El Paso Solar Energy Association - EPSEA

To utilities, a smarter grid will lay the foundation for technologies that seemed outlandishly futuristic a few years ago: electric cars, cities that can insulate themselves from rolling blackouts, homes automatically tuning themselves to the weather and alternative energy that can compete economically with coal.

But to consumers, the smart grid so far is an extra charge on their bill they don’t particularly like.

Why don’t consumers seem to care about the smart grid? The answer in part lies in a lack of awareness. A recent poll conducted by General Electric found that 79 percent of Americans were unfamiliar with the term, but those that understood it generally supported its goals.

Utilities have also chronically failed to explain the benefits, or at least demonstrate that the benefits won’t just come to them. A power distributor in Texas has noted that its 500,000 meter network-paid by surcharges to customers– will allow it to shut off an individual’s power in 30 minutes if someone doesn’t pay a bill. Consumers are not leaping for joy.

How can utilities better educate ratepayers and get the word out on the benefits of the smart grid?  Read more and join the conversation along with Greentech Media and General Electric's Ecomagination by clicking here.

 

 

Read the full press release here.

GTM Research's latest report, The Emergence of Meter Data Management (MDM): A Smart Grid Information Strategy Report, forecasts the MDM market to grow from $54 million in 2009 to $221 million by 2014 as planned smart meter rollouts occur and MDM vendors expand and enhance their product offerings.

The report defines MDM's role in smart grid build-out and presents the necessary prerequisites for MDM's success.  The report's analysis includes the best plans for MDM deployment and presents technology drivers and inhibitors.  In addition, GTM Research profiles and ranks the top MDM vendors vying for this market, including eMeter, Aclara and Itron along with eight other technology leaders.

One of the initial hurdles to MDM's breakthrough has been identifying the technology's role and value to utilities.  GTM Research's report begins by presenting a definitive taxonomy of MDM's core components, including data repositories, enterprise integration platforms and enhanced smart meter functionality.

"Accelerated deployment of smart meters is driving demand for meter data management systems," said Chet Geschickter, a Smart Grid analyst at GTM Research and the report's author. "MDM creates an opportunity for utilities to build intelligent applications across the enterprise, but they need to adopt modern system designs including service oriented architectures in order to do this."

GTM Research's report ranks the top MDM providers in the U.S., positioning California-based eMeter at the top of the list.  EMeter is most active in Texas and Ontario, where the company plans to roll out MDM systems to manage 6.5 million meters by 2014.  U.S.-based Aclara and Itron are second and third respectively in GTM Research's ranking. Other companies included are Ecologic Analytics, EnergyICT, Hansen Technology, NorthStar Utilities Solutions, Oracle, OSIsoft, SAP MDUS and Telvent.

"MDM vendors have a strategic opportunity to expand beyond core meter data management with additional features like consumer web portals and data warehousing," Chet Geschickter said.  "Their ability to work closely with utility customers is a key to growth and future success."

About the Report

The Emergence of Meter Data Management (MDM): A Smart Grid Information Strategy Report is an incisive analysis of first-wave MDM deployment in North America and will be integral to define MDM's functionality, value and competitive market.

Questions the Report Addresses:

• What is MDM? What are the core features, key system boundaries and limitations?
• Which business problems does MDM solve and enable?
• What is the strategy for managing meter data and what can that data be used for?
• How mature is the market? Can utilities count on vendors both now and in the future?
• What are the keys to successful MDM deployment? What are the pitfalls and how can they be avoided?

For purchasing or detailed information about The Emergence of Meter Data Management (MDM): A Smart Grid Information Strategy Report, priced at $1495.00, visit http://www.gtmresearch.com/report/the-emergence-of-meter-data-management-mdm.

Applied Materials had a strong quarter and beat guidance and Wall Street expectations driven by semiconductor, display and crystalline silicon solar businesses.  

Results would have even been better if it weren't for the the Energy and Environmental Solutions (EES) group restructuring plan that resulted in charges totaling $405 million. The Energy and Environmental Solutions includes the amorphous silicon Sunfab line, as well as Applied's successful crystalline silicon product lines.  These charges consisted of inventory-related charges of approximately $250 million and severance and asset impairment charges of $155 million related to their a-Si business. The inventory-related charges lowered gross margin by approximately 10 percentage points and reduced GAAP and non-GAAP EPS by $0.12. Excluding the EES restructuring plan charges, non-GAAP EPS would have been $0.29.

Greentech Media was in front on the coverage of the travails of the Sunfab amorphous silicon line.  More here.

Some highlights from the earnings call:

• Applied generated net sales of $2.52 billion, up 10%
• The Santa Clara chip equipment maker (NASDAQ:AMAT) posted a profit of $123 million, or 4 cents a share
• Orders grew 8% to $2.7 billion dollars, resulting in the highest quarterly order level since the year 2000
• Applied GAAP earnings of $0.09 and non-GAAP earnings of $0.17 
• Absent EES charges, non-GAAP results would have been $0.29 
• Gross margin was 34.2 percent including the thin-film solar equipment inventory charge which lowered gross margin by approximately 10 percentage points.

In the words of Mike Splinter, Applied's CEO: “During the quarter, we took actions that focus our Energy and Environmental Solutions segment on our most promising opportunities in solar and advanced energy, and strengthen our company’s financial outlook.” That action will impact 400 to 500 positions globally, although a number of affected employees may transfer to other groups within the company.

“Applied had strong results across our semiconductor, display and crystalline silicon solar businesses, and we now expect Silicon Systems Group net sales to be up by more than 160 percent over fiscal 2009,” said Splinter.

Energy and Environmental Solutions (EES) orders decreased to $353 million. Net sales more than doubled from the second quarter to $387 million led by record demand for crystalline silicon solar equipment. EES had an operating loss of $371 million, which included $405 million in charges associated with the restructuring plan.

For the fourth quarter of fiscal 2010, Applied expects net sales to be in the range of flat to up five percent quarter over quarter.  The company sees strength in their markets but is "watching soft macroeconomic leading indicators."

Despite all the talk about carbon footprints and the rows of compact fluorescent light bulbs at every hardware store in the U.S., consumers have no idea how much energy they use and don't understand the best ways to reduce consumption, according to a new study.

The shift to educating, and empowering, consumers has been critical in the past among utilities and smart grid startups in the home area network space. But the study shows that most efforts to date have left Americans clueless and simply doing less of their regular behavior, without looking at simple changes that could reap bigger gains in efficiency.

"Of course we should be doing everything we can. But if we're going to do just one or two things, we should focus on the big energy-saving behaviors," said lead author Shahzeen Attari, a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University's Earth Institute and the university's Center for Research on Environmental Decisions, in a statement. "People are still not aware of what the big savers are."

Nearly 20 percent of approximately 500 study participants listed turning off lights as the best way to save energy. Furthermore, most of the people had no idea how much energy a truck uses in comparison to a train or ship, or how much energy a room air conditioner uses versus central AC. Overall, participants were more willing to somewhat curtail their actions rather than to invest in real efficiency, even if the latter would save more energy and money over the long run.

The results of the study, published in this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, were slightly more promising when examining less energy-intensive behaviors. Although people's understanding was generally poorer when the potential for energy or carbon dioxide savings were large, they were more accurate on a smaller scale. For example, most participants were able to guesstimate the savings of swapping out an incandescent with a CFL or adjusting the thermostat in summer.

Those in the study also overrated the savings of many activities, including driving slowly on the highway, recycling glass containers or unplugging chargers when not in use. Even people who described themselves as having a high degree of pro-environmental behavior did not always report engaging in a large number energy-efficient habits and actions.

Although the study had some limitations, including the moderate sample size and a lack of incentives for correct answers, the conclusions are stark. "Many people's concerns about energy are simply not strong enough, relative to their other concerns, to warrant learning about energy conservation," the study authors write.

So for utilities and regulators looking to cut energy consumption through efficiency, how do you get people to care? For one, stop telling people to turn off lights when they leave the room. The conversation must become more sophisticated.

The problem with many of the smaller energy savings actions that are constantly suggested is that they don't offer enough gain for the effort. "We're all very instant gratification animals," said Daniel Moneta from MMB Research, an engineering firm that makes a family of ZigBee smart energy hardware and software for commercial vendors.  "From an economic standpoint, we all should have replaced our old bulbs with CFLs. If you do the math, you'd save money."

