Green Wombat

photo originally uploaded by misterken

Call it industrial recycling. PowerLight, the solar panel subsidiary of SunPower (SPWR), is moving its headquarters from Berkeley, California, to a historic Ford (F) manufacturing plant in the East Bay city of Richmond. An icon of early 20th century industrial design, the bayfront Ford factory once was the largest manufacturing facility on the West Coast, according to the federal government. The reason for leaving eco-conscious Berkeley? Space – business is booming and PowerLight is bursting out of its current HQ, a company spokeswoman told Green Wombat. PowerLight will occupy about 175,000 square feet of the Ford plant’s 520,000 square feet of space. The facility produced jeeps and other military vehicles during World War II and was considered a key cog in the war effort. And where once greenhouse-gas spewing cars rolled off the assembly line, the factory will now be enlisted in the fight against global warming, producing solar panels for homes and businesses.

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photo originally uploaded by mona, eh

How’s this for green energy: The California Public Utilities Commission yesterday approved contracts for two 49.4-megawatt solar power plants that will use biogas made from cow manure as a backup fuel source. The plants will be located on 640 acres of alfalfa farmland in Southern California’s Imperial Valley and will provide electricity to San Diego Gas &
Electric (SRE). The developer is Bethel Energy, which was founded by Len Daniel, a former engineering executive with the storied solar power pioneer Luz. The Israeli company built eight solar power plants in California’s Mojave desert in the 1980s that are still operating and generating some 300 megawatts of power. The Bethel Solar One and Bethel Solar Two plants will use the latest version of the solar thermal technology devised by Luz. That likely means solar troughs (like the ones at Arizona utility APS’s (PNW) Sagauro solar plant pictured at right) that uses the sun to heat an oil or other
liquid to create steam to drive a electricity-generating turbine. According to California Public Utility Commission documents, bovine biofuel will be used to pre-heat the plant’s equipment. Cow poop, of course, releases the potent greenhouse gas methane, so using bovine biofuel in a solar power station is a one-two punch against global warming. At least two companies have contracts to sell cow power to California utility PG&E (PCG), but this is apparently the first time it will be used to supplement solar energy.

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With the future cloudy for its plan to build a 1,600-foot-high, 50-megawatt solar tower power plant in southeast Australia, EnviroMission (EVOMY.PK) announced this week that it is studying the feasibility of sites near El Paso, Texas. The Melbourne, Australia-based startup says it is also is using weather stations from utility Arizona Public Service, a subsidiary of Pinnacle West (PNW), to assess potential solar tower sites northwest of Phoenix. Another site assessment is being conducted on Native American land that covers part of Arizona, California and Nevada. EnviroMission is working with the Fort Mojave tribe’s utility, Aha Macav Power Service. The developments come as the viability of the Australian solar tower remains unclear. The project is planned for 24,000 acres of sun-drenched land EnviroMission owns on the edge of the Outback on the New South Wales-Victoria border. However, EnviroMission lost out on a $A75 million ($US57 million) Australian federal government grant to Solar Systems, a competing Melbourne solar power company. Solar Systems intends to build a 154-megawatt solar power station in the same area. (See "Tower of Power," the Business 2.0 magazine story I wrote on the EnviroMission for details on the Aussie solar tower.)

In other solar power station news this week, the Colorado Public Utilities Commission approved construction of an 8-megawatt solar photovoltaic power plant. The plant will be built by SunEdison, which will sell the electricity to utility Xcel Energy (XEL).

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Media mogul-turned-environmentalist Ted Turner is getting into the solar power business. The CNN founder and former vice chairman of Time Warner (TWX) (Green Wombat’s employer) has created a partnership Dome-Tech Solar, a Branchburg, New Jersey-based solar energy
developer, and renamed the company DT Solar. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed and it’s unclear what ownership stake and role Turner will take. Green Wombat has made inquiries and will update later today. Founded in 2003, the company
builds large-scale solar panel arrays for commercial and industrial use and plans to
construct solar power plants in the southwest United States. With Turner (shown at right with DT Solar executives) on board, the company says it will expand beyond the Garden State, targeting several new markets, including California. “We’ve got to move away from fossil fuels and develop long-term energy solutions that work," Turner said in a statement. "Using clean energy technologies, such as solar power, is the right thing to do, and it represents a tremendous business opportunity.”

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EnviroMission, the solar energy company planning to build a 50-megawatt, 1,600-foot-high solar tower power plant in southeast Australia, has opened an office in Phoenix to pursue a U.S. project. (See "Tower of Power," the Business 2.0 magazine story I wrote on the company, for details on the Aussie solar tower.) The Melbourne company says it is studying the feasibility of building a solar tower on 24,000 acres of Arizona state land.
It’s the summer holidays in Australia and everyone’s at the beach (including Green Wombat), but I’ve made inquiries and will  post more details on EnviroMission’s U.S. project when they become available. As Green Wombat earlier reported, EnviroMission suffered a setback in October when it lost a bid for a $A75 million Australian government grant it was counting on to jump-start its Aussie solar tower.

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Green Wombat recently sat down with John Langdon of HelioVolt, a thin-film solar company based in Austin, Texas. Thin-film solar promises to be the next big thing in solar technology. At the risk of oversimplifying, the technology prints solar cells on rolls of flexible metal foil. The payoff: relatively inexpensive solar film that could be incorporated into the roofs and walls of homes and office towers and, eventually, even windows so that a skyscraper, for instance, might generate half of the electricity it needs. A passel of thin-film startups are racing to be first to market, including Silicon Valley’s Miasole, Innovalight and Nanosolar, which the San Jose Mercury News’ Katherine Conrad reports today, will open one of the world’s largest solar cell manufacturing plants in South San Jose by mid-2007.

