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The ongoing saga of copper-indium-gallium-(di)selenide photovoltaics provided one of the talking-point touchstones of this year’s Solar Power International show. Will solar historians look back to 2010 as the beginning of the Production Age of CIGS? That may be presumptuous and premature, since the thin-film PV’s slice of the overall solar shipment/deployment pie remains small.
But a growing number of companies have signed large supply deals and have been shipping megawatts of modules every month for rooftop and ground-mount projects. Manufacturing capabilities and capacities have increased many-fold and will continue to do so, while the nascent commercialization of flexible CIGS panels points to the disruptive possibility of a building-integrated PV market insurgency.
Using the time-honored method of issuing press releases in conjunction with a major tradeshow, a host of companies both familiar and surprising tapped into the CIGS newswire during SPI 2010. During the course of the week, I spoke with several key players from the sector who offered updates on their own companies’ progress in the market.
Korean megacorp Hyundai Heavy Industries will join forces with fellow multinational and current CIGS player (via its Avancis unit) and big-time glass supplier Saint-Gobain to build a 100MW fab in South Korea.
Showa Shell subsidiary Solar Frontier will be supplying GE with private-branded versions of its CIS modules, and in return the PV manufacturer will benefit from GE’s prodigious chops in the utility-scale power plant business.
Ascent Solar scored a certification coup, becoming the first flexible CIGS panelist to achieve the full IEC 61646 environmental testing stamp of approval.
Another large corporate entity participating in the CIGS sector, 3M, officially launched its Ultra Barrier film, arguably the key enabling material set for roll-to-roll processed, flex CIGS, CdTe, and organic PV thin-film modules.
The rap against flexible CIGS has been its lack of durability and the photoactive film stack’s extreme allergy to even trace amounts of moisture. 3M’s transparent compound protects the CIGS absorber layers from the wet stuff, and has been engineered for the long haul to weather the elements found in rooftop settings.
As we stood under the twisting contours of an Ultra Barrier-laminated SoloPower flex panel in 3M’s SPI booth, the material company’s Tracy Anderson pointed out the benefits of flexible PV, such as its light weight (nice for roofs that can bear the load of traditional PV), ease and low cost of installation (no racks and such), and large module size (5m long and counting).
He said that the effort to develop and commercialize the barrier films drew on about a half-dozen implements in the company’s vaunted innovation toolbox, including expertise in adhesion, vapor deposition, encapsulation, lamination, and polymers, calling the work a good example of how 3M’s resources have been applied to a “game-changing technology.”
The company is engaged in a buildout of Ultra Barrier production capacity at its Columbia, MO, plant, according to Anderson, with the expanded line due to be installed next year and the ramp to volume taking place in late 2011 and early 2012. Although he couldn’t tell me how much capacity will be added (3M has a standing policy about citing capacity numbers), he did say that the film coming off the new line will be a full meter wide, up from the one-third-meter capability currently in place.
Global Solar is one of the CIGS companies taking advantage of 3M’s and other material suppliers’ barrier-film work, although slyly grinning CEO Jeff Britt would neither confirm nor deny that the Minnesota-based material manufacturer was indeed one of his suppliers. He did tell me that Global has a primary barrier-material source, has been working with a secondary one, and is running initial tests on a third.
Britt (pictured at right) said that the company is integrating the barrier-material process gear into its two R2R production lines, with the Tucson plant at the tool-qualification stage and the Berlin facility still setting up the equipment. He explained that the toolset modifications will only add “a few pennies” to the overall capex cost per watt.
The factories’ capacity loads have been in the 50-75% range, according to the CEO (who still wears the CTO hat), with test yields in the mid- to high 90s and factory yields “well into the 80s, and moving into the 90s.” When it comes to yield issues, he reminded that “you can’t just solve one problem, you have to solve three dozen problems.”
On the conversion efficiency front, Britt said that they’ve hit new string-level records, increasing the maximums by a half-percent or so. Once they push the number up to a full percent, devices will be submitted to NREL for official testing. Global’s current 300W laminates boast 13.2% cell efficiencies, 12.6% aperture ratings, and 10.7% at the module level, according to the exec.
Marketing and biz dev VP Jean-Noel Poirier believes there’s a recognition in the market that BIPV is a valid segment, that a tipping point for CIGS flex has been reached, since existing and potential channel partners and customers want a plug-and-play, high-efficiency (higher than the existing amorphous-silicon laminates anyway) solution.
“It’s great to work with people who really understand roofs,” he said, adding that there’s much innovation to come as integrated system-design development starts to take off.
At least 15 customers--spread across parts of Europe, Japan, and the U.S.--are running validation tests on Global’s flex panels, with many more requesting samples in quantity, according to Poirier. The usual test kit consists of about 20 modules, each about 2m long, adding up to about 2KW of power. Some partners ask for smaller pieces to run adhesion tests and the like, and others may soon ask for larger sample quantities.
