$5 billion investment deal announced with California company
This solar thermal power plant, built by eSolar in Lancaster, Calif., was inaugurated last August.
updated 1:46 p.m. ET, Sun., Jan. 10, 2010
BEIJING - A U.S. solar power company said Saturday it will help build a series of solar thermal power plants in China, as the world's biggest emitter of greenhouse gases tries to decrease its heavy reliance on coal, imported gas and oil.
California-based eSolar Inc. will provide Shandong Penglai Electric Power Equipment Manufacturing Co. with the technology and information to build the concentrated solar thermal power farms with a capacity totaling 2,000 megawatts.
The $5 billion investment would be the largest such project in China, though the companies didn't say who would be investing how much.
"This is a huge jump for China," said Deborah Seligsohn, director of the China climate program for the U.S.-based World Resources Institute. "That amount suggests a number of commercial plants."
Interest in China as a solar energy market is growing quickly as the government looks for alternatives to coal. Saturday's deal comes four months after the largest solar panel maker in the U.S., First Solar, struck a tentative deal to build a massive solar field in China.
The eSolar deal is for concentrated solar thermal power — not the traditional image of vast farms of solar panels, but a system of taking what essentially are mirrors and focusing them to heat water to create steam to power a generator.
"There's room in the world for both systems, and we need both," Seligsohn said.
China is moving much faster than the U.S. in solar power development, eSolar officials said.
"This is an excellent example of what we all must do to fight climate change," Merrick Kerr, eSolar's chief financial officer, told a news conference Saturday in Beijing.
The first solar plant under the deal will be in Yulin city in the central province of Shaanxi.
China has set ambitious goals for solar and other renewable energy in an effort to clean up its environment and curb surging demand for imported oil and gas, which communist leaders see as a strategic weakness.
Late last year, legislators approved changes to China's 2006 renewable energy law saying utilities will be required to buy all the power produced by wind farms and other renewable sources in an effort to reduce heavy reliance on coal.
Government goals issued in 2005 call for at least 15 percent of China's power to come from wind, solar and hydropower by 2020, up from 9 percent now. Officials say that target may be raised to 20 percent because the industry is developing so quickly.
Coal, however, provides two-thirds of China's power and is expected to remain the dominant energy source in coming years.
China is the world's biggest emitter of greenhouse gases and is not bound by global agreements on curbing emissions because it is a developing economy. But the State Council, or China's Cabinet, has promised to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide for each unit of economic output by 40 percent to 45 percent from 2005 levels by 2020.
Showing posts with label First Solar. Show all posts
Showing posts with label First Solar. Show all posts
Thursday, January 14, 2010
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Leaner and cheaper
Oct 22nd 2009 | WASHINGTON, DC
From The Economist print edition
The future of solar power is not only bright but also thin
A bend in the modeTHE modernist box that won this year’s Solar Decathlon, a contest for solar-powered houses sponsored by America’s Department of Energy, had solar panels of the conventional, crystalline sort on its roof. But the walls were covered in solar cells made with thin coatings of silicon and other materials in the place of expensive slices of crystal. Thin film, as this technology is known, is still less popular than crystalline cells and its move to the mainstream has been a year or two away for a decade. But its time may have come at last.
There are many exotic ideas involving thin film, from the solar shingles recently unveiled by Dow, a big chemical company, (a roof’s worth costs $27,000) to experimental prototypes of power-generating clothes, roads and cars. But most thin film comes in the form of panels that resemble crystalline ones. They are roughly half as efficient (meaning that a panel must be twice as big to generate the same amount of power), but a third cheaper, watt for watt. So in places where there is no shortage of space, they are the natural option.
Thin-film cells are also more versatile, since they can be mounted on a variety of materials including flexible plastics and fabrics. Like all solar cells, they are becoming more efficient: the decathletes of Team Germany, who designed the winning house, bragged that its north façade was covered in panels that could convert even indirect sunlight into electricity.
Over the past year or so, thanks to a crash in demand tied to the recession and falling subsidies in big markets, the price of crystalline panels has fallen by 30-40%, undermining thin film’s relative advantage. Nonetheless, thin film’s share of the market has continued to rise: it is now almost half, compared with just 10% in 2004.
The biggest force in the industry is a firm called First Solar, based in Arizona, a sunny American state. Like that of virtually all alternative-energy firms, its share price has suffered in the recession. But it has nonetheless performed considerably better than Standard & Poor’s clean-energy index over the past three years. Its gross margins in the first half of the year were over 50%, on sales of $944m. This month the firm was added to the S&P 500 stockmarket index of America’s biggest firms.