Given that most of the companies use basically the same underlying technology, the key is how quickly and cheaply they can manufacture thin-film solar. HelioVolt exec Langdon contends that’s where his company has the edge with FASST (Field Assisted
Simultaneous Synthesis and Transfer), its patented nanotechnology printing process. Without going into the technical details, FASST allows solar cells to be printed directly on metal, glass and other building materials. "We can turn a knob and make different form factors" on the fly, says Langdon, HelioVolt’s marketing vp and a Texas Instruments veteran. "We use less energy and have less inventory. When you have a plant that costs $50 million, it all comes down to how many units you can make at what cost."

The five-year-old company plans to break ground on a manufacturing plant next year and begin shipping products by late 2008. As interesting as its manufacturing process is the company’s distribution strategy and take on the market.

(more…)

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Palo Alto startup SolFocus has yet to release its high-efficiency solar concentrator technology but the company is already expanding overseas, said co-founder Steve Horne this afternoon at the ThinkEquity Greentech confab. He said in 2007 SolFocus will operate test sites in California, India and Hawaii and has signed a deal to produce half a megawatt of solar power in Spain.
The company also inked an agreement with an Indian manufacturer. Altogether, SolFocus will install 2 megawatts of solar power next year, according to Horne, the
company’s
chief scientist.
"It’s a global business," he said. "In 2007 we’ll be turning our design into a full-fledged product."  SolFocus initially plans to build small-scale power plants that will feature fields of solar concentrator panels. The photovoltaic technology uses small lenses and curved mirrors to concentrate the sun’s rays on solar modules made by Spectrolab, the Boeing subsidiary that just set a world’s record for wringing a 40.7 percent efficiency rate from its solar cells. Horne said SolFocus is currently working on a second
generation version of its technology, which should be ready for market in two to three years.  Going global was a theme of the day. Ira Ehrenpreis, a cleantech venture capitalist with Technology Partners, told the standing-room-only audience that investors need to be prepared to travel away from Sand Hill Road as renewable energy technology, research and markets are found far afield from Silicon Valley.

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Silicon Valley’s solar energy startups are grappling with a shortage of engineering talent, several solar executives said today at ThinkEquity’s Greentech Summit in San Francisco. "We are going to invest in an European operation because, in part, it balances the talent pool available and the market access," said Martin Roscheisen, CEO of Nanosolar, a Palo Alto thin-film solar company. Dave Pearce, chief executive of Santa Clara, Calif.-based Miasole, another thin-film company, said he’s opened a 25-person facility in Shanghai. "We’ve been very successful in attracting executives with good Western language and management skills and who also understand the Chinese market," he said.  Part of the problem, according to the solar execs, is that some of the best engineers work in countries with big solar industries. Echoing their counterparts in Silicon Valley’s tech industry, they complained that U.S. immigration laws make it difficult to bring those engineers to California. "I think it’s ridiculous that we’re going into 2007 with all the H1Bs already taken," said Conrad Burke, CEO of Santa Clara’s Innovalight, referring to the visa program for tech workers. "We found a lot of very talented individuals in Germany and other countries that have experience in solar that we couldn’t hire because of immigration problems with H1B visas, green cards."

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Boeing (BA) subsidiary Spectrolab subsidiary has created a concentrator solar cell that achieved 40.7 percent efficiency – a new record that could finally make solar energy  competitive with coal and other fossil fuels, according to the U.S. Department of Energy, which
helped fund the company’s work. Standard solar cells like those used in rooftop panels have efficiency rates of 12 to 18 percent.  Spectrolab, based in Sylmar, California, achieved the world-record efficiency in a multi-junction solar cell.  Multi-junction cells are being used in  solar dish arrays like the one pictured above at a Solar Systems power station in Australia.

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Here’s some sobering reading for startups and other companies hoping to cash in on California’s green energy boom by building solar power stations, wind farms and wave generators: The Golden State is faltering in its efforts to meet a mandate to produce 20 percent of its electricity from renewable energy by 2010 and a third of its power from solar, wind and other green sources by 2020, according to a new report from the California Energy Commission. The review finds that renewable energy’s share of total electricity produced in California actually fell .3 percent last year while the state’s three big investor-owned utilities have made scant progress over the past couple years in tapping renewable energy sources.  The report details the challenges California – the world’s sixth-largest economy – faces in realizing the goals set in its landmark global warming law. Achieving renewable energy targets is critical if the state is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 25 percent by 2020.

So in a land blessed by abundant sunshine, wind and waves, what’s the problem? The report identifies red tape and uncertainty over the contracting process for renewable energy projects as partly to blame for the fact that California utilities have signed some 4,200 megawatts worth of contracts for green electricity but only 240 megawatts have gone online to date. But the biggest obstacle, according to the commission, is years of delay in building transmission lines to connect new solar and wind power stations to the California grid. For instance, San Diego Gas & Electric has signed an agreement to
purchase 300 megawatts of electricity from Stirling Energy Systems, which plans to build a massive solar power plant in the California desert. Problem is, there’s no transmission line to move the electricity to the grid as the proposed Sunrise Powerlink transmission project (shown below) has been bogged down in bureaucracy. Likewise, a project that would allow the transmission of 700 megawatts of new wind energy from the wind-blown Tehachapi region has been languishing in limbo land. The energy commission meets next Thursday, December 7, to discuss the report and recommendations for speeding the availability of renewable energy. Click here for webcasts of energy commission meetings.

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