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The past week or so has been one of the most tumultuous in recent memory for the solar photovoltaic manufacturing community. The earnings season is upon us, and some of the company news has been downright scary, especially from the likes of Q-Cells and others that have seen the bottom fall out of their markets and have had to take drastic steps to survive, such as the Q’s plant shutdown and layoffs. Analysts and researchers haven’t exactly been rays of sunshine either, as iSuppli, DisplaySearch, and Barclays Capital touted their versions of the “rapid demand slide/severe inventory bloat/enormous production overcapacity/drastic module-price reduction” story.
But the news has not been all bad. SolarWorld, for example, saw shipments go up 26% yet revenues only slip 6% year over year and its losses actually decrease, as the company’s strength in certain markets as well as its vertical integration and cost-cutting measures helped to ease the pain of the decline in module prices. The crystalline-silicon firm also continues to bet heavily on the future, investing in its production and R&D facilities in Germany, United States, and South Korea. The new 8500-sq-meter cell and module innovation center on the company’s Freiburg campus will include a complete cSi pilot development line—said to be the first of its kind in Europe.
Research and development efforts also highlight the results of certain key production equipment suppliers. Both centrotherm photovoltaics and Roth & Rau saw their revenues for the first half of the year shoot up considerably compared to the same period last year, and although the pair of German companies are quite guarded about the outlook moving forward and are marshalling their resources, they emphasize the need to increase R&D spending to get better process performance and productivity out of their toolsets.
Centrotherm made significant progress on R&D projects across its portfolio, from solar silicon to PV cell to cSi and thin film turnkey, including coming up with a nondestructive thermography method that has improved the analysis of TFPV module characteristics and another project that has led to the development of an alternative buffer-layer coating for copper indium gallium (di)selenide (CIGS). The company’s first-to-market CIGS turnkey line, which uses a sputtering-centric two-step process, is ramping up at a customer site in Taiwan, while results in centrotherm’s CIGS pilot line in Germany show a clear pathway to 12% module conversion efficiencies.
Another, albeit smaller tool company, CVD Equipment eeked out a tiny profit during the quarter. The New York-based company says that it has seen a promising uptick in customer use of its applications lab over the past three months, mainly to take advantage of CVD’s improved process capabilities in transparent conductive oxide (TCO), which is used in CIGS and other thin-film PV devices.
Speaking of CIGS, there have been some mildly tectonic shifts in the space. Shell’s sale of its half of Avancis to joint-venture partner Saint-Gobain marks the exit of the company which was once a leader in solar and first commercialized the chalcopyrite PV devices, when it fired up the pilot line at what was then its facility (and now SolarWorld’s, sans any TFPV activity) in Camarillo, CA. A few megawatts of CIS modules came off that line, demonstrating manufacturability in a way that certain newer entities have yet to accomplish themselves.
Also on the ownership front, Bosch has decided to buy a controlling interest in the shares of another German CIGS family member, Johanna Solar (which uses a cousin to CIGS-- CIGSSe—where a little dab of sulfur gets thrown into the absorber layer), to go along with its other, lower-case solar holdings, aleo and ersol.
Even among the wreckage of Q-Cells latest results, the company pointed to a bright spot in its new technology holdings, an area where the company says it will accelerate investments despite the woes of its foundational silicon-cell business. Solibro, the Q’s CIGS associate company soon to be 100% owned by the parent, has been moving along swimmingly, with stabilized module efficiencies closing in on 11%. The expansion of its first 25MW production line and plans for the construction of a second line are apparently under way and on schedule.
Speaking of wreckage of an even more serious kind, the prospects for DayStar Technologies have never been bleaker. The company has little more than a million in cash (a bit more, if you throw in the chunk of change it will get for selling some assets to Veeco) and has admitted that unless it gets some fresh funding very soon to keep on the path to commercialization, it will likely be forced to file bankruptcy and possibly flat out go out of business.
DayStar’s pride and joy is Big Baby, its massive multichamber reactive sputtering system used for production development, which has been at the heart of its efforts to scale its monolithic CIGS integration scheme to manufacturing. There’s been another Big Baby in the news, Glen “Big Baby” Davis, a stocky power forward for the storied Boston Celtics NBA franchise. (Full disclosure: I'm an L.A. Lakers fan and have no love for the men in green.)
On the same day that the Celts said they had re-signed Big Baby Davis to a two-year contract that could pay him as much as $6 million, DayStar announced it had a second-quarter loss of $6.7 million.
One Big Baby smiles as the other one cries—or at least its operators do.
