David Owen

Solar Monkey and Portuguese company, WS Energia, today announced an agreement to establish a new generation of high precision, reliable and affordable solar tracking systems in North America based on WS Energia's patented award winning tracker design.

Amtech Systems, Inc. (ASYS) announced that its solar subsidiary, Tempress Systems, Inc., has received a $7.5 million follow-on solar order for its diffusion processing systems from an existing customer based in Asia.

Tigo Energy has brought aboard veteran sales and marketing executive, Jeff Krisa. Krisa brings over 20 years of noteworthy experience in semiconductor technology, systems development, international marketing, and general management as well as a long history of involvement in alternative energy.

MacDermid, Incorporated has announced the formation of a new Photovoltaics business unit. Don Cullen, 20yr veteran of the PCB (Printed Circuit Board) industry will lead the new group. MacDermid already offers to PV manufacturers, wafer cleaning, conductor metallization to screen-printing and anti-reflective technologies.

It is a tale of two strategies when dealing with the U.S. solarmarkets, be they consumer or business markets. Both Akeena Solar andFirst Solar have announced their first quarter financial resultsrecently. The scale of each company is worlds apart and theirapproaches to a growing market segment are at polar opposites, and itshows. These two companies cannot be directly compared; using these twocompanies is purely to highlight a growing trend among many solarcompanies of focussing on certain end-user segments of the solar market.

Sunovia announced yesterday that it had completed its next round of financing and was devoting these resources to the company’s plans for manufacturing CdTe solar cells. More than $25 million has been invested into the companies' core CdTe research, development and design for the high-throughput CdTe-based manufacturing facility. Sunovia’s move to mainstream commercial solar is a departure from its background as a supplier of niche solar products for NASA and the military.