Instead of just providing actionable information, campaigns need to include information about relative effectiveness of those actionable items. For example, many people thought that line-drying clothes would save more energy than changing their washer settings, according to the study, but the opposite is true. The study also pointed out that people will often make just one or two changes and think they are doing enough, so it might be a better strategy for utilities and government programs to communicate the best two or three actions to get the most bang for the buck.

Public education campaigns and web portals should not only recommend individual actions, but should also strive to paint a picture for people about which actions, both in the home and as consumers, can save the most money and energy. 

"If we have that number in front of us all of the time, and we look at it in comparison to our Facebook friends," said Moneta, "we can see that one device next to another device has a better [contextual] meaning. I think that will certainly help to motivate customers."

For the first half of this year, the conventional wisdom was that 2010 would be the year the U.S. committed itself to a national Renewable Electricity Standard (RES) requiring its regulated utilities to obtain an increasing portion of their power from renewable sources over the next ten to fifteen years. Then, at the end of July, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), in pursuit of re-election, threw renewables under the proverbial bus.

Conventional wisdom now holds that election year politicking makes an energy bill with an RES provision unlikely. This turn of events has provoked a wave of whining and hand-wringing. But enough with the whining! This isn't the end of the world; it is a political setback.

There are 35,000 megawatts of wind and 1,200 megawatts of solar PV out there sending electricity to the U.S. grid because a lot of dedicated people wouldn't take no for an answer. Why should the renewable energies change now?

Commentary has turned to what the renewables and environmental communities did wrong and how partisan politics has ruined everything. Reality check: what's going on in Washington is business as usual.

Some lay the blame on the president because he did not put his shoulder into the effort to pass an RES like he did for health insurance reform. But everybody in renewable energy was so in love with President Obama just twenty-one months ago. He talked straight, said a New Energy economy was possible and stayed calm when things got tougher. Guess what? That's exactly what he's done since he became president.

The president didn't turn on the renewables industries. Together, they ran up against the reality of economic circumstances harsher than any in three-quarters of a century. This economy would waylay even the wisest of political strategies. It's easy to look back and pick things apart, but doing it accurately will require the perspective of time. Those who have watched the events of 2008, 2009 and 2010 unfold shouldn't have to be told that a lot of important things got done, there were a lot of tough calls, and nothing goes right all the time.

Nobody was whining and hand-wringing when the stimulus bills of 2008 and 2009 delivered billions of dollars and most of the renewable energy industries' wish list. The president and his people made it happen in spite of the political opposition's determined obstruction. Obstruction from both Republicans and moderate Democrats is deeply saddening -- but not surprising.

Obstruction has always been a successful political tool. It stopped the Civil Rights movement in the 1950s and it served the Democrats during the Reagan years. Renewables advocates should not be flogging themselves or their leaders for running afoul of it. They should be consolidating their base, working to bring costs down, pressing ahead with the agenda they know is right and looking for political leverage.

Consider the careers of some pioneers in the New Energy economy. Paul MacCready built the world's best solar-powered car in the 1980s and Aerovironment, the company he founded, built the ill-fated EV-1 in the 1990s. How would he feel to see the all-electric Nissan Leaf and the plug-in hybrid electric Chevy Volt coming to show rooms in November? Defeated? Not likely.

Tom Gray joined the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) when the idea of a utility-scale wind farm was about as realistic as putting a robotic lander on Mars. He's still with AWEA, the robots on Mars have found signs of water, the scale of wind turbines is growing and the wind industry is now partially owned by utilities.

Hazel Henderson left a Carter administration government agency in the 1980s and wrote a book called The Age of Light, envisioning a new era powered by the sun. Two decades ahead of her time, she's now working to find ethical ways for business to fund the U.S. solar industry's next gigawatt, and the gigawatts to come.

Paul is gone but Aerovironment is involved in the development of chargers for the Leaf. Tom is still with AWEA and trying to help them figure out how to deal with the fossil fools in the Senate. Hazel is now President of Ethical Markets and is trying to convince bankers and brokers to fund the fight against climate change because it would be so much better not only for their children and their world but for their bottom lines.

What the renewable energy industry has done in the last two decades came hard but engagement taught the pioneers that change comes slowly and takes work, whether or not the Obama girls and the Silicon Valley egoists think so. The Old Energy powerbrokers are not going to simply hand over the keys to the grid, no matter how many coalminers and ecosystems they kill. For over a century, they have proven they are the kind of people who double down on bad bets and make the dealer an offer he can't refuse.

But the times really are a-changing. It is tempting to quote the bard of Hibbing, Minnesota, who famously sang "Get out of the road if you can't lend a hand," but it is all-hands-on-deck time. The conventional wisdom now is that this is the hard part. Forget the whining. It's time to get to work.

Yesterday, we heard pretty positive earnings results from Suntech.  Many Chinese photovoltaic suppliers have produced revenue upside largely due to volumes with modest margin upside and stable pricing outlooks for 2H10.

But today it was Yingli's turn and they had very good news. Yingli Green Energy Holding (NYSE:YGE) designs, manufactures and sells photovoltaic modules in China and internationally.  Yingli also designs, assembles, sells and installs PV systems and is one of the world's largest vertically integrated photovoltaic manufacturers.

Here are the highlights from this morning's earnings call:

• Total net revenues were $398.1 million. The firm crushed consensus revenue of $371.13 million.
• Gross profit was $133.5 million with a historical high gross margin of 33.5 percent.
• Operating income of $83.4 million and operating margin of 20.9 percent. 
• ASP decreased slightly in the quarter due mostly to currency exchange rates.
• 2010 Guidance for shipments is 950 megawatts to one gigawatt at a margin of 28 percent to 30 percent gross margin.  The company is sold out for the year and continues to work on expansion.
• Q3 margin guidance is 28 to 30 percent.

According to representatives of the firm, initial high efficiency PANDA production was begun on a 300-megawatt capacity line. Efficiency rates of 19 percent have been achieved on a pilot line. The company expects to deliver 60 megawatts of the PANDA product at a price premium in the high single digits.  The firm also kicked off its collaboration with Innovalight to boost the average efficiency of multicrystalline silicon-based solar cells. 

Fine Silicon, their polysilicon manufacturing facility with a designed annual production capacity of 3,000 metric tons, began commercial operation earlier this month. 

The company is confident in its prospects for a strong second half of the year.

Yingli's stock was trading slightly up in the early hours of trading.

According to Barclays Capital:

• Market share gains in the U.S. could likely offset any slowdown in Germany in Q1 2011. Additionally, checks suggest demand from European markets such as Italy and France remains strong, particularly in 1H 2011. Barclays' new estimates are based on $1.40/W ASPs exiting 2011.
• Current capacity should enable 1.3 gigawatts to 1.4 gigawatts shipments in 2011, but an additional 200 to 400 megawatt capacity expansion could likely drive 2011 shipments upside to 1.4-to-1.5-gigawatts levels.

I ran into a colleague yesterday morning who said to watch for big things from Solaria.  This must be what he was talking about.

EnXco, an EDF Energies Nouvelles Company, and Solaria just announced a five-year global supply agreement under which low concentration photovoltaic (LCPV) module manufacturer Solaria will supply their solar module to enXco.  EnXco made a small equity investment in Fremont, California-based Solaria, as well.  EDF develops, constructs, operates and manages wind and solar projects throughout the U.S.

Solaria's modules are designed specifically for ground-mounted tracking systems.  The panels use less silicon than conventional flat panels, while matching the form, fit and performance of conventional PV modules.

The agreement is a combination of a firm order and options.

This is win for concentrating photovoltaics (CPV) technology, which is in the midst of a modest winning streak from the likes of Amonix, SolFocus, and Concentrix.

Solaria closed a $45 million funding round in May of this year round led by CMEA Capital and DBL Investors along with Sigma Partners, NGEN Partners, Mitsui Ventures and Savitr Capital.

Some background on Solaria and its CEO

Solaria CEO Dan Shugar has been involved in the world of solar since the early days of 1988.  He built PowerLight with Tom Dinwoodie (now CTO at SunPower), and that pioneering solar firm built over 500 large installations and grew strong from 1996 to 2006.  SunPower purchased PowerLight in 2007 for $332 million as part of their downstream integration strategy.

