If only they were solar panels…

On Tuesday at Solar Power 2007, GABA (German American Business Association) held their 2nd Clean Technology Industry Group event during the Solar Power Conference and Expo. I reported second hand about last year’s event in German Market for Solar Modules soft.

Solar Power: Achieving Cost Competitiveness was this year’s theme, and the panel included five CEOs and Managing Directors from a range of established to new companies:

Anton Milner, CEO, Q-Cells AG
Kristin Roth, Managing Director Photovoltaics, Roth & Rau AG
Robert Gattereder, Managing Director, M+W Zander
Suvi Sharma, CEO, Solaria Corp.
Rajeeva Lahri, CEO and Founder, Signet Solar

Garrett Hering, Editor with PHOTON International, acted as Moderator of the panel as they addressed the theme of cost savings through scalable, differentiated technologies and the expected time frames.

In my opinion, there were few revelations from this discussion panel. First, Suvi Sharma revisited Solaria’s plans to ramp a new 25MW production line located in the Philippines towards the second half of 2008. And Signet Solar CEO Rajeeva Lahri reiterated plans to ramp their Applied Materials thin film line, I presume SunFab, in Döbeln, Germany, by mid 2008, beginning with amorphous silicon (A-Si) for time to market and migrating to tandem micromorph later.

At EU PVSEC, I was interviewing someone who made an observation that I must have realized on an unconscious level. Q-Cells CEO Anton Milner always has something insightful, profound, and to the point to say in response to a subject or question. As a result, I have numerous video clips from Solar Power 2007 Panel Discussions featuring Anton Milner.

In this first clip, Mr. Milner discusses the historical solar cost reduction curve, perturbations caused by polysilicon shortages, cost, price, profit, and reinvestment.

Solaria CEO Suvi Sharma gets tagged here with a question about whether photovoltaic (PV) manufacturing is cost effective in the USA. A number of photovoltaic production equipment and services companies participated in this year’s Expo to test the waters for US based PV manufacturing. Signet Solar CEO Lahri also chimes in later.

Garrett Hering asks CEO Milner his opinion about High Concentration PhotoVoltaics (HCPV), the one area of PV Q-Cells has not made an investment. I asked Mr. Milner this question in Milan but I haven’t had time to post his response. Mr. Milner said HCPV may have a place in niche markets for centralized applications, but it is not a mainstream PV technology.

For me, the highlight of the evening was getting to see and handle a Solaria solar cell. I was lucky enough to walk over just as Philipp Kunze, Solaria Director of Strategic Marketing and Business Development, pulled one of the cells from his jacket pocket for show and tell. After a polite query, I was able to hold and examine the Solaria solar cell. I must admit, although I just wrote Solaria Solar Cell Revisited Redux, it is difficult to understand the structure of the cell by looking at the front side. Apologies are in order for CNET News.com’s Martin LaMonica who I criticized in Solaria spills low concentration photovoltaic technology at Symposium. The back of the cell was covered in black plastic with a few thin metal contacts. Next, I would like to see how these Solaria solar cells are built into a module.

On the CSP front, I learned panel participant M+W Zander is a turnkey contractor for Concentrating Solar Power plants and is already planning three (3) CSP 30 MWel or MegaWatt (installed electric capacity) plants in Southern Europe with their technology partner, NOVATEC BioSol AG per M+W Zander and NOVATEC BioSol: Cooperation agreement to build solar thermal power stations in Spain. Then again, I have not been following the CSP space.

I’ll start off Part 2 with brief insights into the CEO Panel Discussion.

The final tally is in and Solar Power 2007 attracted a r
ecord 12,500 people.

©2010 GUNTHER Portfolio. All Rights Reserved.