Global has submitted samples of its PowerFlex BIPV modules for IEC certification, and Britt anticipates approvals before the end of the year since the precertification accelerated testing results have been very positive. By the first quarter of 2011, Britt and Poirier expect Global to be rolling out megawatts of the certified product to the market.
One interesting side note: on the military side of Global’s business, the procurement cycle has kicked in and there’s been a large increase in orders (as in tens of thousands of product units) for the company’s standard Sunlinq solar chargers, and Britt thinks defense sector bookings might expand at an even-faster clip.
Another CIGS company with its eye on the commercial rooftop market is Solyndra. Against a booth backdrop of the company’s distinctive, crowd-drawing cylindrical modules, corporate communications chief Dave Miller filled in a few details about the company’s upgraded, improved 200 Series panels debuting at the show.
The simplified installation scheme is really quite elegant: a simple fit-and-click mounting mechanism locks the module-bearing panels in place, with nary a screwdriver in sight. The overall weight has been reduced some 12.5%, slimming down from 3.2lb/ft2 to 2.8lb/ft2. An installation team can get about 200KW of panels (now rated as high as 220W each) put down on the roof in three days, he said.
The spacing between the PV tubes has been optimized and the height of the panel array off the roof has been slightly increased, all in the name of better light collection, according to Miller. The liquid optical coupling agent (OCA)—the viscous material between the outer and inner parts of the tubing that provides a moisture barrier and boosts the active cell surface--has been tweaked, its color now an appropriate dark green compared to the somber blue-black tone present in its earlier incarnation.
Miller said that Solyndra has at least 500 installations completed on rooftops in Europe and the U.S., with that number likely to hit the thousand mark by year’s end. The active systems represent roughly 70MW of power-generating capacity.
The company’s brand-spanking new Fab 2 manufacturing facility in Fremont, CA, is not quite open for business, with panels running through qualification as the last of the tools come in, he explained. By the end of 2010, the plant should be in full production mode, with the expectation of pushing the company’s total capacity (including Fab 1, which is at 80MW) to about 300MW. Eventually, Fab 2 (combined with more optimization of Fab 1) could help push that corporate-wide nameplate number to 400MW.
If one adds up all four buildings on the Solyndra campus (including the back-end assembly site occupying a former Hewlett-Packard print-head plant), the company has about a million square feet of space to play with.
Although its eyes are set on the utility-scale PV market prize, printed CIGS proponent Nanosolar is also in expansion mode. With the 18th-floor view from the new JW Marriott hotel in downtown Los Angeles occasionally distracting our conversation, company VP Brian Stone put some specific production capacity figures to what he had told me in general terms during my mid-July visit to the company’s facility in San Jose.
The board has approved plans to increase the nameplate of its California cell-making facility to 115MW by fall 2011, with a goal of producing at least 20MW of cells and 10-11% efficient panels (from its Luckenwalde, Germany, assembly line) next year.
By 2012, when Nanosolar expects to be in the black in operational cash flow (without an additional capital raise), he said the numbers should jump to more than 100MW at ~12% efficiency levels. Beyond that, he sees a doubling or tripling of production each year.
“We believe we can be the world’s lowest cost [PV] manufacturer in three years,” Stone claimed, needing only hundreds of megawatts of production scale, not gigawatts, to achieve that distinction. The R&D team is focused on further enhancements of the company’s unique nanoink/nanoprint approach, including the reduction and eventual elimination of vacuum-type tools on all but the bottom- and top-electrode processes, he added.
Since space is at a premium at its current NorCal location, Nanosolar is actively exploring site selection options, both near and longer term. The VP said the big question is: “Where do we build our 500MW or 1GW factory? Do we stay in San Jose, California, or the United States? We would love to manufacture gigawatts of cells in the U.S.”
On the installation front, the company has officially announced a project that Stone told me about in July—the grid-connection of a Beck Energy-developed 1.1MW power station on a landfill in Luckenwalde (shown above).
A newer deployment, the 3MW plant done in conjunction with EDF Energies Nouvelles, is under way in Gabardan, in the Bordeaux region of France. The modules are being delivered there this month, he said, and the balance-of- systems components are being built out. The system should be fully installed and interconnected by spring 2011. Plus, new framework deals with existing customers should be announced later this quarter, according to Stone.
Nanosolar’s panels have been undergoing outdoor performance field-testing at TUV Rheinland’s yard near Phoenix. The first three months of data “look fantastic,” he said. The company is working with Sandia National Labs and other partners in outdoor and indoor tests, since “we can’t do enough in field testing.”
The company has also continued to fill out its executive and directorial ranks. Stone noted the hiring of CFO John McAdoo, who came on board about six weeks ago, as well as new supply chain VP Michael Brassington.
Excited by the infusion of “energy and experience” that the “world-class management team” brings to the company, Stone wrapped up the briefing with words that could apply to the entire CIGS community: “Now all we have to do is make high-quality, high-reliability panels.”
SOLYNDRA BOOTH PHOTO BY TOM CHEYNEY; NANOSOLAR PHOTO COURTESY OF COMPANY