Shugar worked at SunPower for a few years with strong results, taking a sabbatical in March of 2009.  He then worked with the Sierra Club and helped "kill over 100 coal plants comprising 60 gigawatts of baseload coal."

Suvi Sharma, the CEO of Solaria, approached him in September of 2009 to consider a position with the company.  Shugar initially said, "No, thanks."  However, after some cajoling, Shugar and his own team of experts performed an extremely careful inspection of the company.   And when everything checked out technically and financially, Shugar took the reins of VC-funded Solaria as CEO in January of this year.

Solaria’s technology is based on dicing or “singulating" a standard crystalline silicon wafer and mounting these strips on a substrate with a lensing system that essentially halves the requirement for silicon.  The lensing and concentration is integrated into the rolled cover glass, representing a significant change from an earlier acrylic sub-assembly design.

Home furnishings retailer to tap into Earth's steady temperature; NREL to collect data, monitor system with an eye toward helping save energy and money.

Why waste time driving around looking for a parking space when you can simply outbid someone?

World Sensing has come up with an application that lets drivers bid on available parking spaces in downtown urban cores via a handset. If parking is tight, the price rises. If you want to reserve it 30 minutes or more in advance, the price goes up. The system reserves a given spot by programming the electronic parking meter to refuse to accept a payment from any other debit card within the reservation period.

Ideally, it could reduce gas and fumes associated with idling and prevent traffic clogs, says Drew Clark, director of strategy in IBM's Venture Group.

The company is one of the pre-public, and often pre-venture, outfits that IBM is trying to highlight through its Smart Camp initiative. At Smart Camp, startups get an opportunity to pitch themselves and VCs ideally plunk money into them. The next one occurs in September in San Mateo. ("We beat them 92 to 1/Cogito Ergo Sum!" chants the Descartes cabin at Smart Camp.)

Clark's job is to talk to established companies, startups and regulators and try to figure out where IBM's technology might best fit in the market. IBM's VC group doesn't invest in companies. Instead, it mostly tries to make connections and introductions. Ergo, Clark can serve as a signal on where the market is going. Some of the things on his mind these days:

--Expect to see servers and other high-powered computing devices out in the field as the smart grid expands. One of the primary goals of making the grid more intelligent is to be able to implement fine-tuned demand response or demand management networks. To turn power consumption up and down, however, requires a somewhat granular view of what is taking place inside of a home or office building.

Utilities thus will not be able to gather all of the data in real-time, process it, and then send signals out for turning down air conditioners or dimming lights. Instead, servers and intelligent edge switches closer to homes will access network-based databases and take the appropriate action.

Side note: networking has become one of the dominant themes of the year. As a computer giant, it is natural for IBM to promote it, but General Electric also said that leveraging IT technologies and networking will play a large role in its next five-year plan for ecomagination.

"These are going to be quad-core processor servers," he said. "More and more data is being pulled out of the data center. The closer you get, the more granular a view you get...They [utilities] are starting to think about what sort of processing on the network makes sense."

--We may see the evolution of parallel networks. Many utilities that have moved forward with plans to modernize their grids have adopted meters with low-bandwidth transmission protocols that check on energy consumption every 15 minutes. That isn't good enough for home energy management or demand response companies.

"Demand response companies will need sub-second signals," he said. "They need to take off kilowatts instantly."

To that end, these companies, particularly in deregulated states, may insert their own control boxes into homes and offices and rent fiber or bandwidth from commercial carriers. This network will interact with the utility's own network, but often operate as a separate entity.

--Speaking of demand response, some utilities will offload that task to third parties and others will keep it inside. "Some of them want to control every inch of connectivity," he said. Larsh Johnson, president of eMeter, said recently that some utilities will begin to unfurl their own demand response networks next year.

--Green IT remains a high priority in corporate America. To that end, IBM has linked alliances with SynapSense (data center assessment, monitoring and control) and Hara (software for monitoring resource consumption.) In many of these types of alliances, IBM provides sales contacts and layers on services.

A 22.5-sq.-mile site in the small town of Clovis, New Mexico is the only place in the United States where the three grids that service the western states, some eastern states, and the entire state of Texas all meet.

Sort of. The three grids come close to each other, but they aren't connected. This prevents electricity from being transferred between the Eastern Interconnection (which services states like New York), the Western Interconnection (which services states like California), and the Texas Interconnection (well, this one is obvious).  In that sense, it's like the nation's fragmented roads in the 1950s, before the Interstate Highway System linked the country.

With Tres Amigas, California conceivably will be able to siphon off excess wind capacity from Texas. At the current juncture, that is physically impossible. The transmission structure doesn't exist and energy storage technologies -- flow batteries, compressed air, sodium batteries -- aren't yet economical enough to start planting them en masse in the desert.

CH2M Hill is overseeing the construction of Tres Amigas SuperStation, a project that will change all that. The project will connect the entire power grid across America for the first time. The initial phase of the project will cost $600 million, but the hub is expected to make money by buying and selling electricity to utilities (and could make some $4 billion in revenue every year).

In the last 20 years, blackouts have increased to 124 percent in the United States. Smart grids could predict a potential outage and send electricity to the places where it is needed.

"The three grids are like three giant ocean liners that you are attempting to tie together," said Randy Connett, T&D services head at CH2M Hill.

The SuperStation will transform the way Americans consume electricity, make the grid more reliable, allow different forms of renewable energy to enter the grid, and open up the market for energy producers to unlock their renewable energy assets.

"Renewable resources seem to be a long way from where the load centers are," said Connett. The power grids currently in place are only designed to deliver power locally and can't distribute renewable energy over long distances.

"There are regulatory challenges. It's not a generator, but it acts like a generator. It's not a transmission line, but it is a kind of transmission line," said Connett. "It's a converter station. Because it's a new type of facility, regulators are working on how to classify it. They have rules on how to connect transmission lines and generators, but there are no rules to connect this type."

The SuperStation converts the AC power in the power lines to DC while it is in the station and then reconverts to back to AC (your cell phone and laptop run on DC). The conversion allows the power to be easily transferred from one grid to another. It's worth doing it over long distances so less energy is wasted, and it ensures the power arrives at its desired destination.

Construction on the station will begin in 2012 and should be completed by 2014. It will be built with underground direct current superconductor cables, voltage source converters, and energy storage systems.

The station will have initial power transfer capacity of about 5 gigawatts (GW), which can power 5 million homes. This will soon increase to 30 GW as the market grows, Tres Amigas representatives anticipate. The energy will be distributed more efficiently, so it will save hundreds of millions of dollars.

The nation needs a grid makeover -- and the Tres Amigas project is a good start.

Alan Champagne, vice president at CH2M Hill, said, "We are seeing the whole market change. There's a shift to [offering] more services. We want more plasma TVs [and other household items]. The peak market is growing."

The SuperStation will connect the utilities to other sources of energy. This will reduce the spinning reserve. Each utility is expected to have extra power. "If you are not able to draw from somebody else, you build more and more power plants. But if you can share between locations, you don't need as much spinning reserve," said Champagne.

So if a power plant goes down in Texas and you have spinning reserve in California, you can send the power needed over to Texas. Projects of this scale give the power grids the ability to share power where it is most in demand.

"The SuperStation is an additional source of supply and an additional market to deliver goods to," said Connett.  "It's an exciting project that promotes sustainability and creates jobs in the Southwest. Those are both things we are delighted to be apart of."

The move to integrate more renewable sources of energy into the grid isn't all that American -- Europe and China have definitely taken the lead in rolling out converters to upgrade their aging power grids.

"In Europe, HVDC can connect countries using sub-sea cables that are only possible using HVDC cables because of the distances.  Also, offshore wind generation can be connected to the grid using sub-sea cables," said Gary Rackliffe, ABB's VP of North America.

In Europe, the North Sea supergrid has opened up markets for solar and wind energy trade. For instance, the European Union's synchronous grid allows Britain to access France's nuclear power through undersea cables.

China is using HVDC for above-ground transmission over long distances in order to connect generation in western China with the load centers in cities in eastern China. 

