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This installment of Solar Short Takes offers a skeptic’s view of AQT Solar’s quick move to production mode, an update on the status of SMA America’s manufacturing plant in Denver, and yet another case of a pillar of the mainstream media community getting it wrong when it comes to the efficacy of photovoltaics.
AQT Solar’s rapid, low-cost entry into production of CIGS cells at a new facility in Sunnyvale has generated a fair amount of coverage, and rightfully so. The company went from destealthing last fall to setting up, debugging, and ramping an operational manufacturing line (featuring repurposed Intevac dry-sputtering gear) in roughly the same time it takes a human embryo to be conceived and gestate to full term. The relatively cheap price of entry—about $15 million, give or take—is a fraction of what has been spent on capex by emerging CIGS module makers like MiaSolé, Nanosolar, Solyndra, Solibro, Sulfurcell, Ascent, and just about every other outfit in that crowded thin-film PV sector.
But not everyone is enamored of AQT’s apparent early success. One long-time industry insider familiar with the intricacies of copper-indium-gallium-(di)selenide processing (who chooses to remain anonymous) sent me a note with a few comments about the upstart CIGS cell maker.
“I don’t view AQT’s announcement as much more than hype,” he said. “Making cells is one thing, making them with good efficiency and with reasonable cost and throughput is another. There is also a lot to the back-end process which startups frequently underestimate and AQT plans to pass off to their customers.”
“The Intevac tool was designed to process around 1000 disks per hour but hard disk films are quite thin compared to a CIGS solar cell. Temperatures are also much higher for CIGS solar cell processing, with glass being a poor thermal conductor and therefore slow to heat and cool. The net of this is that I think throughput and thus cost effectiveness are going to be a big issue with the AQT approach. I wish them well, but I’m skeptical,” the source concluded.
Speaking of operational production plants, SMA America’s new inverter manufacturing facility in Denver is up and partially running, according to company sources. The SMA mothership just posted record first-half revenues and shipments, though the company continues to cite the adverse impact of a bottleneck in the supply of certain electronic components on its efforts to increase production—including the run-rate at the Colorado plant.
Since the initial announcement of the company’s plan to build the 1GW capacity inverter factory in the Rocky Mountain state, there has been little hoopla about the site, other than a few update comments in recent quarterly reports. Apparently, the Colorado plant started operations this summer.
“Currently it’s producing 3000–7000W Sunny Boys for North America,” according to a brief email attributed to Jeffrey Philpott, SMA America’s director of marketing. “It’s also producing some of our North American HE central inverter line as well.”
(The Sunny Central HE boxes came on the market in the past few months, 500- and 630KW units designed for high-voltage utility-scale applications.)
“However, it still has a ways to go before it’s fully operational, which we estimate will happen early next year. Key staff has been in place for some time and we are continuing to hire at a brisk pace,” he said. “As you can imagine, we all want to see the new site ramp up instantly but SMA is very deliberate with everything it does in an effort to maintain the highest possible quality, so we have to make sure our expectations are reasonable.”
The start date of SMA’s other forthcoming North American inverter factory, a 500MW facility to be built in Ontario, has been pushed back, according to the latest half-yearly financial report. The plant, announced in March and originally scheduled to come online sometime in Q4 2010, will be commissioned and see first products ship in Q2 2011.
Finally, another chapter in the continuing saga of the mainstream media’s inconsistent coverage of solar photovoltaics. A subtle yet maddening example shows up in the otherwise-excellent article “The 21st Century Grid” in the July issue (I know, I’m a month behind in my reading) of one of my favorite magazines, National Geographic. Toward the end of the piece (p. 137 actually), the author discusses the concerns of utility company planners about the admittedly prickly issue of “intermittency” from renewable energy sources like wind and solar.
Here’s the excerpt.
“So windmills worry them. A utility executive might look at one and think: What if the wind doesn’t blow? Or look at solar panels and think: What if it gets cloudy? A smart grid alone can’t solve the intermittence problem. The ultimate solution is finding ways to store large amounts of electricity for a rainy, windless day.”
I'll stipulate to the storage dilemma. But at this point in the article, the reader has been lulled into complacency by what has been a thoroughly researched, well-written piece, when BAM! the nagging myth of “solar panels don’t work when it’s cloudy” shows up.
Of course, concentrated solar thermal and its CPV cousins need direct, pretty much unobstructed, high-insolation conditions, but c’mon, all other members of the PV module family continue to generate some power on a cloudy day, and certain technologies, like CdTe thin film, have pretty impressive low-light performance metrics.
Think of the gigawatts of solar installed in Germany, not exactly a sunshine nation-state—no amount of incentives would have been enough to drive that market if the panels sat idle much of the year.
It's hard enough getting the proper respect and coverage for the current state of PV without these kinds of erroneous quasi-subliminal messages, let alone more egregious examples, still showing up in the reporting of the Fourth Estate.
TOP AND BOTTOM PHOTOS BY TOM CHEYNEY; INVERTER PHOTO COURTESY OF SMA