First Solar looks likely to continue to grow. Last month it signed a memorandum of understanding with China to install two gigawatts’ worth of panels in Inner Mongolia—a place with plenty of space. That is enough to power 3m homes. Installation is due to begin next year and finish in 2019. That and other projects should consume all its output for several years to come.
First Solar’s rivals are much smaller. But technological advances may yet catapult one to the fore, says Steve Milunovich, an analyst at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. First Solar makes its cells from a chemical called cadmium telluride. But firms such as Nanosolar, which is building factories in California and Germany, believe that a combination of copper, indium, gallium and selenium known as CIGS will prove cheaper to produce on a mass scale. Researchers at the University of California, meanwhile, hold out great hopes for cells made of organic chemicals.
For the moment, however, the cheapest form of solar power is none of these, but the less glamorous solar-thermal power, which involves heating water with sunlight to make steam. Utilities are also keen to use lenses to increase the amount of sunlight hitting solar panels—a technique known as concentrating solar power. They still need subsidies or a high price on carbon emissions to make investments in any sort of solar power profitable. But the gap between solar and conventional power sources is becoming, well, thinner.
Comment
Having solar built into ones roof panels is expensive now. Wonder what a regular shingle roof of that size would cost? How much power would it generate? Thin film could be put on the sides of buildings, cars, etc. but the cost may be prohibitive now. Using panels that absorb a wider range of sunlight increases the efficiency.
From The Economist print edition
The future of solar power is not only bright but also thin
A bend in the modeTHE modernist box that won this year’s Solar Decathlon, a contest for solar-powered houses sponsored by America’s Department of Energy, had solar panels of the conventional, crystalline sort on its roof. But the walls were covered in solar cells made with thin coatings of silicon and other materials in the place of expensive slices of crystal. Thin film, as this technology is known, is still less popular than crystalline cells and its move to the mainstream has been a year or two away for a decade. But its time may have come at last.
There are many exotic ideas involving thin film, from the solar shingles recently unveiled by Dow, a big chemical company, (a roof’s worth costs $27,000) to experimental prototypes of power-generating clothes, roads and cars. But most thin film comes in the form of panels that resemble crystalline ones. They are roughly half as efficient (meaning that a panel must be twice as big to generate the same amount of power), but a third cheaper, watt for watt. So in places where there is no shortage of space, they are the natural option.
Thin-film cells are also more versatile, since they can be mounted on a variety of materials including flexible plastics and fabrics. Like all solar cells, they are becoming more efficient: the decathletes of Team Germany, who designed the winning house, bragged that its north façade was covered in panels that could convert even indirect sunlight into electricity.
Over the past year or so, thanks to a crash in demand tied to the recession and falling subsidies in big markets, the price of crystalline panels has fallen by 30-40%, undermining thin film’s relative advantage. Nonetheless, thin film’s share of the market has continued to rise: it is now almost half, compared with just 10% in 2004.
The biggest force in the industry is a firm called First Solar, based in Arizona, a sunny American state. Like that of virtually all alternative-energy firms, its share price has suffered in the recession. But it has nonetheless performed considerably better than Standard & Poor’s clean-energy index over the past three years. Its gross margins in the first half of the year were over 50%, on sales of $944m. This month the firm was added to the S&P 500 stockmarket index of America’s biggest firms.
First Solar looks likely to continue to grow. Last month it signed a memorandum of understanding with China to install two gigawatts’ worth of panels in Inner Mongolia—a place with plenty of space. That is enough to power 3m homes. Installation is due to begin next year and finish in 2019. That and other projects should consume all its output for several years to come.
First Solar’s rivals are much smaller. But technological advances may yet catapult one to the fore, says Steve Milunovich, an analyst at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. First Solar makes its cells from a chemical called cadmium telluride. But firms such as Nanosolar, which is building factories in California and Germany, believe that a combination of copper, indium, gallium and selenium known as CIGS will prove cheaper to produce on a mass scale. Researchers at the University of California, meanwhile, hold out great hopes for cells made of organic chemicals.
For the moment, however, the cheapest form of solar power is none of these, but the less glamorous solar-thermal power, which involves heating water with sunlight to make steam. Utilities are also keen to use lenses to increase the amount of sunlight hitting solar panels—a technique known as concentrating solar power. They still need subsidies or a high price on carbon emissions to make investments in any sort of solar power profitable. But the gap between solar and conventional power sources is becoming, well, thinner.
Comment
Having solar built into ones roof panels is expensive now. Wonder what a regular shingle roof of that size would cost? How much power would it generate? Thin film could be put on the sides of buildings, cars, etc. but the cost may be prohibitive now. Using panels that absorb a wider range of sunlight increases the efficiency.
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