"For Tres Amigas, HVDC is being used because Texas, the Western Interconnect, and the Eastern Interconnect all are 60-Hz operating regions, but they are not synchronized," said Rackliffe. "HVDC is used for the interconnection with 'back-to-back' systems that convert from AC to DC, connect between regions, and then invert from DC to AC.  The Texas, Eastern, and Western operating regions can be interconnected at Tres Amigas," he said.

The deal, naturally, is attracting other big name partners. American Superconductor Corp. will supply superconducting wire. Superconducting cables can carry far more electricity than their traditional transmission cable counterparts, though they need to be cooled with liquid nitrogen to do so. Despite their high cost, superconducting DC cables are seen as a viable alternative for certain high-voltage transmission applications (see Superconductors For the Grid).

American Superconductor is already making superconducting wire for Korea's LS Cable to install in that nation's electricity grid (see this Green Light post).

Xtreme Power announced today that it has been selected as the energy storage provider for Tres Amigas. The company's Dynamic Power Resource (DPR) energy management system will deliver consistent power across the three grids and respond to fluctuations. The DPR will also provide back-up power to each grid.

The storage system has been used in locations with extreme climactic conditions, such as the South Pole, and in wind farms in Hawaii. In the Tres Amigas project, Xtreme Power's system will integrate renewable energy sources smoothly into the mega-transmission hub so the power can get to the customers who need it most.

In recent years, the electronics industry has gained notoriety for creating an endless stream of disposable products that make their way at life's end to developing countries, where poor people without safety gear cut and burn out valuable materials, often spilling contaminants into their water, air and lungs in the process.

Solar modules contain some of the same potentially dangerous materials as electronics, including silicon tetrachloride, cadmium, selenium and sulfur hexafluoride, a potent greenhouse gas. So as solar moves from the fringe to the mainstream, insiders and watchdog groups are beginning to talk about producers' responsibility and the prospect of recycling in an attempt to sidestep the pitfalls of electronic waste and retain the industry's green credibility.

Solar modules have an expected lifespan of at least 20 years, so most have not yet reached the end of their useful lives. But now, before a significant number of dead panels pile up, is the perfect time to implement a responsible program, said Sheila Davis, executive director of the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition.  

The nonprofit environmental group has been a leader in recognizing the problems of e-waste, including hazardous disposal sites in the Bay Area left by the semiconductor industry. Now it is focused on the solar boom in Silicon Valley. Last year, the group published a report calling for a "just and sustainable" solar industry, and this year it issued a scorecard of solar companies. The scorecard evaluates recycling and extended producer responsibility for the product's end of life, called takeback; supply chain and green jobs; chemical use and lifecycle analysis; and disclosure. 

Vastly expanding industry

Solar energy is the most widely available resource we have. Every hour, enough solar energy strikes Earth to meet human energy needs for more than a year, according to NASA. Now the solar industry is poised for huge growth in the United States, thanks to policy changes, incentives, technological improvements and economies of scale. Solar photovoltaics have recently become less expensive than nuclear energy on a per-kilowatt-hour basis, according to a new report from Duke University. Also, solar is widely expected to reach cost parity with fossil fuels in most markets by 2013.

In 2009, Greentech Media estimated that U.S. solar demand will continue to increase about 50 percent annually through 2012. The report said the U.S. capacity installed during 2008 was about 320 megawatts, and it predicted that about 2,000 megawatts would be installed during 2012. Such growth would put U.S. capacity ahead of solar leader Spain and potentially ahead of Germany, as well. 

While most of the new modules will likely have a long, productive life, factory scrap, transport breakages and field failures are ready for recycling now. Jennifer Woolwich is collecting these broken solar modules in a warehouse near Phoenix.

She founded her company, PV Recycling, in February 2009 after estimating that she could harvest 500 panels a week from these sources. She is not yet collecting at that capacity, nor does she have enough panels to begin recycling them, but she is talking with solar manufacturers in an effort to win their recycling business. 

"Of those we interviewed, 100 percent want recycling," she said. "Eighty percent want an independent third-party doing the recycling."  

Woolwich said she has seen a quick evolution in solar manufacturers' attitudes toward recycling: "Last year, there was kind of a 'wait and see, we're not sure how this is going to work' attitude. Over the past 12 months, I've seen a 180. I've seen companies who are hiring consultants to research their whole value chain to identify waste, including the end of life of modules. We've received calls from consumers asking us which companies have takeback programs in place."

Solar companies tend to be secretive about their product recipes, making some manufacturers cautious about, yet conceptually open to, third-party recycling.

"We guarantee that intellectual property will not be put at risk," Woolwich said. "We're not interested in reverse engineering or selling company secrets. We have certificates of destruction that we provide."

For now, though, some companies are doing their own recycling.

SolarWorld, which received an 88 out of 100 on the toxics coalition's scorecard, has been recycling its own panels since 2003 at its main factory in Freiberg, Germany. That factory now receives broken panels from its U.S. plants in Cabrillo, Calif., Hillsboro, Ore., and Vancouver, Wash.

"The fact is, there isn't much to recycle," said Ben Santarris, a spokesman for SolarWorld. "In the future we might expand recycling to our U.S. plants or contract with a third-party recycler."

First Solar earned a rating of 67 on the scorecard. Headquartered in Tempe, Ariz., it has recycling facilities at its manufacturing sites in Perrysburg, Ohio; Frankfurt (Oder), Germany; and Kulim, Malaysia. Lisa Krueger, vice president of sustainable development, said that so far the company is primarily recycling manufacturing scrap.

"It's our intention that there would be other recycling facilities worldwide as you get into those volumes," she said.

Materials of interest

Solar modules employ a variety of technologies, and even models within the same technology can have different ingredients. These materials may or may not be classified as toxic depending on who is regulating them.

Dustin Mulvaney is a scientist who works on solar issues at the University of California, Berkeley, and serves as a consultant to the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition. He has analyzed solar modules currently on the market and has outlined for each its key ingredients, including potentially toxic elements and materials that would be valuable to recover in recycling.

Used in SolarWorld modules, crystalline photovoltaic is the oldest and most widespread solar technology in the United States, holding 57 percent market share in 2009, according to Greentech Media. "As far as hazardous materials go, you're primarily talking about lead," Mulvaney said.

A thin film technology called cadmium telluride makes up about 21 percent of the U.S. market. First Solar panels use this technology.

Cadmium may be carcinogenic. Exposure affects the lungs and kidneys and can be fatal. "It's gene toxic and a mutagen, so it has the ability to affect DNA, meaning it could affect reproduction and future generations' DNA," Mulvaney said.

Cadmium is technically banned by the European Union's Restriction on Hazardous Substances directive, although the policy currently allows an exemption for its use in solar modules.

Still, there's not a lot of data about whether cadmium is toxic in the alloy form in which it's used in thin film. And cadmium isn't likely to go away anytime soon, as it is uniquely efficient at absorbing light.

Another thin film material, copper indium gallium selenide (CIGS), also has a cadmium layer. Indium is a potentially hazardous substance, too, particularly in the form of indium tin oxide, Mulvaney said. Studies have linked it to pulmonary disease in flat-screen TV recycling facilities. And selenium has been documented to be a hazardous material.

While CIGS currently has a market share of just 6 percent, amorphous silicon, which also has an indium tin oxide layer, holds 16 percent of the market.

California's Department of Toxic Substances Control has taken note of the European Union's concern about cadmium and is researching the chemical and physical makeup of various types of modules.

"We think some solar panels, probably the cadmium thin-film type, might be hazardous waste when shredded or disposed of in a landfill," said Charles Corcoran, a hazardous substances scientist at the department.

Only panels classified as hazardous would fall under the jurisdiction of the department. It is considering regulatory options to try to steer end-users toward recycling rather than disposal.

"That gets a little complicated, because California and U.S. regulations aren't necessarily in sync," Corcoran said. "An option might be to transport it out of state where disposal is legal."

Today, California has no solar module recycling facilities. But recycling locally is an important tenet of an ethical, sustainable industry, said the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition's Davis. Recycling locally reduces the process' carbon footprint.

"It would also make people more conscious about what goes into the products," Davis said. "And it would create local jobs."

Designing with recycling in mind

Extended producer responsibility, including module recycling, is currently an expense rather than a source of profit for companies, including Solar World and First Solar.

