Wondering about Intel.

The New york Times told us the other day that Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company is planning to enter the Solar Cell market.

What I want to know is, where is Intel? These guys know the Silicon Wafer as well as anyone else. Are they passing up an opportunity?

Wait, looking up "Intel Solar" brings up SpectraWatt. SpectraWatt was formed by Intel in June '08. Their plan was to build a manufacturing plant in Oregon to start deliveries in mid-2009. In January of '09, SpecraWatt halted construction of their Oregon plant, and on April 9th of this year they announced their intention to build a headquarters and manufacturing plant in New York.

Ok, so deals went sour in Oregon, I don't know the details, can't say much about that, but still, I gotta say WTF? Come on, INTC. Do you REALLY want into this market? After a year with pretty much nothing to show for it, you are now planning to manufacture 60MW by 2010, and 120MW annually within a couple of years after that. Even if the Implementation had gone flawlessly, this tiny output demonstrates a lack of vision, at the very least. SpectraWatt will have to do better than this if they want to compete in this market.

So, it looks then like Intel has actually moved to enter the Solar Market. They've just done so in a half-assed noncommital sort of way.

Of course, they've got cash. Maybe, like HP, they've discovered that the bottom line doesn't necessarily support building new manufacturing plants in the US. They could buy a heck of alot of Asian production, all in one fell swoop. There won't be too many opportunities to buy into the Asian industry on the cheap, though.

My guess then is that they're not actually idiots; they know what's up, and they're just being sneaky. It's too bad, though, that this Leading US Company is taking so long to get into the game.

FSLR; The Betamax of Solar?

FSLR announced their earnings today. The results were great, particularly considering the overall economy.

I've given FSLR considerable thought in the last couple years, and I remain convinced that they have unspeakable future problems. On their investor relations page, they link to the pdf associated with their Q1 conference call. In it, they mention what they consider to be risks to their business, but nowhere do they mention the risk associated with availability of their critical Tellurium supply. Ok, so maybe they have it all figured out; but nobody's asking, and nobody's telling.

Ok, I don't know, but I want to get an idea of what kind of supply issue they're up against, so I've gathered some info.

Per Greentech Media, FSLR uses 6 grams of Tellurium per square meter. (See.)

Per First Solar, the FS-277 Module is .72m2 and has a peak power of 77.5W. (See.)

77.5W / .72m2 = 107.64W/m2

So, at 6 grams / m2, the amount of Tellurium required per Watt works out to be 6g / 107.64W = .056 g/W.

Well, we know that FSLR is aiming for a bit over a GW in annual production for '09 and '10, so rounding to 1GW gives roughly 55.7 Metric Tons of Tellurium required to produce that GW of modules.

The question, then, is how much Tellurium is out there, and what does it cost?

According to the USGS, the price has ranged from $41,800/MT in 2004 to
$82,000/MT in 2007. The World Supply of Tellurium according to US Geological Survey was 132MT in 2006.

Ah, no problem. If they're using 55MT to produce 1W worth of modules, and they're paying even the high price of $82,000/MT for their supply, then they're only paying a total of $4.5 Million for their entire yearly supply of Tellurium. That's less than a penny per Watt. In fact, during the CC, Jesse Peechel stated, quite possibly accurately, that First Solar's largest cost was glass.

Wait, a problem. Solar is big. A sensible look at the required future scale of Solar Energy puts the annual Global installation rate to be around 30GWp per year by just 2012. What if FSLR wants to maintain a significant share in this market?

Well, as it is today, it appears that over a third of the World's Tellurium supply is required for the production of a single Gigawatt of First Solar modules.
If FSLR were to take 10% of that market, they'd have to produce 3GW of modules, which by today's efficiencies would require 165MT of Tellurium, or more Tellurium than the World produced in 2006! Well, maybe the price of Tellurium is a pittance when the company is demanding only a third of the World supply of material, but I can guarantee that it won't remain so when that company is demanding 33MT MORE than the World's annual supply.

