Selecting Photovoltaic Modules and Inverters

Considerations for Selecting Photovoltaic Modules and Inverters


With so many different types of products on the market today for the solar electric (PV) industry, selecting the right module or inverter can be the difference between a successful system and a failed one. With the fast growth of the US market and other parts of the world, it seems that almost overnight the PV market has hundreds of companies to choose from when selecting product. Being that longevity is one goal in providing an extended return of investment (ROI) for projects, it is important to select the products from companies that you can trust will be around into the distant future.

Research can be a daunting task in regards to finding the balance of quality, longevity, and price — your distributor can be a great source of information when considering products for a PV systems. Your representative should be able to provide you with information about product warranty, quality of the product, price (often reflected in dollars per watt), and any technology implemented into the product.

As it relates to solar modules, the most expensive side to the system, a low priced module can get very tempting. While important, price should be weighed in conjunction to a manufacturer’s longevity; after all how good is a 20-25 year warranty when the company no longer exists? Additionally, there is a common miss-conception that module efficiency should be the deciding factor — efficiency generally only affects a systems size not performance. Efficiency reflects a modules ability to convert the sun’s energy into electrical power. For example a 200 Watt 16% efficient module vs. a 200 Watt 20% efficient module reflects a reduction in the system physical size by 20% but this will also most likely increase the cost of the module and therefore the length of ROI on the same 200 Watts of power. Until just recently, module technology was mostly based only on efficiency and material type, but now some electronic technology is implemented into the modules themselves increasing the modules energy yields, and power output.

Inverters are also a key function to the PV system and also typically the second most costly item of the system. Inverters contain many electronic components and over the years can be stressed to their limits, so selecting a manufacturer that has proven technology and a solid warranty can help save the installer a problem down the road. In the past the PV market has seen typically a 10 year inverter warranty and a fail period on the inverters in the first 15 years, however with today’s leading manufacturers these numbers are progressively getting better with 15+ year warranties and a fail period after the first 20+ years.

Product selection can take a significant amount of time, but with a good distributor relationship, on-going training, and a focus on longevity you can become a better installer with better projects and happier customers.

04/02/10,Michael Harvey- Able Energy Co.

Contact: Scotty, Scott's Contracting Green Builder "St Louis Renewable Energy" for all your Green Building and Renewable Energy Needs

A Message From Congressman Russ Carnahan

April 6, 2010

Saint Louis, Missouri

Thank you for contacting me in regard to H.R. 1835, the New Alternative Transportation to Give Americans Solutions (NAT GAS) Act of 2009. I appreciate hearing from you and welcome the opportunity to respond.


As you know, the NAT GAS Act would extend tax credits and incentives to encourage the use of natural gas in the commercial and federal vehicle fleets. It would direct the U.S. government to run 50% of its vehicles on compressed or liquefied natural gas by 2014, and it would authorize the Secretary of Energy to administer grants for research leading to cleaner, more efficient engines powered by natural gas.


Please be assured that since coming to Congress, I have been working hard to reduce our dependence on foreign oil, bring down record-high fuel prices, and launch a cleaner, smarter energy future for America. I have consistently supported legislation to lower costs while creating hundreds of thousands of high paying, clean energy jobs.


Last year, Congress took a number of steps to encourage the development of alternative energy sources. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act invested over $43 billion in researching and deploying new sources of energy. I also recently introduced legislation to create energy innovation hubs, which will be tasked with conducting intensive research to develop alternative energy sources.


Currently, the NAT GAS Act has been referred to three House committees, including the Committee on Science and Technology, of which I am a member. Please know that as this bill continues to be debated, I will keep your views firmly in mind.


Please feel free to get in touch with my office in the future if I can be of further assistance to you on this or any other matter of concern. I also hope you will find my website, carnahan.house.gov, a useful resource for keeping up with my work in Washington and the 3rd District of Missouri, and I welcome you to sign up for my e-newsletter at carnahan.house.gov/updates Thank you again for taking the time to share your thoughts with me.

PV Industry, fastest Growing Industry

Info supplied by Scotty "St Louis Renewable Energy" Missouri.
Posted on March 23, 2010 by J. Peter Lynch, Financial Anaylst


PV – A Question of Scale

PV is already the fastest growing industry in the world. But if it is going to play a significant role in future worldwide electricity production, it all comes down to one word – scalability.

