First Solar sizes up project sales, Solarion beams plastic CIGS, MiaSolé decloak

This edition of Solar Short Takes does a bit of number crunching of the recent project sell-off news from First Solar, checks progress by Solarion on the CIGS-on-plastic front, notes MiaSole’s recent re-emergence from the PR closet, finds Trina saying yes to MES, questions Applied Materials’ buy of Advent Solar, and offers the aloha lowdown on next year’s tropically inclined IEEE PVSC event.

The sale of the 21MW (AC) Blythe PV power plant to NRG marks the second move by First Solar to cash in on some of its hundreds of millions of potential dollars in project assets, following the announcement in early October to sell off the 20MW Sarnia, Ontario, site to Enbridge.

Both projects, when completed by the end of 2009 (yup, that's right--First's Alan Bernheimer confirmed they'll be done next month), will be among the largest active PV systems--and certainly thelargest thin-film arrays--in North America. Florida Power & Light’s recently activated crystalline-silicon-powered 25MW DeSoto Next Generation Solar Energy Center--which made me smile even before I had my morning coffee when I saw President Obama speaking at the center on CNN last month, with its thousands of solar panels lined up behind him--is the biggest in the States, at least for now.

Two more projects in First Solar’s pipeline will come online by the end of 2010 that will dwarf the Florida installation—the 30MW (AC) ground-mounted system being built for electric power supplier Tri-State in New Mexico and the 48MW (AC) added to the existing 10MW at the Sempra Boulder City/Copper Mountain site in Nevada. Although double-digit megawatt-scale PV systems remain rare, especially in North America, in a few years they will become more commonplace and triple-digit beasts will start to colonize the earth.

Since a Short Takes blog would not be complete without mention of the copper-indium-gallium-(di)selenide TFPV community, congrats to German CIGS-on-plastic company Solarion for successfully (and internally) testing its flex cells under the rigors of the IEC 61646 damp-heat test regimen--a thousand hours at 85% relative humidity and 85°C. Solarion’s main polymeric competitor, Ascent Solar, made a similar announcement in August. These results as well as recent updates from Global Solar and several materials companies suggest serious progress is being made on the main bugaboo of flexible CIGS—a manufacturable, relatively inexpensive yet durable moisture encapsulation layer.
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Labels: CIGS, First Solar Inc, FSLR, miasole, Solar News, Solar Projects

posted by Ertai at 9:52 AM