Solar short takes: First Solar beats buck-a-watt, CIGS/CdTe turnkey turns corner, and porcine PV

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Tom Cheyney

Tom Cheyney is former senior editor of PV-Tech / Photovoltaics International magazine. A veteran technology journalist / editor / blogger, he covered the semiconductor, microelectronics and solar sectors for many years - since fax machines were state of the art. His PV-Tech blog has become a must-read for industry insiders and observers. He was also chief editor of "The Rise of Thin-Film Solar Technology" book published in early 2010.

Here's some more short takes from the solar PV realm for your collective cogitation.

Breaking the buck-a-watt barrier. Beating "the Street's" estimates for financial performance is nothing new for the trend-setters over at First Solar--they did it again this time, with revenues, income, and most other metrics closing above what just about every sector analyst had forecasted. What's a few extra tens of millions of dollars among friends?

But for the photovoltaic manufacturing community, the CadTel king's results include a true milestone of a different sort, one long awaited and eagerly sought: First Solar says its cost-per-watt produced for the fourth quarter was 98 cents, the first time anyone has broken the buck-a-watt barrier. The company has been edging inexorably closer to the magic number, quarter after quarter (with a few hiccups), landing at $1.08 in the previous quarter.

Congrats to the team at First Solar for mastering production and rewriting the record book once again.

Turnkey turns corner. Two recent news announcements hint that the dawning of the age of turnkey production line solutions for CIGS and CdTe thin-film PV may be upon us. About a year after launching its CIGS turnkey program, German toolmaker centrotherm photovoltaics has made its first sale. llies Renewables ordered a 50-MW production line for CIGS-on-glass modules; the integrated toolset is tentatively scheduled for delivery in the first half of 2010. The company said the value of the order will exceed €60 million--a hefty chunk of change for a company with total revenues of €375 million last year.

On the CdTe side of the ledger, Roth und Rau just bought CTF Solar for several million Euro in stock and other considerations. R&R hopes that the new acquisition will give them the technological wherewithal to go where no other equipment supplier has gone before: to make turnkey CadTel TFPV module-production lines (something the company already does in the crystalline-silicon PV sector; ditto for centrotherm, btw).

In addition to project management responsibilities, R&R says it will "produce the coating facilities required for the deposition of the cadmium telluride," which it claims "account for around 58%, and thus the largest share, of the investment costs for the overall production line." The market launch of R&R's CdTe turnkeys is set to take place before the end of the year.

BP Solar, landlord or realtor? In another sign of tough economic times, the Frederick (MD) News-Post is reporting that "BP Solar is looking to sell or rent the 140,000-square-foot space at its plant" in the area. Tom Mueller of the BP press office told the paper that "the company has put the addition, set for completion in early summer, up for sale or rent." Mueller also said "the move will not affect the current employment level or manufacturing operations" at the plant and that to complete the construction, another $30 million will be spent.

Seems BP does not stand for "better planning."

Turning solar into fuel. For those curious about how photovoltaic energy might be turned into go-juice some day, check out "Powering the Planet with Solar Fuel," a recent lecture from Harry Gray, now video-streaming on the California Institute of Technology's Website.

The noted Caltech professor explains how he and his colleagues "are trying to find efficient and economical ways of storing solar energy in chemical bonds through the development of a technique for splitting water into its elemental components—hydrogen and oxygen—using solar-driven molecular machines that are designed to be even more efficient than natural photosynthesis."

Fascinating stuff, but don't hold your breath waiting for the imminent commercialization of Gray and Co.'s next-gen nanotech solar-energy storage solutions.

Pork farmer chops PV pricing. Swiss solar inverter company Sputnik Engineering inadvertently tickled the funny bone with its press release about "one of the first system operators in Germany to finance their PV installations with the new tariff for private consumers under the German Renewable Energy Sources Act (EEG)," which offers monetary benefits to those with systems of 30 KW or less.

The company chose a farmer named Raphael van Hövell as its poster boy for the EEG. Van Hövell is a pig farmer who lives (not in a hovel) in the Borken (not Porken) district in Deutschland. He has been lighting and ventilating his porcine feeding pens and helping to feed his swine-herd of 1200 since February with a 29.4-KW solar power system (equipped with a half-dozen Sputnik SolarMaxes), capable of generating about 30,000 kilowatt-hours annually.

That breaks down to 25 watts installed and 24.5 kilowatt-hours per pig (Wp/pg and KW-hr/pg, respectively)--and 200 pigs per SolarMax inverter.

The system will pad Farmer van Hövell's profits by about €10,000 over the next 20 years at today's electricity prices, and the new EEG tariff will add another €10,000 to his cash stash over the same time-frame. At today's headcount, that's almost €17 for each pig over the next 20 years.

So there it is, aggies: Solar power can help subsidize slopping the sows.