"As we get to scale, we hope those costs will come down," Krueger said.

A dedicated recycler like Woolwich is counting on economies of scale. Her business plan also includes various revenue streams, including reclaiming and selling materials and providing a service of managing manufacturers' collection and recycling systems.

Davis said recycling costs could be reduced if manufacturers would take the notion of extended producer responsibility to the next level: the design phase.

"If you don't look at the recycling when you're designing the product, then it's really, really difficult to recycle," Davis said. "But if you know you're going to have to pay for the recycling at the end of life, you might make the necessary design changes in your product now to reduce that cost."

Mulvaney said that if the government were to set a price on carbon emissions, that would also help make solar recycling more affordable. Because turning sand into crystals takes 70 to 80 percent of the energy used to make crystalline photovoltaics, he said recycling silicon would "save so much energy in production, it could become a money saver."

Still, most companies that are beginning recycling programs today are proceeding under the assumption that recycling will be a cost. They are preparing for that expense by creating a variety of funding mechanisms based on the principle of producer responsibility.

Via her surveys, Woolwich has found that solar companies are using an annuity program, escrow, maturity bonds, annual fixed contracts, and pay-as-you-go.

Krueger said First Solar uses a trust: "First Solar doesn't have access to those funds except for collection and recycling," she said. "It's designed that way because of the long product life. If something happens to First Solar, the industry won't have to deal with orphan waste."

Some materials in solar modules such as silicon and rare metals could be more valuable in the future, providing an additional incentive to recycle. Material price spikes have caused industry turmoil in recent years. For example, polysilicon shot to $400 per kilogram between 2006 and 2008. It is now down around $55.

Krueger said First Solar currently harvests cadmium and tellurium from its recycling program to use in new modules, even though buying it from a supplier is currently less expensive. She said she expects harvesting costs to come down as recycling scales up.

Mulvaney said that the industry would do well to plan now for the recovery of rare metals such as indium and tellurium.

Of course, materials recovery has an environmental benefit, as well. "We'll be able to reduce impact from mining and other environmental hazards by collecting a lot of the metals and other valuable minerals that are being used in panels," Davis said.

Being truly sustainable -- and maintaining that green credibility -- is a powerful motivator for renewable energy companies.

Santarris said the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition's scorecard was an "important step" toward figuring out which manufacturers are the most environmentally benign.

"There's not a lot of sophistication in the marketplace to differentiate among products and manufacturers of varying environmental performance," Santarris said. "Are solar modules all the same? They're not."

***

This article was originally published at the SF Public Press.

Greentech Media and GTM Research have led the pack in questioning the viability of amorphous silicon in photovoltaic applications -- especially in chronicling the spectacular faceplant of Silicon Valley semiconductor giant, Applied Materials, their customers, and their a-Si photovoltaic efforts. 

We've been less dismissive concerning Oerlikon's efforts in a-Si because in our many conversations with Chris O’Brien, Oerlikon Solar’s head of market development in North America, he's insisted that business is strong and that their aggressive cost targets are in reach.     

According to O'Brien, Oerlikon has some key first-mover advantages, such as possessing a longer legacy in micromorph (tandem junction) and starting off with an efficiency advantage that became much more important when crystalline silicon (c-Si) joined First Solar as cost leaders.  O'Brien also cited their zinc oxide transparent conductive oxide material as an efficiency booster, as well as a new reflective coating from DuPont that allows thinner silicon layer thickness and reduces efficiency degradation.

O'Brien said that Oerlikon's cost last year was $1.30 per watt; this year's is under a dollar and 70 cents per watt is achievable by the end of the year.

Applied Materials is out of the game and Oerlikon should benefit from that exit, but Oerlikon is not competing with Applied.  They (or more accurately, their customers) are competing with First Solar and a flock of low-cost c-Si companies. And Oerlikon is going to have to overachieve at execution and R&D to keep up with those pacesetters.

But Oerlikon Solar's first-half financial results were not a good sign.

Oerlikon's orders received for the first half of 2010 were down 98 percent (!) since the prior year, with operating losses of $57.5 million.

But according to the report, "in recent months the solar market has also shown signs of recovery, and Oerlikon Solar won two follow-up contracts from its Chinese customers Tianwei and Astronergy, which were announced in July and August, respectively. In the second half-year 2010, Oerlikon Solar expects to significantly reduce its losses."

Oerlikon Solar, based in Zurich, Switzerland and controlled by Russian tycoon Viktor Vekselberg, is one of the world’s largest suppliers of equipment for building thin-film photovoltaics. The firm has not been profitable since 2007.

O'Brien was quoted in Recharge as saying, “Obviously, there’s been a big change in price expectations in the market, so getting to $0.70 [per watt] has gone from an aspiration to a real imperative." 

Other Amorphous Silicon Players

Sharp is going full-speed-ahead with amorphous silicon and recently embarked on a joint venture with Enel and ST Microelectronics in a-Si. Chinese a-Si manufacturer Trony Solar withdrew its IPO earlier this month.  Trony's investors include Intel, which owns about 5 percent of the firm. 

Also struggling to remain competitive in amorphous silicon are flexible panel vendors Energy Conversion Devices and relatively quiet VC-funded Xunlight.  Other startups investigating variations of amorphous silicon include AOS Solar, APSTL, EPV Solar, HelioSphera, NanoPV, Sencera, Sierra Solar, Signet Solar and Skypoint.

All of this action takes place against the backdrop of thin film leader First Solar, soon to have 2 gigawatts of 14 percent efficiency solar module capacity at a cost of less than 65 cents per watt.

I'll leave you with a quote from Chet Farris, the CEO of CIGS PV vendor, Stion, who had this to say about amorphous silicon: it was a "dead duck ten years ago" and "is a dead duck today."  It will be "relegated to specialty and niche markets."

Potential amorphous silicon photovoltaic market:

Suntech Power Holdings is now the largest solar panel manufacturer by revenue. Dr. Zhengrong Shi, Suntech's Chairman and CEO, led this morning's second quarter earnings call.  Here are the highlights:

• Suntech total net revenues for the second quarter of 2010 came in at $625.1 million. Net loss of $174.9 million mostly due to one-time impairments.
• Gross margin was expected to be in the range of 17.5 percent to 18.5 percent and came in at 18.2 percent. Revenue and margin were in line with guidance Suntech issued in early August.
• The firm is increasing capacity to 1.8 gigawatts by end of 2010
• 2010 shipment targets increased from 1.3 to 1.5 gigawatts, a growth year-on-year of 113 percent.
• ASPs look to be fairly stable, with a small decrease in Q3 and stable in Q4.
• Non-silicon costs were reduced by .04 to 52 cents per watt with relatively flat silicon wafer costs.
• Andrew Beebe was promoted to chief commercial officer in charge of global sales.
• The firm saw a Q2 acceleration in demand in North America.  CSI  applications are up 250 percent year-over-year with 15 percent slated to use Suntech panels. Back in March, CMO Steve Chan said the company wanted to triple North American sales, so Suntech seems to be on track.
• Their high-efficiency (19 percent) Pluto output increased from 4 megawatts to 6 megawatts per month.  Shi considered this a small volume but able to command a 15 percent price premium.
• Q3 is expected to see growth quarter-on-quarter of 15 to 20 percent with growth margin in mid to high teens.
• As covered by Michael Kanellos, Suntech has ceased the manufacture of amorphous silicon thin-film solar panels. As a result, Suntech expects to incur a thin film equipment non-cash impairment charge of approximately $54.6 million in the second quarter of 2010.

Commenting on the charges, Dr. Shi said, "While the thin film-related and Shunda-related charges will significantly impact our second quarter financial results, they have no bearing on our core manufacturing operations, which are performing very well."

Home Depot is going after more than hall lamps with its latest LED light bulb announcement.

The DIY giant has started to sell a line of LED downlights -- those interior lights that look like small floodlights -- for homes. The bulb was designed and will be produced by Cree, but sold under Home Depot's EcoSmart brand. Home Depot will also sell Philips-made LED bulbs and already announced it was selling Lighting Science LED bulbs under the EcoSmart brand back in May. 