A big part of this problem is that there's no such thing as a Tellurium mine. Tellurium is only produced as a byproduct of mining other commodities, such as Copper. This means that it's very difficult to increase the World Supply independently of the supply of those other materials. If you were to mine Tellurium alone, the cost would be astronomical, and yet if you were to drive up the mining activity in Tellurium's sister elements, then you'd have the affect of driving down the prices of those materials, thus making them into less desirable targets for mining.

What about efficiency gains? Sure, if FSLR is able to pull off a tripling, or even just a doubling of their efficiency, then they could make do with dramatically less material. I can imagine several possible ways that they could do this, but I suspect that it will be a tough path. As it stands, per the CC pdf, FSLR has increased the conversion efficiency of their product by .3% since Q1 of '08. That's simply not going to cut it, particularly if you look out past 2012 when the market gets even larger.

I don't know. They have some very smart people there, and they're working hard in an exciting industry. The particular technology just doesn't seem to stack up to me, though, and like I said, nobody is asking questions and nobody is volunteering answers.

Ah well, in the short term, I'm quite certain that they are going to do great. Wall Street loves them, and they have excellent margins for the time being. They very well might be able to leverage some of that temporary financial advantage in order to open up new technologies to their benefit, so we'll see.

All that said, I'm not short FSLR, and I suspect that to go short FSLR would be a very bad plan.

Also, a final note, it's pretty obvious that I think that the strongest players at this time are out of China, but it's not that I don't like some US Companies. I really like Applied Materials, and Sunpower to name a couple of domestic players.

Interesting Technology Option - Holographic Tuning.

Found at www.1st-solarenergy.blogspot.com.

Manufactured by Prism Solar

The Senate Bill, Not Yet Passed.

One source says that they pulled $5 Billion or so (most in planned loan guarantees).

There are Billions left in the Bill, though.

Solar vs Coal, Land Area Comparison.

Thirty-eight years of Kentucky strip mining have, at one time or another, destroyed 1.5 Million Acres (6,070,284,633 m2) of land, and torn down 470 Mountains.

Let's roughly compare the land impact of Coal to the potential land impact of Solar, with this 1.5 Million Acres as a basis.


First, let's see how much Energy could be produced by all the Coal that was mined in Kentucky in 2007*. Answer: 553 Billion kWh.


Per Salon, 158 Million Tons of Coal were produced in Kentucky 2007. I know from previous calculations that a very efficient coal plant can produce around 3.5 MWh/Ton, so burning the entire 158 Million Tons of coal produced in Kentucky in 2007 gives, 158 Million Tons * 3.5 MWh/Ton = 553 Million MWh, or 553 Billion kWh.


Now lets look at how much Solar Energy is available to an equivalent area of Kentucky. Answer: 10,000 Billion kWh.


Take a look at the US Insolation Map and note that the State of Kentucky is almost entirely bright yellow. Look at the legend, and note the value of 4.5-5.0 kWh/m2/day for this color. This is the Average amount of Solar Energy striking a 1 m2 panel on some single Day of the year (Averaged over the whole Year). Let's take the low estimate, and get the total Solar Energy incoming onto a 1 m2 panel, over an entire year, by multiplying 4.5 kWh/m²/day * 365 days = 1642.5 kWh/m²**. Multiplying this by 6.07 * 10⁹ m² gives us the total Solar Energy Striking the mined area of Kentucky in 2007, or 10 * 10¹² kWh, or 10,000 Billion kWh.


So, how much of this Energy could actually be converted to Electricity using modern Solar Panels? Answer: 1,600 Billion kWh.


Of course, Photovoltaic Panels don't convert all of the Energy Striking them into Electricity. At this time, it would be fair to use 16% as a rough Average Conversion Efficiency***. So, if you were to cover that 1.5 Million Acres with Solar Panels, and each panel was 16% efficient at converting that light to Energy, that installation would produce 10,000 Billion kWh * .16 = 1,600 Billion kWh of electricity.