While there was voluminous coverage of recent announcements by Solaria Corporation regarding Solaria Secures Solar Cell Supply Agreement for 1.35 GW, Announces $50M Series C Round and Q-Cells AG increases presence on the US market, there hasn’t been much coverage about the technology. For example, a notable Wall Street Journal article, Solaria Panels Win Backing Of Germany’s Q-Cells (read in full here without a subscription), by Leila Abboud, is typical of mainstream media and Press Release editors.

Or at least until the revamped Solaria website is investigated.

The most recent website addition is Plastic surgery – Solaria Corp. fuels high hopes with low-concentration approach by Garrett Hering. This a PHOTON International article reprint about Solaria from the recent July 2007 issue (PI 7/2007, p.76-78). Please note this article predates the recent investment and solar cell sourcing agreement. An old RED HERRING (VIDEO): INTERVIEW WITH SOLARIA CEO SUVI SHARMA from April 2007 reinforces the news in the PHOTON article and from other sources.

Information about Solaria’s Management Team, Board of Directors, and Investors is located at the WHO WE ARE tab. Solaria provides a certain level of detail about their technology, process, and partners. In fact, Solaria will even let you Take a look at photos from our pilot production facility.

On the partner page, I believe the manufacturing services partner logo and link should be to Ionics EMS, Inc. (SIN:I10), not a unit of GE Water Technologies. DISCO CORPORATION (TYO:6146) appears to be the supplier of the customized solar cell strip cutting equipment shown in the PHOTON article. In addition to Q-Cells AG (FRA:QCE), PV Industry value chain partners include BP Solar and S.A.G. Solarstrom AG (FRA:SAG).

For those interested in learning in depth about Solaria’s solar cell and module technology, three key Solaria international patent applications have been published by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO).

(WO 2007/033308) METHOD AND SYSTEM FOR ASSEMBLING A SOLAR CELL USING A PLURALITY OF PHOTOVOLTAIC REGIONS

(WO/2007/014288) METHOD AND SYSTEM FOR MANUFACTURING SOLAR PANELS USING AN INTEGRATED SOLAR CELL USING A PLURALITY OF PHOTOVOLTAIC REGIONS

(WO 2006/133126) METHOD AND SYSTEM FOR INTEGRATED SOLAR CELL USING A PLURALITY OF PHOTOVOLTAIC REGIONS

Since I wrote Solaria Supercell Revisited, it appears the “Super” part of the cell moniker has been dropped, but I still classify this as a follow up post.

And Valleywag has the latest Red Herring news including a link to a parody publication, Dead Herring.

©2010 GUNTHER Portfolio. All Rights Reserved.

First, a correction to the post, Moser Baer PV reveals Solaria Supercell, is required. Stellaris has claimed the grainy diagram I extracted from the joint press conference presentation by Solarvalue AG (XETRA:SV7) and Moser Baer Photo Voltaic Limited (MBPV). It would appear this diagram and the Concentrix Solar diagram on page 11 were added to the presentation as industry examples or in error.

So this diagram is not related to the Solaria Supercell solar panel photo. While not much detail is discernable from the Supercell photo, this does answer some key questions articulated in Solaria Keeps Solar Technology Secret and provides a photo reference to accompany Martin LaMonica’s description in Solaria shines light on high-powered solar panel.

Standard sized silicon solar cells are not used with the Supercell. Strips of what appear to be a thick photovoltaic material are inserted in the transparent polymer and arrayed at a slight angle relative to the top of the panel. This arrangement seems to look like a slightly closed Venetian blind and implies there is one correct way to orient the panel to face the sun at installation time.

Zooming in on the photo, it is now possible to understand what Mr. LaMonica meant when he said,

Viewed from the side, the solar cells are held atop small, elevated grooves molded into the plastic.

It is possible to see the cells rest on top of a polymer like substrate. Also, two bands can be seen perpendicular to the solar cell strips dissecting the panel into thirds. These bands give the panel the appearance of a large silicon solar cell. I postulate these are busbars and used to interconnect the solar cell strips.