The Cree/EcoSmart bulbs cost $49.95, last for 35,000 hours and emit about the same amount of light as a 65-watt incandescent downlight. It will screw into standard ceiling fixtures. Cree says the bulb over its lifetime -- which will be 32 years if you use it about three hours a day -- will save consumers $300. The bulbs are available on the Home Depot site now and will be in stores in the fall.

"20 million downlights are sold a year. They are increasingly used in new construction and retrofits," said Ty Mitchell, vice president and general manager of LED lighting at Cree.

Declining prices, policy directives and the rising price of electricity has set off a revolution in lighting. Over the next few years, fortunes and opportunities will be won or lost (here is a roadmap to new lighting).

Osram Sylvania back in May promised an LED bulb by August, so expect something from that company soon, although it may not be in collaboration with Home Depot.

The bulb in part grows out of a line of LED bulbs Cree already sells into the commercial market. Cree combines white and red LEDs inside the bulb so the bulb emits a warm, bright light similar to the light that comes out of familiar, but highly inefficient, incandescent bulbs. You won't see red spots interspersed with white-bluish light because of the white/red mix, or even a sparkling rose. It will look like regular light.

The EcoSmart bulb costs less than Cree's earlier commercial versions of this type of bulb that are already on the market. Cree will also sell a version of the EcoSmart bulb to commercial customers.

Most bulb makers tinker with the phosphor to boost the warmth and take some of the harsh glare out of white light LEDs. The white/red approach, however, results in a more energy-efficient bulb that can put out more light while using less power, according to Cree. Cree also has intellectual property on combining whites and red in this way. (Cree's intellectual property portfolio is something nearly all LED makers have to contend with, either by trying to woek around it or paying Cree royalties under a licensing agreement.)

Philips, Osram and others earlier this year unfurled plans for LED bulbs to replace familiar "A" type bulbs. Earlier this month, Home Depot itself began to tout a 40-watt equivalent standard bulb developed by Lighting Science. General Electric has an LED bulb coming that is also based around LEDs from Cree.

Technically speaking, Cree's downlight will emit 575 lumens and consume 10.5 watts. An equivalent incandescent would consume 65 watts and emit 635 lumens. While the LED bulb emits fewer lumens, fewer lumens are wasted due to the optical characteristics of bulb.

"Brightness is not going to be a problem," he said. "It appears brighter to most folks."

An equivalent compact fluorescent downlight might only consume 15 watts, or close to the level of the LED downlight. But CFL downlights contain mercury, don't last as long, and, perhaps most important of all, don't dim, or at least don't dim in most circumstances. Dimmers and downlights are often used in tandem in homes.

A note on lumens. Typically 60-watt equivalent A bulbs emit 800 lumens. The 60-watt equivalent A bulbs announced by Osram and Philips earlier this year will emit, respectively, 810 and 806 lumens.

Downlights emit fewer lumens. The 65-watt equivalent bulb shown here will emit 575 lumens. The parabolic shape and interior reflective surfaces, however, make downlights more efficient so you get more illumination for less wattage.

This is what a consolidating industry looks like. 

Sources have informed Greentech Media that independent power producer (IPP) Recurrent Energy is up for sale, and it's happening sooner rather than later.  We have verified from other inside sources that the firm is indeed for sale.

Solar project developers with strong project pipelines are a hot property.  Owning a project developer or an IPP allows a firm such as, say, a solar module manufacturer to capture more of the solar value chain and provides a captive outlet for product.

SunPower and Suntech have acquired a number of project developers, and even silicon manufacturer MEMC has looked to get vertical with investments in Tioga Energy and the acquisition of Sun Edison.  Recurrent Energy uses Suntech panels on their San Francisco reservoir project.

Recurrent Energy is developing a fleet of distributed-scale solar projects in North America and Europe. The VC-funded firm develops ground-mount and roof-based solar power plants that are interconnected at utility substations or on a distribution network.

One of Recurrent's most prominent projects was a public-private project that just closed long term debt financing  -- the 5-megawatt solar power system located at the Sunset Reservoir in occasionally sunny San Francisco, California. The company secured approximately $18 million for the project from Prudential Capital Group, which provided 24-year term debt financing.  Recurrent Energy also has PPAs with utility Southern California Edison. 
 
The project will be one of the largest municipal solar power systems in the United States and will more than triple San Francisco’s total municipal solar energy output.  It  is expected to be fully operational by early fall of 2010. 
 
According to Recurrent's CEO Arno Harris, “We have more than 330 megawatts of distributed-scale projects in our contracted portfolio across North America and Europe."  Recurrent has a pipeline of over 1.3 gigawatts of distributed-scale solar projects in development across North America and Europe.  The firm also has projects in France, Spain, Canada and Israel.

Investors in Recurrent include Mohr Davidow Ventures and Hudson Clean Energy Partners.  Both investors declined to comment on this story.

 

Santa Clara, Calif. -- Who would have thought the Japanese underworld would get involved in the fight against climate change?

Micron Technology earlier this year bought a company called Numonyx, which specializes in a fast and super energy-efficient type of computer memory called phase change memory (PCM) that has been delayed for years. Early PCM adopters have included computing companies, who use it in internal systems to speed up their prototype development process, said Ed Doller, who runs the advanced memory group at Micron, during a meeting at the Flash Memory Summit taking place in Santa Clara this week.

Another major early application, he added, was in gaming devices, specifically, "Pachinko machines," he said. A compulsive staple in the entertainment world of Japan, Pachinko machines have had long connections to shady characters.

Over the next 18 months, expect to see a few more PCM applications. Some companies are looking at inserting the technology into phones or DVD players for rapid boot-up. (Side note: Micron formed a solar joint venture earlier this year, so expect to see the name pop up more frequently in green circles.)

Memory and data storage will likely be one of the major topics in green IT over the next few years. That is, after better air conditioning systems. Storage can account for a large percentage of the power consumed by data centers. Startups like Schooner Information Technology and Nimbus Data Systems have started to market all-in-one storage devices based around flash drives and their own software. Meanwhile, Lyric Semiconductor, Fusion I-O and Sandforce have come up with components that boost the performance of the actual flash drives and chips.

In notebooks, meanwhile, a major notebook manufacturer will introduce a notebook that will not accommodate a regular hard drive, according to Micron Technology vice president Dean Klein. It will only come with a solid-state flash drive. Right now, most of the major manufacturers sell notebooks in which consumers can order a flash drive instead of a hard drive, but an all-flash notebook would be novel.

Who will do it? Apple is a candidate. The company already offers solid-state drives on its notebooks: it could just kill off the version of the MacBook Air with a regular drive and claim to have accomplished something significant. The obligatory obsequiousness would be deafening. Then again, Lenovo caters to the corporate types that would get the most use out of a notebook with an extended battery life.

Conventional flash memory will likely be the technology that starts to erode the dominance of drives. Alternatives may not be needed in large numbers or quantities until the second half of the decade. And the leading one is PCM, which has a long and interesting history. (And if history is any guide, a strong chance exists that it will never replace flash altogether.) PCM stores data differently than flash or even hard drives. It is made from a material similar to the stuff DVDs from which are made. To write data to it, heat is applied to a memory cell. When the cell cools, the bit re-solidifies into one of two crystalline structures, depending on how fast the cooling takes place. The two different crystalline structures exhibit different levels of resistance to electrical current. Those differing levels of resistance are ultimately read as '1s' or '0s' by a computer.

Stan Ovshinsky is the original inventor of phase change. Ovshinksy is the celebrated yet controversial inventor who played a major role in amorphous silicon solar panels and nickel metal hydride batteries (he is also the founder of Energy Conversion Devices).

PCM has been heralded as the next big thing since the early 1970s. Gordon Moore himself predicted in Electronics Magazine that computer users might see it in that decade.

The memory, though, actually only started coming out recently. (Don't feel bad for Moore, though. The same issue of the magazine included an article titled, "The Big Gamble in Home Video Recorders.")

Another PCM side note: Brian Harrison, the new CEO of Solyndra, used to run Numonyx.

The Networked EV: Smart Grids and Electric Vehicles is the only conference dedicated to the intersection of electric vehicles and smart grids. This conference will not only focus on EV technology, policy and adoption rates, but will also dive deeper into the importance of an enhanced networked grid infrastructure to support mass adoption of EVs while maintaining grid stability and reliability. Of equal importance, and also to be examined in detail, is an intelligent network-based charging infrastructure for EVs as they are deployed globally.

