects does not include every solar, wind, geothermal, or other clean energy system planned for the Golden State, it does offer a peek at nearly 70GW of green-powered possibilities...

Ohio continues to stake its claim as one of the more solar-visionary states in the U.S., both in terms of nurturing a growing photovoltaic manufacturing base and putting the power panels (and its people making and installing them) to work. The latest example comes in the form of more than $13 million in grant awards just funded by the federal American Recovery and Reinvestment Act’s State Energy Program (the first to be awarded from said program). Although some of the dough has been designated for wind and solar thermal projects, the lion’s share—more than $7.4 million—will go to 15 solar photovoltaic power installations to be deployed throughout the Buckeye state.

Why aren’t more solar production plants powered by solar energy? Although it’s not uncommon for solar cell and module companies to have some panels operating onsite, atop the roof or bolted to ground-mounted racks, they’re usually smallish test arrays, of no more than a few kilowatts, not serious power systems providing a significant chunk of the electricity needs of the plant. Nothing says “sustainability” like clean and green products manufactured using renewable power, not to mention the benefits for a company’s carbon footprint and energy payback time stats. That’s why the news of a couple more manufacturers plugging in decent-sized PV systems on their own factories provides a modest pretext to be thankful.

Trailing leader Illinois going into the final day of the Solar Decathlon, Team Germany from the Technical University of Darmstadt scored a perfect 150 in the tenth and final leg of the competition—net metering—passing the Illini and holding Team California at bay, to secure the overall title. The win marks the Darmstadt kids’ second straight victory (they took top honors in 2007 too) in the U.S. Department of Energy event, which featured 20 university teams “designing, building, and operating the most attractive and efficient solar-powered home” on the National Mall in Washington, DC.

This edition of Solar Short Takes perambulates around a charming press release typo, a strange newspaper layout, underreported bits from the recent Suntech hubbub in the New York Times, SolarWorld USA’s plans to add moduling capacity, ECD’s yield improvements and fast-ramping skills, and the nexus of National Geographic and Nanosolar--and Nano's next moves.

The curse of bigness plagues many a solar project news story. Barely a week goes by without someone claiming—and much of the mediaverse parroting--that a planned PV system installation will be the largest of its kind in the world or in a particular region or in some subcategory such as rooftop or ground-mount, tracking or fixed, or crystalline silicon or thin film. What do all of these upbeat, forward-looking announcements have in common? None of the projects has been built yet, let alone activated.

In this edition of the blog's solar short takes, the new issue of Newsweek includes a surprising advertorial insert from Sharp Solar, trade group SEMI lays off more employees, and a recap of recent news reveals many reasons to ponder whether the solar industry recovery has begun.

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.