Amid last week's crowded halls at Intersolar in San Francisco, a handful of companies were noticeable by their absence. A track devoted to concentrating solar technologies such as CPV and CSP featured Areva, which carved itself a niche in steam augmentation for existing fossil plants, but failed to attract BrightSource and SolarReserve.
Intersolar attendees weren't sure whether they had been invited to a wake or a wedding yesterday as they heard the global outlook for the solar industry.
Evonik Cyro has launched ‘ACRYLITE’ Solar Pre-Fab acrylic lens panels, which are combined with a Secondary Optical Element (SOE) to create a complete optical train package for assembly directly onto Concentrated Photovoltaic (CPV) modules. This allows customers to bypass purchasing the tooling device needed to create the product and avoid the required time-consuming installation process.
Edwards has launched the STP-iXR1606 series of magnetically-levitated turbo-molecular pumps (TMP) with a fully-integrated onboard controller. Edwards’ new TMP incorporates a new rotary design that delivers approximately 40% improvement in throughput at high gas flow rates and an increase of nearly 90% in maximum gas flow, compared to existing products.
Engineered Conductive Materials (ECM) has introduced a fast curing conductive adhesive, DB-1590 for use as a solder replacement in next-generation crystalline silicon solar modules using thinned silicon and/or plated bus bars. This material formulation has been optimized to provide improved conductivity and stability on various substrates when cured at 200°C.
California has seen a tale of two IPOs over the past couple of months: one was aborted at the last moment; another was the second largest in US history.
For leading c-Si manufacturers, three issues have been influencing $/W cost metrics during the past couple of years: blended silicon cost, non-silicon process cost, and cell efficiency/module power.
Satcon Technology has expanded its product portfolio to include certified inverter solutions for the light commercial solar market segment with the launch of ‘Equinox LC’ with a maximum efficiency of 98.2%. The new product line will include four UL certified power ratings of 12kW, 16kW, 20kW and 24kW, and five CE certified power ratings of 8kW, 10kW, 13kW, 17kW, and 20kW.
The following article comments on the ongoing discussion of the grid parity issue. Although considerable movement can be observed in how PV is thought of in the industry, this article aims to point out the consequences of the necessary transition from incentive to non-incentive markets.
As predicted in this PV Tech blog a couple of months ago, Republican presidential campaigners could not resist dragging the Solyndra saga back into the political spotlight.