Join industry experts, utility executives, policy makers, financiers and more as they gather to gain understanding and network with each other in the emerging networked EV space. Hosted by the company that organized the highly successful Networked Grid series, this is a one-day conference you won't want to miss. This event will take place on November 9, 2010 at the PG&E Auditorium in downtown San Francisco.

Save $200 when you register before August 31, 2010.

Learn more about the event and register on the event website.

Topics to be covered at The Networked EV: Smart Grids and Electric Vehicles include:

• The Networked EV: Market Outlook through 2015, including exclusive marke research from GTM Research
• The Networked EV Big Picture: Let the Rollout Begin
• Networked Auto 2.0: The New Wave of EV and Battery Manufacturers
• Networked Charging Infrastructure: Intelligent Smart Grid Control Networks for Charging
• EVs and Distribution Automation Networks: The Integration of EVs on the Smart Grid

In addition, The Networked EV will feature two keynote presentation sessions:

• Steve Malnight, Vice President of Integrated Demand-Side Management, PG&E will deliver the morning keynote
• The afternoon keynote speaker will be announced in the coming weeks
• The full agenda for The Networked EV can be found here.

Please inquire to events@greentechmedia.com for information on non-profit, government and student discounts. Please inquire to sales@greentechmedia.com for information on sponsorship and exhibit opportunities.

We hope to see you there!

An Irish energy expert's new book says Ireland has the potential to turn its energy the color of its green shamrocks and put lots of gold into the pockets of the Irish who lead the transition.

"Clean energy can help rescue Ireland from its current economic and energy challenges,"said John Travers, CEO of Alternative Energy Resources. In his new book, Green & Gold: Ireland: A Clean Energy World Leader?, Travers makes the case for the benefits that will come with transitioning the Emerald Isle to a new energy economy.

"Ireland is endowed with winds that are among the strongest in the world and the waves that crash against our western seaboard are some of the most powerful on the planet," Travers told a book release party audience at University College Dublin. "Harnessing these and other clean energy sources such as solar and biomass offers Ireland a golden opportunity to overcome the energy challenge it faces."

Graham Brennan, program manager for renewable-energy research and development at Sustainable Energy Ireland (SEI), the government's green-technology arm, said that while the nation's peak electricity demand is approximately 6,000 megawatts, the wind blowing over the island contains 8,000 megawatts of power.

In addition, a recent white paper from Ireland's Marine Renewables Industry Association found that newly designated ocean energy test sites can lead to Ireland meeting its 500-megawatt target for wave and tidal capacity by 2020. And the recent  Generation Adequacy Report 2010 - 2016, from EirGrid, reported there would be at least nine megawatts of new biomass capacity coming online each of the next seven years.  While the report included no mention of coming solar development in Ireland, a new UK feed-in tariff could alter that.

According to Travers, Ireland can build enough renewable energy installed capacity to meet 20% of its energy needs by 2020 and it can generate 80% of its energy from renewables by 2050.

To fully achieve its potential, most experts believe more renewable energy storage will be necessary. To that end, SEI has a wind-battery storage project at a wind farm in Donegal and can expand on a 300-megawatt pumped hydro facility in Turlough Hill.

Travers also stressed that by using its renewable energy resources to free itself from its current 90% dependence on imported fossil fuels, Ireland can reap huge economic benefits. "There is the potential to create almost 100,000 jobs from harnessing renewable energy and applying energy efficiency," he said.

The East-West Interconnector, Ireland's major new 500-megawatt capacity transmission system, is due to come online in 2012, according to the EirGrid report. It will interweave the Irish and British grids and provide the opportunity to export the abundant renewable assets. The EU's planned Supergrid, conceived by Irish wind pioneer Eddie O'Connor, will expand the market for Ireland's wind even further. According to Travers, 20% of Ireland's GDP can come from exporting its renewable energy.

"In achieving energy independence, Ireland can become an outstanding world leader and a global beacon for the use of clean energy," Travers said.

John Travers is an engineering graduate of University College Dublin and has an MBA from Harvard University. He became the CEO of Alternative Energy Resources, a leading Irish alternative energy company, after stints with Shell International and McKinsey & Company. His previous book is Driving the Tiger: Irish Enterprise Spirit.

'Smart grid' is a term with as much buzz as any I've heard lately.  It's mentioned in conversations about climate change, renewable energy and new types of energy storage.  It seems that just saying "smart grid" several times in a conversation makes people think you're smarter.  But with all the buzz and money being spent to make our existing grid smarter, the least talked about but most important part of the smart grid is what's often left out - you.  The American consumer's acceptance of this new, intelligent technology is of paramount importance.

The smart grid is coming, and sooner than you think. Around the world, countries such as Germany, Italy, China and England have been accelerating the use of technology to improve their electricity grids for years.  Here in the U.S., with the help of the Department of Energy, billions of dollars are being invested by America's utilities to bring the benefits of smart grid technologies to consumers. 

Change can be disconcerting, but think of the world 20 years ago, before the internet arrived. Now, it's difficult to imagine the world without it-and you can look at the smart grid as a permutation of the World Wide Web, because it will for the first time allow utilities and customers to have a two-way conversation.  The smart grid won't change what your appliances do, but it will give end-users more information to make smart decisions and make the grid more reliable and efficient. While the smart grid will enable savings on monthly electricity bills now, it will help even more to curb future increases. It's time that we use our ingenuity and innovation to improve a system that we not only can, but should bring into the 21st century.

Our government, utilities, energy providers and leading scientists and engineers are in favor of the smart grid and are working very hard to make it a success.  New technologies and alliances are being announced on an almost daily basis, much of it focused on reducing peak energy demand and enabling greater energy efficiency.  However, its ultimate success on a large scale will depend on its acceptance by you, the consumer.  When the smart grid connects to your home in the next five years or so, it can be as complex or as simple as you'd like it to be.  In many cases, it will succeed when the technology supports your lifestyle, your values and your pocketbook.  Smart grid technology is going to give consumers many options for managing home energy consumption, and providing these options in a way that fits our lifestyles is the ultimate goal.  While there is always a place for technophiles who will constantly tinker with their energy use, in order to become mainstream, it must be as easy as "set-it-and-forget-it."

As we rebuild our electricity infrastructure with 21st century technology, we need to help consumers adapt to change.  While the smart grid will allow consumers and utilities to manage energy through better information, Big Brother shouldn't be watching your every move. No one should to dictate when you use electricity, and your privacy should not be impinged upon.  An entirely new ecosystem of technology providers stands ready to introduce innovative new products and services directed at consumer energy management, and we need to accelerate that progress if we hope to affect the energy consumption patterns in this country.

In this new era, where there is an expectation of a two-way communication between the utility and the consumer, we must be mindful of the change. I believe that consumer representation still plays a significant role, but the consumer will now be heard directly, with no intermediary. It's no longer adequate for the advocates to be the sole voice of the consumer. 

Therefore, I think it is time to discuss a Smart Grid Consumer Charter. Such a charter can help this industry bring a level of transparency and fairness to the consumer, who currently does not have much control over the design, the content or the direction of the smart grid.

This is a complicated subject because of the coming changes. Today, there are advocates and officials who look out for electricity consumers.  But as we move to implement the Smart Grid, consumers will need additional protection because the country's electricity infrastructure and the way it operates will change significantly. There will be a two-way conversation between consumers and utilities will strengthen the relationship when the expectations are clarified. It will expand the ties that exist today, ties represented only by the advocate and commissioner.

A charter also would protect the utilities. By being proactive in the enforcement of these expectations, utilities could go a long way towards instilling public confidence in their ability to allow the consumer to manage their energy in a responsible manner.

As American consumers, we have taken electricity for granted for a long time.  For the better part of a century, the electric utility has made it convenient for us to consume electricity when we wanted it and how we wanted it, regardless of how much it cost to produce at any given time.  By sharing the responsibilities of energy management with the utilities, we can all be better stewards of the environment.  The smart grid is coming. Is America ready? Will we be responsible? Do we have a charter that we can rally behind?

I propose a Smart Grid Charter that will strengthen the customer's role in the smart grid rollout and provide an opportunity for an open dialogue between the utility and its consumers.

