Guest Blog

As leading CIGS manufacturers and equipment suppliers in Europe prepare for quarterly and half-year reporting during August, the impact of Veeco’s parting comments may force a closer examination of existing market-share adoption rates and business-unit operating margins. The company’s rationale for exiting the CIGS systems business was based on its assessment that “the timeframe and cost to commercialization [of CIGS tooling] are not acceptable,” coupled with “the lower-than-expected end-market acceptance for CIGS technology.” Rather than speculating whether Veeco’s prepared remarks will—or will not—have any tangible effect on investor confidence levels across the CIGS community as a whole, it is perhaps more prudent to revisit the fortunes of other PV equipment suppliers that have been championing CIGS in support of dedicated product portfolios offered to the market.

As PV manufacturers prepare for Q2’11 reporting, the need to understand accurate industrywide capacity levels has become essential. Currently, much of the industry is addressing the prospect of widespread production cutbacks to allow record module inventory levels to be worked through. While in contrast, some Tier 1 producers continue to operate at close to full capacity utilization.

Centrotherm Photovoltaics has released its Q1’11 results, highlighting strong year-on-year revenue and bookings performance compared to Q1’10. Revenues grew year on year by 64.2% to €189.3 million, while new orders increased by 187.8% to €224.3 million. However, a more appropriate comparison comes by looking at quarter-on-quarter trends - in particular how Centrotherm’s PV book-to-bill is tracking – and in understanding trends within the industry driving these metrics.

Since the fast track review bombshell was dropped last week I have been thinking about what kind of implications this will have on the UK solar industry as a whole -- not just how it will affect the large-scale market. As we all know, one of the many things this country’s renewable energy industry lacks is experience, which is why it was so encouraging to see some of the world’s largest and most influential solar players step onto British soil.

Italy is faced with three very important considerations in determining how to power the nation: very modest domestic energy resources (it imports 87% of its electricity), resulting high electricity prices and abundance of sunlight. Consequently, over the last few years the Italian government has instituted a series of policies to promote solar photovoltaic (PV) deployment. Growing from just 60MW in 2007, Italy installed almost 2GW of solar PV last year - making it the second largest market in the world.

On March 3rd, 2011 a group of 22 Czech Senators filed a complaint with the Supreme Court against a new Czech PV law, which introduces a 26% tax on solar energy production. The Senators are afraid of the impact of solar arbitrages against the Czech Republic in the near future.

Alan King of Canadian Solar notes that while the extension of the U.S. Treasury's 1603 cash grant program has positive implications for the solar industry in 2011 and beyond, there's much work still to be done to increase PV's percentage of the country's overall energy portfolio.

On December 10, 2010 the Czech President Vaclav Klaus approved a retroactive solar tax for solar power plants in the Czech Republic

In reporting its fourth-quarter earnings, Applied Materials (AMAT) announced net sales within its Energy & Environmental Services (EES) segment (which includes PV tool revenues) of US$606 million. Accordingly, Solarbuzz equipment supplier analysis reveals that AMAT has just reached a significant landmark: the first equipment supplier to reach and exceed the US$1 billion barrier for PV-specific trended ttm tool revenues. Certainly, this achievement offers comfort to tool suppliers that the PV segment has grown to an appreciable level. However, while every other PV tool supplier would welcome reaching this milestone, AMAT’s road taken to the US$1 billion PV revenue mark has been far from incident free.