The PV industry happens to be the fastest growing industry in the world, with a promising chance to remain the fastest growing industry for the next 25 to 50 years. The PV industry worldwide grew at a compound annual rate of 35% during 2000-2009.

What is the cause of this enormous growth and why is it expected to continue? The reason is really quite simple. The market demand is enormous and PV has a number of unique characteristics that give it clear and significant advantages over any other source of electrical energy.

Unique Advantages of PV:
1. No moving parts, minimal maintenance
2. Safe and simple operation
3. High dependability, durable and long life (30+ years)
4. Scalable in output, from micro-watts to millions of watts (megawatts)
5. Silent operation
6. Maximum output coincident with peak utility power loads (summer time)
7. No emissions, no pollution
8. Portable, easy and fast to install anywhere
9. Available everywhere there is sunlight.
10. Ability to integrate attractively into existing and new buildings

What the PV Industry Needs

What could an industry with all these unique advantages, plus being the fastest growing industry in the world, possibly need?

The answer is quite simple. It needs to reduce its cost of production. Bottom line, it currently costs too much to produce PV cells. In order to dramatically reduce the cost, the industry must deploy next generation technologies that are scalable to larger volumes that will enable the needed cost reductions.

How could there be an industry with a product that is too expensive be the fastest growing industry in the world?

This contradiction is a result of the fact that the market is so vast, and that despite the current tremendous industry growth, it is only the beginning of the industry’s long-term growth curve. Incredible as it may sound the industry actually has the potential to grow at 30% per annum rates for decades.

Regardless of this dichotomy, long-term world demand will exceed long term supply (even at current “high” costs) and when future decreases in cost are accomplished the demand will literally soar far beyond the capabilities of current technology.

To address this coming demand surge, new next-generation technologies, capable of far greater production volumes, will be necessary; hence process scalability will be needed.

United States Electricity Market

The current U.S. electricity demand is roughly 4 trillion watts (4 Terawatts or TW) and is growing at approximately 2.5% per year. Current projections place demand somewhere between 11 TW and 18 TW by 2050.

To illustrate the tremendous potential of the PV industry and also the current and future demand-supply imbalance facing the industry let’s look at a few macro numbers.

For PV to supply only 1% of the U.S. demand in 2010, the worldwide PV production capacity would have to be 44 billion watts, which is over 20 times larger than current worldwide capacity. It is obvious that expanding the total industry capacity 20 fold in a few years is impossible, one thing for sure, we MUST set the bar a lot higher.

Note:
Megawatt (MW) = one million watts of electricity

Gigawatt (GW) = one thousand megawatts (one billion watts) of electricity

Terawatt (TW) = one thousand gigawatts (one trillion watts) of electricity

U.S. Electricity Demand 2010 vs. Current PV Industry Capacity

a-Percentage of Demand (2010) to be met with PV                  
b-# Times larger than current worldwide industry capacity

c-GW of capacity needed


-1%    44      20 Times Larger
-5%    220  125 Times Larger
-10%  440  250 Times Larger

The above figure shows the enormous potential of PV and how large worldwide PV capacity would have to be compared to current industry capacity, for PV to achieve 1%, 5% and 10% of the worldwide electricity market.

At least two points become very clear from the figures above:

1.The potential market for PV worldwide is absolutely enormous;

2.New production technologies will be needed to produce far greater volumes at far lower prices if the industry is ever going to make a significant penetration of this huge market.

Currently 90%+ of the world’s solar cells are manufactured using silicon technology. This technology is over 50 years old and the good news is that it has done an amazing job at dramatically reducing the price of solar cells over the years. The bad news is that the price needs to decrease even more and it cannot do this without technologies that can be scaled up to produce GW and not the current industry MW.

Unless the industry develops a manufacturing technology or discovers a new breakthrough technology that is capable of cost effectively producing PV at the GW level, PV can never make a significant contribution to future electricity generation.

Importance of Development of the Next Generation of Manufacturing

In addition to the obvious huge business opportunity, there may be other factors that will necessitate the rapid development of the PV industry and a host of new next-generation clean technologies. This future increase in demand may not be able to be addressed by fossil fuel sources for a number of reasons that, for the most part may be beyond our control:

Limitations to addressing this growth via fossil fuels:

•Peak Oil: Short term, Peak Oil is approaching, when worldwide demand will exceed supply permanently. This may cause a rapid and permanent rise in the price of oil and natural gas that will make them uneconomical at best and unavailable at worst.

