In this survey we are looking at the large US headquartered solar PV manufacturers with a view to examine how they are doing in this difficult economic climate. As basically anyone knows, who has not been cloistered away meditating in some cave, 2009 has been a very tough year for pretty much everyone.
California’s biggest utility PG&E is seeking approval from state regulators for a power purchase agreement with Solaren Corp., a Southern California company that has contracted to deliver 200 megawatts of clean, renewable power over a 15 year period, beginning in 2016. Power from out of this world, that is. Solaren says it plans to generate the power using solar panels in earth orbit, then convert it to radio frequency energy for transmission to a receiving station in Fresno County. From there, the energy will be converted to electricity and fed into PG&E’s power grid. UPDATE: The California Public Utilities Commission gave its approval yesterday to the project giving it the green light to proceed.
By some measures 2009 has been the worst year in the young solar PV sectors history. In fact, global revenue for Photovoltaic (PV) panels is expected to drop by nearly 20 percent in 2009, as oversupply causes prices to crash by nearly fifty percent. Many of the weaker firms may not survive this shakeout and right now things do look very gloomy – even though by some other measures 2009 is not as bad as it may seem. For example more newly installed capacity (4.2 GW) is installed this year than any year – ever; however this is of little comfort to the many firms in this sector that are being buried under an avalanche of negative revenue. This article examines the short term outlook for the solar PV sector going forward, basing itself on market data from a recent iSuppli study.
This update highlights several current issues and developments in the solar energy space. Concerns have been raised about the potential deleterious impact of utility scale solar energy projects in the fragile water poor desert environments of the Mohave Desert. Large scale solar collection farms use water to wash the mirrors and for concentrating solar thermal often use water for cooling.
