A 16-year veteran of the renewable energy industry, Jean M. Wilson has joined the SunPower team as Vice President and General Manager of the company’s utilities and power plants. This new role will include running SunPower's North American utility and power plant division, supervision of all project development and overseeing utility and Independent Power Producer partnerships, as well as marketing, EPC and component sales.
One of the earliest of potential customers of Applied Materials ‘SunFab’ thin film production lines, looks close to securing the necessary funding that would see it establish the first of three planned production facilities. Genesis Solar, a subsidiary of Genesis Energy Investment Plc has recently announced that it has a Letter of Intent from an unidentified U.S. investor to inject US$42 million into its Spanish subsidiary, Genesis Solar España S.L., which has a partially completed production facility designed to house Applied’s ‘SunFab’ thin film line in El Puerto de Santa Maria, Cadiz, Spain.
Dow Corning majority-owned subsidary Hemlock Semiconductor will not be affected by the parent company's plans to cut 800 jobs, or 8% of its 10,000-strong worldwide workforce. The company offered no further details on the specific regional impacts of the layoffs, other than to say that reductions will occur at all of Dow Corning's global sites.
Photon Consulting may have recently projected the PV industry to reach the US$1 per watt manufacturing cost threshold in 2012, but First Solar has ignored such projections and reached this important milestone in the 4Q08, with a cost per watt of US$0.98. Not prepared to sit back and wait for competitors to catch-up, First Solar expects further reductions in the coming years that could see a cost per watt below US$0.65 by 2012 or earlier.
Air Products has begun supplying bulk and specialty gases to Taiwan-based Green Energy Technology's new thin-film solar photovoltaic production facility. The deal calls for the long-term supply of nitrogen and silane as well as the accompanying gas delivery equipment and piping.
A survey commissioned by National Semiconductor reveals that most solar PV systems installers believe there's no such thing as an acceptable amount of shade on residential and commercial rooftop installations. In addition to the 54% of respondents sharing the no-shade stance, 41% of installers encounter shade when selling or installing a system; of those, 87% "frequently" or "always" design around shade; and another 28% "frequently" or "always" tell the owner that solar cannot be installed.
Evergreen Solar said that the first phase of construction of a landmark solar PV installation using the company's StringRibbon panels is nearing completion on the roof of a tunnel of Germany's A3 highway. The 2.8-MW system, incorporating more than 16,000 solar modules, will be one of the country's largest and the first to be located on a public highway.
Konarka’s New Bedford, Massachusetts manufacturing facility, opened in October 2008, has received a boost for its future manufacturing plans with a $5 million long-term loan. The organic photovoltaics developer secured the loan from a funding collaboration between the Emerging Technology Fund of Massachusetts Development Finance Agency and the Massachusetts Renewable Energy Trust’s Business Expansion Initiative.
A new study on the installed costs of solar photovoltaic power systems in the U.S. shows that the average cost of these systems declined significantly from 1998 to 2007, but remained relatively flat during the last two years of this period. Researchers say that the overall decline in the installed cost of solar PV systems is mostly the result of decreases in nonmodule costs, such as the cost of labor, marketing, overhead, inverters, and the balance of systems. The results suggest that state and local PV deployment programs—which likely have a greater impact on nonmodule costs than on module prices—have been somewhat successful in spurring cost reductions, according to the authors
The latest solar manufacturer to pare its financial outlook is Chinese multicrystalline wafer and polysilicon producer, LDK Solar. The company updated its numbers, estimating that revenues for the fourth quarter will be in the range of $415-$425 million, a slight drop from its previous guidance of $425-$435 million provided in early January, while the outlook for wafer shipments continues to hover between 245 and 255 MW. But an inventory-related writedown of $210-$220 million will help push LDK into the red, resulting in a negative gross margin and a resultant loss for the quarter of $135-$145 million.