Smart Grid Consumer Charter

• Expectation of privacy. The consumer billing and/or usage data should not be shared with any unauthorized third parties without the consumer's consent.
• Expectation of transparency. As the rate structures change, consumers will need a clear description of the new rates and its impacts to their lifestyles. It also would help if utilities could publish their quantifiable Smart Grid goals and metrics so consumers can view overall progress on areas like energy savings and carbon reduction across their regions.
• Expectation of security. The utility must secure all consumer data and be compliant with industry-standard cyber security protocols and best practices.
• Expectation of anonymity. Any customer information used for regional analysis, load growth projections or just stored for long-term and non-billing uses should be stripped of any personally identifying information including addresses, names, or consumer IDs.
• Expectation of choice. In the future utilities will be developing different rate structures and customers will be able to modify behavioral aspects of their in order to save money. Because one size doesn't fit all, the consumer must be given choices between rate structures. Utilities and regulators must design their systems to allow consumers to purchase their own controllers and equipment as new technologies emerge.
• Expectation of sharing. The benefits of the Smart Grid must be made apparent to all. Each of us has a right to know how big our carbon footprint is and how successful we are being in reducing it.
• Expectation of data. The utility must provide collected usage data back to the consumer.

 

***

Dr. Mani Vadari is a member of the board of GridWise Alliance and a Vice President at Battelle, where he directs Battelle's investments to build on its portfolio of DOE's National Labs and associated partnering institutions.

Santa Clara, Calif. -- What is the secret sauce behind Miasole, the maker of copper indium gallium selenide (CIGS) solar modules?

The heart of the company's technology is a large, hexagonal manufacturing machine festooned with valves and rollers that looks like a cross between a particle accelerator and a prop from a science fiction movie. A miles-long metal foil sheet goes in one end, gets turned 90 degrees so that it's vertical, and, in succession, is coated with molybendium, molybdenum, cadmium, indium, selenide and other materials.

It is like watching a multimillion-dollar spin-art machine.

"It produces a module every 90 seconds," said Joseph Laia, Miasole's CEO, during a tour earlier in June.

While solar cells are semiconductors, and many of the processes for making solar cells are similar to those used in chipmaking, the tour reminded me once again that the two industries share distinct characteristics.

The differences:

1. Moore's Law Doesn't Exactly Map to Solar. Moore's Law -- the observation made by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore in 1966 that the number of transistors that can be placed on a chip can be doubled every 24 months -- became the foundation of the tech industry, because it laid out a forecast for growth. With Moore's Law, chip makers could feel comfortable plunking down $1 billion or more for a new fab while software developers could sleep without worrying if enough bandwidth would ever exist for swapping movies.

Unfortunately, it also doesn't translate well beyond the realm of computer chips. Why? Moore's Law is all about getting small. Transistors exist to ferry electrons from point A to point B. Thus, smaller transistors mean better performance. They also mean lower costs, because more chips can be popped out of the same finitely sized wafer. Alternatively, designers could add more transistors to a single chip to give it more oomph.

But the "smaller, cheaper, better" concept doesn't work everywhere. If the car industry followed Moore's Law, a Rolls Royce would cost less than a dollar and be as fast as a plane. However, it would also be only a few millimeters high and could barely accommodate a few fleas. In fact, not everything about the dictum works in chips: Moore predicted silicon wafers that would be six feet in diameter by now. The current generation actually measures more in the range of 300 millimeters. (Moore told me in a casual interview in 2003 that Moore's Law has continued to be applicable in part because we "got lucky" with silicon and the way its crystalline structure works.)

With solar, shrinkage doesn't work well. Shrinking a solar cell reduces the surface area exposed to the sun, which directly reduces the amount of power it can generate. In the solar space, at least, smaller is the enemy of better.

"This is not the chip industry. The rate of change is completely different," said Laia. "I don't have Moore's Law...I don't have shrink."

2. It's About Process, Not Products. Although modules might be ornate devices, the fact that they all perform similar functions means that they will ultimately get bought, sold and priced as commodities. Thus, the intellectual property doesn't largely reside in the cells or modules: it relies in the manufacturing equipment and processes, according to Laia. Miasole designs its cell manufacturing hardware itself.

"We make our own coaters," he said. "Between your design and the variety of equipment makers, Intel can differentiate its process from Samsung and TSMC. Their factories can sing and dance at different levels."

Miasole has 105 patents and patent applications and has 50 more coming soon. The company's goal is to file around 100 applications per year.

The opposite situation exists in the semiconductor space: chip makers gave up producing their own equipment years ago.

The "process or product" debate about equipment in solar is contentious and not everyone agrees. The first generation of CIGS manufacturers -- Solyndra, Miasole, Nanosolar, HelioVolt, SoloPower -- spent hundreds of millions of dollars creating their own equipment. Effectively, they had to become Applied Material in order to serve a single, captive customer: themselves.

AQT Technologies built a 15-megawatt CIGS facility for under $15 million with second-hand parts from the disk industry. Telio Solar and NuvoSun are trying something similar.

Then again, look at the SunFab debacle at Applied Materials. It sold similar equipment sets to Signet Solar, Masdar PV and others. The experiment is now winding down.

"The only differentiator is the cost of electricity, and maybe water or labor" among solar manufacturers with the same equipment, asserts Laia.

"Process is indeed everything," writes Travis Bradford of the Prometheus Institute. "Process-tech will determine if you have cheap-enough-but-still-profitable selling prices and [whether you] can continue to deliver those in an ever-falling price market."

Whether this is sustainable-or whether solar manufacturers can "bake" more variety into their cells-- remains to be seen.

3. Diversity. Or, more precisely, a lack thereof. The chip industry started by producing transistors and then integrated circuits. Since then, semiconductor designers have fashioned these basic building blocks into processors, signal processors, amplifiers, FPGAs, converters, actuators, sensors, accelerometers, and a whole range of memory devices.

Solar companies likely won't achieve that sort of diversity. Solar cells and modules ultimately do one thing: convert light into electricity. Different manufacturers will conjure up different types of modules optimized for flexibility, weight, or different light conditions, but all of them will essentially perform the same task.

In that sense, solar ultimately might become something like PCs, a functional tool that can be sold independently or can be integrated with other devices. That's a great future, but the solar industry may not be able to support as many independent manufacturers. Count the number of chip makers and the number of PC makers.

The Similarities:

1. Cost Cuts by Any Means Necessary. Shrinkage is the only driver in the chip industry: Flash memory performance and price declines occurred twice as fast as normal during the last decade because of structural changes in how chip makers introduced new lines of flash. The rise of chip makers in South Korea, Taiwan and China accelerated price declines in unanticipated ways.

The same process takes place in solar, moving from $300 per watt in 1956, to $50 per watt in the 1970s, to $10 per watt in the 1990s, to under $2 per watt today through cell improvements, but also through changes in silicon demand, racking and other aspects of installation.

Even unglamorous things like packaging will be a big deal: Miasole wraps its cells in Lego-like packages that cut the cost of module assembly.

The price declines achieved through these means allows the industry to achieve a rough approximation of Moore's Law, according to SunPower CEO Tom Werner.

2. A Social Set. Why will solar leave wind, biofuels, fuel cells and most other segments of the green industry in the dust? The sheer number of people flowing into the industry give it a collective intelligence that will be difficult to stop. Thousands work in the industry and it has expanded from a base in Japan and Europe to encompass the U.S., China and India. You even see the same confrontational chucklehead personality so familiar in the chip industry in the solar space now. Half of the solar execs these days, after all, hail from chip-industry roots.

Intellectual heft can also determine intra-industry debates. Germanium chips provided better performance, but were relegated to the sidelines. Hard drives inevitably will lose ground to solid-state flash memory. Never bet against silicon. Does this mean thin film is dead? The circumstances aren't completely parallel: in chips, silicon was cheaper than germanium while some types of thin film are cheaper than silicon. Still, it bears watching.

3. A Horizontal Horizon. In the middle of the last decade, many solar manufacturers thought the future lay in creating vertically integrated companies that managed every step of production. The ultimate case was OptiSolar, which wanted to perform and control every task from making silicon to managing power plants.

It burned through more than $320 million before cratering.

Don't expect to see that movie again.