And per the above mentioned three dimensional (3D) diagram, Stellaris plans to use thin film photovoltaic material at the bottom of each parabolic trough lens. In my opinion, this approach becomes very interesting if thin film deposition can be used to grow the photovoltaic strips on top of the trough material. This would eliminate the need to cut thin film photovoltaic strips and fasten them to the troughs with an adhesive or other process.

©2010 GUNTHER Portfolio. All Rights Reserved.

Solaria disclosed details about their low concentration solar technology during their presentation at Piper Jaffray’s (Piper Jaffray & Co., NYSE:PJC) Second Annual Opportunities in Alternative Energy Symposium (see Solaria presenting at Alternative Energy Symposium).

Thus far, this CNET News.com article, Solaria shines light on high-powered solar panel by Martin LaMonica, is the lone mainstream media report with additional business and trade publications destined to follow. However, on the Solaria core technology, this article disappoints:

Solaria does its concentration using plastic-based optics. A flat plastic casing made out of a proprietary polymer houses the solar cells while amplifying the light.

If you read my post, Solaria Keeps Solar Technology Secret, it seemed clear the solution was polymer based.

Viewed from the side, the solar cells are held atop small, elevated grooves molded into the plastic.

This vague statement raises more questions:
Are the grooves straight, circular, or another pattern?
Does the back or front of the solar cells sit on the elevated grooves?

Solaria, too, originally played with another design, trying to concentrate light as it hit the finished module, rather than within the solar cells.

I don’t think the current solution is concentrating light within the solar cells per se. So the solar cells are encapsulated in a proprietary polymer that is in direct contact with the solar cell minimizing the critical angle of total internal reflection versus an air gap between the flat optics and the solar cells.

The article does not describe the solar cells used in the Solaria solution, but it would appear these are standard size silicon solar cells.

Solaria’s CEO, Suvi Sharma, said the initial product will double the sunlight (two suns) hitting the solar cells, while a 2008 product will triple the sunlight concentration (three suns) on the solar cells. On the cost front, although Mr. Sharma claimed Solaria based modules would use 50 to 60 percent less silicon solar cells than traditional solar modules, Solaria based modules will only have a 15 to 17 percent cost advantage in 2008 until manufacturing volumes ramp.

I requested equal access to the information Solaria presented at the Symposium, but Solaria denied my request.

As I discovered after the 7. Forum Solarpraxis, Solaria was not the sixth unnamed company in the Q-Cells AG presentation at EU PVSEC. Instead this was CIGS thin film solar module company, Solibro AB.

©2010 GUNTHER Portfolio. All Rights Reserved.

I saw a spike in searches for Solaria Corporation on the Blog today.

At first, I thought the interest in Solaria might have been a result of Silicon Valley Solar’s deal with ErSol for so called high efficiency monocrystalline solar cells supporting the development and early production of SV Solar’s Sol-X2 low concentration solar modules.

However, it appears the increased traffic is related to Solaria’s scheduled company presentation at this symposium. In the event new release, Solaria is one of the few private firms presenting at the one day event. The companies scheduled to present include a number of European solar photovoltaic firms not listed in the United States including: ErSol Solar Energy AG (FRA:ES6), Q-Cells AG (FRA:QCE), and Renewable Energy Corporation ASA (OSL:REC) but SolarWorld AG (FRA:SWV) is absent from the news release.

Alexander “Andy” Karsner, Assistant Secretary for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and Dr. Hermann Scheer will keynote at this event. This event highlights Dr. Scheer’s New York stop of his Energy Autonomy Book Presentation Tour USA.

I placed my unedited videos From Towards Energy Autonomy (at Google) on Google Video. My lousy video editor messed up the audio sync when I split the videos in two to get under the YouTube 100MB limit. Here are the links:

Martin Roscheisen
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8935046867093189314

Dr. Hermann Scheer
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4751316931546195907

©2010 GUNTHER Portfolio. All Rights Reserved.