Salamon Group, Inc. (fka SLMU)

[hpham10]

When thinfilm becomes THE dominant player…remember this post…

My good friend Joe McCabe recently wrote in another solar blog about new PV power cell plants being built in the USA using CdTe thin film technologies.

To put into perspective, in 2003 I bought a factory of about 3Megawatts of total capacity in Wales. Today we are looking at companies in the thin film space owning about 1000 times that amount of production. No wonder it had no possible legs to stand on by itself!

So one must wonder out loud…how does anyone build small thinfilm PV plants and remain competitive? The answer is….very carefully! If perhaps you have an inbound client (ie. self), then that’s fine so long as you don’t mind paying more to yourself than you could to others. If that formula includes carbon offsets, and other government incentives, then you may be able to make an economic argument for smaller size plants (ie. under 100MW).

Yet clearly the world of thinfilm is radically changing from those days where I bought the Welsh factory. And clearly that must mean that strategies must change for the “residual” players of this world. Investing in production capacity in the thin film world is already challenged enough by the ever decreasing crystalline prices. To add the competitiveness of the plants against their peers is to create a serious hurdle against success.

So to those who have internal needs, whether its a parent that requires solar energy for feed-in-tariff programs or wishes to use them for carbon offsets, consider yourself lucky…for now. It takes a skilled team to have a successful thin-film plant. Yield issues abound. The key is to have plant management with a proven record of successfully delivering high yields within a narrow “bell curve” of product ratings. Localization is therefore the only true advantage of a smaller entity. Its flexibility and local nature provide hope that the “universe” model of putting down smaller factories can offset the high cost of transport in places where it makes sense fiscally and from an operational perspective.

Thinfilm continues to increase its market share. It will continue to do so as the lowest cost manufacturing process that has been scaled. I am interestingly watching developments at Nanosolar to see how they fare with their printing press technology. That is the one disruptive technology that I feel is within striking range of actually beating thinfilm production costs.

Sass
http://sassperess.com/blog/?p=901