Green Wombat

Solar panel maker SunPower’s (SPWR) acquisition last year of solar systems installer PowerLight is looking more and more like a savvy move, judging by the first quarter earnings the San Jose company released Thursday. It was the first earnings report since the deal closed, and it was no coincidence that revenues jumped 92 percent over the previous quarter and that SunPower said it was on track to take in more than a billion dollars in 2008. Based up the road in Berkeley, PowerLight installs large commercial solar arrays and lately has been expanding into photovoltaic solar power plants. Last month a 11-megawatt solar plant it built in Portugal opened. Just this week, PowerLight broke ground on a 15-megawatt solar power station in Nevada and announced that it is building or supplying equipment to PV power plants in Spain that will produce a total of 61 megawatts. (About 35 percent of SunPower’s revenues came from Spain in the first quarter, according to ThinkEquity.) Closer to home, PowerLight recently installed a 1.3-megawatt rooftop array on two Tiffany’s (TIF) warehouses in New Jersey and signed a deal to build a 1-megawatt system for chip equipment maker Applied Materials (AMAT) at its Silicon Valley campus. SunPower CEO Tom Werner said in a statement that the company anticipates that by 2012 it will have cut in half the cost of an installed solar array by integrating its high efficiency solar cells with PowerLight’s systems.