The Conclusion?


If you covered the 1.5 Million Acre area of Kentucky that has been affected by Strip Mining and Mountaintop Removal with Solar Panels like those commonly manufactured today, then you would produce 2.9 times the energy every year from that Installation than you would from mining the coal. In addition, unlike in coal mining, where once you've mined out an area, you have to move on to another, in the case of Solar, the Installation would produce Energy Year after Year from the same pieces of land. If you just wanted to produce the same amount of Energy as the 2007 Coal Production, you would only have to set up solar panels on 517 Thousand Acres of land. Of course, the Installation doesn't have to be all in one place, the Panels could be distributed among small Installations all across the State (2% of the total land area of Kentucky).

Note that this post does not attempt to address price. Those calculations are elsewhere, and ongoing. However, just in terms of land use, it becomes clear that the energy content of Coal could, in fact, be replaced by an Installation of Solar, while distrupting a Third of the land area of ongoing Coal Mining Operations.

Also note that this does not address the availability of Solar Panels. This will be addressed incrementally by a growing industry.



* Depends on numerous factors, including Coal Chemistry, and Power Plant Design. The values that I used assume very high Energy Content Coal, and highly efficient, state of the art, Power Plants.

** Note that this isn't quite correct, as the Insolation values on the map are not based on a panel laying flat on the ground, but are based on a panel tilted to the South. Within the scope of these calculations, though, this should be negligible.

*** Expect Conversion Efficiencies of low cost Crystalline Silicon Solar Panels to increase significantly within the next 3 years.

Conversions:
1.5 Million Acres = 6,070,284,633 m2
Kentucky total area = 104 658 829 550 m2 = 40409 mile2

For more information on "Insolation," see "A Note on Units of Energy and Insolation".

This article is followed by http://americansolareconomy.blogspot.com/2009/02/real-world-estimation-of-land-use-per.html, which estimates the Solar Output of 1.5 Million Acres of Kentucky Land, using real Land Use data from Sunpower Corporation.

Good News from the States! 800MW in California.

Two Large Solar Plants Planned in California

"Companies will build two solar power plants in California that together will put out more than 12 times as much electricity as the largest such plant today, the latest indication that solar energy is starting to achieve significant scale.

The plants will cover 12.5 square miles of central California with solar panels, and in the middle of a sunny day will generate about 800 megawatts of power, roughly equal to the size of a large coal-burning power plant or a small nuclear plant. A megawatt is enough power to run a large Wal-Mart store."

The land grab is on - grab some while you can.

The Desert Boom

Outrage by the Bureau of Land Management.

Citing Need for Assessments, U.S. Freezes Solar Energy Projects (1)

Faced with a surge in the number of proposed solar power plants, the federal government has placed a moratorium on new solar projects on public land until it studies their environmental impact, which is expected to take about two years.

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Ok, so, it's a given that Environmental assessments MUST take place in determining the uses of Public Land, but a MORATORIUM on Solar Installations on all Public Land is so irrational, that it can only be an intentional act of disruption, or suppression.

Per (1), the current Applications amount to One Million Acres of land. However, BLM oversees 260 Million Acres in total, of which 44,479,478 acres are under lease, and 11,629,625 acres are in production4. According to the Telegraph, BLM makes the claim that they will continue to process the existing Applications, which amount to a potential 70GW of production, or enough energy to power 20 million homes5.

Even Bush's own Executive Order 132123 should be read to require that these projects be expedited.


There is no valid rationale for a two year moratorium on Solar Development on Public Land; certainly not when it is already acknowledged that Energy Development is a fair use of that public land.

It's an outrage.

2. More Info on BLM and Energy Leases - Washington Post.

3. Executive Order 13212.

4. Analysis of BLM’s Oil and Gas Development 2001-2007.

5. US halts solar energy projects over environment fears - Telegraph.

Thanks to McOgon of Google, and peak_oil_101 of Yahoo for Links.

EDIT: Here's a CNN Special Report on this Story.