The solar industry’s recovery is just over the horizon, with help from U.S. stimulus funds, new government projects and new methods of financing—or that’s how an executive from solar powerhouse Sharp Corp. sees it, anyway.
“I call it a warming up,” Ron Kenedi, vice president of Sharp Solar Energy Solutions Group, said in an interview [earlier today] at the Solar Power International conference being held in Anaheim, California, this week.
And it’s not just hollow enthusiasm manufactured to drum up money from investors. According to Reuters, Sharp is returning to the 30 to 40 percent growth rate that was characteristic of the solar industry before global oversupply sent panel prices plummeting and the financial crisis put a temporary stopper on financing for new projects. While prices for panels have tumbled roughly 35 percent over the past seven months, Kenedi observes that the fall has reached a “plateau.” As an apparent gesture of its faith in its own pronouncements, Sharp expects to increase its market share across a variety of solar segments, ranging from small residential projects to utility-scale endeavors.
The utility-scale market is an especially important foray for Sharp, as it is the place where it is planning to target its new thin-film solar cells.
The lower cost of thin film is seen by Sharp and competitors as the best way to build utility projects because they are cheaper to produce than traditional silicon-based solar panels. U.S.-based First Solar dominates the thin film solar market, but Sharp aims to put as much thin film on the market as its silicon-based products.
Sharp doesn’t plan to waste any time—it has already planned to ramp up production at its new thin-film plant in Osaka, Japan, in March 2010, where it will start off with a modest 480 megawatts and expand to 1 gigawatt.
What do you think? Is Sharp’s optimistic prediction wishful and premature…or bold and spot-on? Or is it still too early to tell?
That would be good if things would level off and residential buyers would begin to buy again. I think that it is a wait and see approach for my intentions.