Editors’ Blog

After a relatively quiet Monday, the second day of the EU PVSEC conference in Valencia certainly ‘hotted up’, in more than one sense of the word. With temperatures hitting 28°C, but feeling more like the high 30s, the air conditioning and vastness of the Feria Valencia are welcome as the suited and booted attendees meander their way around the eight halls and the conference centre.

Local press reports in France have pointed towards feed-in tariff cuts for solar power installations. The French government is expected to follow the trend in solar slashing to keep its policy in line with the massive price drops apparent across the industry.

As of July 1, 2010, the amount of applications for photovoltaic systems installed under the micro-generation feed-in tariff in Ontario, Canada, reached 16,000. The majority of these applications have been for ground-mounted systems and thus, the Ontario Power Authority (OPA) has designed a FiT cut for any systems of this kind of 10kW or less, to stop the pressure this will place on tax payers.

With the first four Solar Decathlons held in the U.S., intrigue was high for the first European edition held in Madrid this month. In a bid to find out exactly what the competition had in store this year, I travelled over to the Villa Solar just a few days before the closing ceremony to see the offerings first-hand.After 10 days of heated competition, with scorching temperatures beating down all day in the Spanish capital city, the 17 teams' enthusiasm was on top form. Each house's designers welcomed me in, eager to reveal all about the design, planning and above all renewable aspects that had been worked into their entry.

eSolar, Inc. responds to my CSP (Concentrating Solar Power) site survey and answers a few questions. The Sierra SunTowers were offline for five (5) days because of a “planned outage” followed by another day due to high winds. Not long after the cross post of eSolar Sierra SunTower Project offline to the PV-tech.org Editor’s Blog, I got a response from eSolar to my questions from the previous week.

Partner blogger Ed Gunther from Gunther Portfolio has provided this blog. A tale of two Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) Towers generating no electricity? A funny thing happened on the way to Victorville for the Victor Valley College Solar Power Plant Celebration. I decided to stop in Lancaster, California, to benchmark the eSolar, Inc. CSP project I highlighted earlier this year. As can be seen in my photos over two days, one of the Sierra SunTowers is missing the thermal receiver enclosure nacelle, ample or not, and is out of operation. The second tower has an anemic amount of sunlight focused onto the thermal receiver by the heliostat field although it was late in the day.

The German solar industry’s research and development efforts into advanced solar cell technology will be given a boost of €100 million, after Chancellor Angela Merkel's cabinet approved plans, according to Reuters. The move was made, according to the report, to weaken resistance by members of the lower house of parliament (Bundesrat), particularly from eastern states such as Thuringia, Saxony and Saxony-Anhalt, to a proposed 16% extra solar feed-in tariff cut. There are a a significant number of PV manufacturers located in these regions, and many have openly opposed the FIT cut suggested by Merkel’s government.

Photon Consulting’s forecast figures for German PV installations were virtually right on the mark, and my criticism over its forecasting credibility has been blown out of the water. Preliminary figures from the German Federal Network Agency put PV installations at 3.8GW with the potential for final number crunching to produce a higher figure. Photon Consulting had projected 3.9GW in their September 2009 release of their annual report and could prove to be frighteningly close to final figures, whenever they are issued.

With only a handful of major solar-related manufacturers having released fourth-quarter and full-year financial results, a picture is already emerging as to the health and wealth and 2010 trends for the solar industry. Having reported financial results and conducted its quarterly conference call last Thursday, JA Solar gave a lot of data points to digest about capacity ramps but also importantly, average selling prices (ASPs) for 2010.