A Busy Time for the Solar Industry

Whether it’s the fact that Congress finally passed the solar ITC extension, or just a happy coincidence, the news this past week has been chock-full of advances in solar technology and new solar panel installations.

In tech news, a new inverter from Advanced Energy Industries (AE) brings the efficiency of smaller inverters (over 97%) to utility-scale in a 500kw grid-tied model. And SCHOTT is unveiling a new 225w polycrystalline module at Solar Power International next week. (We’ll have to stop by and check it out.) A spokesman for the company says the new size was developed in direct response to customer requests. But perhaps the biggest news comes from a startup. Solyndra has burst onto the scene with $600m in funding and contracts for more than one billion dollars around the world. Why such a fuss? The company’s solar collectors are long tubes, in appearance closer to solar thermal collectors than traditional PV panels. The thin-film (CIGS) tubes collect the sun’s energy from the whole rounded surface, which means fewer of them are needed to do the same job as traditional panels. The company also claims that these are easier to install–time will tell how they hold up against standard solar panels.

So what else is going on? In Massachusetts, National Grid has proposed four sites for solar in and around metro Boston; if all the installations are okayed, customers of National Grid will pay for it by contributing about $.08/month. As one such customer, I’m just fine with that.

Bringing new weight to the term “energy security,” the US Army has announced a 500mw solar thermal installation at Fort Irwin in California’s Mojave Desert. The Army spends about $3 billion every year on energy, and this is only the first of many such steps towards energy independence.

Interested in making wine, not war? Constellation Wines, a division of the world’s largest beverage conglomerate, is installing a 1mw solar system at Gonzalez Winery in Monterey County, California, with assistance from the utlity PG&E. This is the largest solar panel installation at a winery not just in the States, but in the world, so far.

To close on a more sober note (sorry…had to), there may be troubled waters ahead for solar stocks. I should say, rather, that the waters will continue to be troubled, since it’s hardly been smooth sailing of late. The Associated Press quoted Goldman Sachs on the matter:

The risk of oversupply in the solar market will soon become a reality as considerably less generous demand subsidies take hold just as a wave of supply and tight financing hit the market…We believe that liberal subsidies of the past in markets like Germany and Spain are unlikely to be replicated in the future given fears of their ultimate cost in a bad world economy.

They conceded, however, that even if solar won’t be as good an investment in the future as it has been up to this point, it will still be better than many. And considering the inevitable shift towards greater reliance on renewable technologies, I think it’s safe to say that the long term outlook is safe from these temporary storms.