•Global Warming: Longer term, global warming may drastically limit our use of fossil fuels to generate electricity. This will be especially true of generation of electricity with coal, which currently supplies over 50% of the electricity generated in the U.S. and is a very significant contributor to carbon to our atmosphere.

Bottom Line

The future of the PV industry and how significant of a role it will play is a question of scale. We have to start thinking big and we have to start right now.

The answer is clear: we need to accelerate our development of next generation technologies, with far greater production capacity, so that we will have far lower cost of production.

There are a number of other macro and micro factors that will also be needed, which I will cover in a subsequent article. But the bottom line from a macro point of view is quite simply:

The world needs PV technology capable of GW of PV production not MW.

J. Peter Lynch has worked, for 33 years as a Wall Street analyst, an independent equity analyst and private investor, and a merchant banker in small emerging technology companies. He has been actively involved in following developments in the renewable energy sector since 1977 and is regarded as an expert in this area. He is currently a financial and technology consultant to a number of companies. He can be reached via e-mail at Solarjpl@aol.com. Please visit his site for the promotion of solar energy.

Ineffective Government Programs, Obama Administration & Congrees

Info Supplied by: Scotty, "St Louis Renewable Energy" Missouri. Posted on March 25, 2010 by Robert Lahey, Ardour Capital


Government's Role in Cleantech

The Obama Administration and Congress should be praised for their desire to expand clean technology, but many of their efforts have been largely wasted on ineffective government programs. Right now, they have a unique opportunity to apply valuable lessons of the 2009 stimulus bill to a jobs bill. The stimulus bill allocated approximately $100 billion to 40 different cleantech programs, and one year later, it is very clear which funds had the most impact on the sector. Given the benefit of hindsight, it is disturbing that Congress is attempting to throw more money at the least successful programs.

One example of a struggling stimulus bill program is the Department of Energy Loan Guarantees. It was originally established by the Energy bill of 2005, but the stimulus bill dramatically increased its budget for renewable energy projects. In theory, the program is a solution to the current financing bottleneck; the government should be able to improve tight lending conditions by backing the borrowers. As a political bonus, the Administration can claim credit for the total value of the loans while Congress only has to approve a small fraction for defaults.

While the loan guarantee program addresses a critical problem tempering cleantech growth forecasts, the government’s execution is lagging its ambition. The DOE has issued several press releases recently highlighting progress, but the only actions have been “conditional” approval of pre-stimulus bill applications. Since 2005, only one company has ever received a loan. The stimulus bill gave the DOE $6 billion to support $60 billion in loans, though $2 billion was later redirected to the popular cash for clunkers program. The remaining $4 billion is still untouched and no company appears close to ending the drought because of a slow and burdensome application process.

Securing a loan guarantee involves high application fees, credit requirements, and mandatory environmental studies that move at a snail’s pace. These conditions discourage companies that need financing most. As a result, the program may end up making only a small number of loans to well connected companies that probably can get financing elsewhere, albeit at a higher rate. The program is disturbingly reminiscent of President Carter’s Synfuels Corporation which was canceled by President Reagan for failing to make a substantial impact on the alterative fuel sector.

Cleantech stimulus programs that have made the most awards to date are generally those with the smallest government roles. For manufacturers of wind turbines and solar panels, there is the new Advanced Energy Manufacturer’s Tax Credit (MTC) which provides a 30% tax credit on the cost of new or retrofitted facilities in the US. This program recently awarded its entire $2.3 billion stimulus bill funding in just one round of solicitations to 183 projects. For renewable energy project developers, the stimulus bill extended a similar 30% tax credit through 2012 and made them convertible to cash grants through 2010. Since the grant program was launched in August 2009, it has given out over $2.5 billion to 324 projects.

The difference between the tax credits and loan guarantees is the role of government. Allowing companies to claim tax credits is not considered a “major government action,” and therefore they are exempt from the most burdensome environmental reviews. In contrast, the loan guarantees trigger a wide range of environmental regulations, and also financial due diligence that is conducted at a slower pace than comparable private sector processes.

The House of Representatives is ignoring the lessons of the stimulus bill by doubling down on cleantech programs with large government roles. The jobs bill it passed last December adds $2 billion to the loan guarantee programs and attempts to streamline its application process. There is nothing allocated for the MTC which is out of funding, the grant programs expiring this year, the wind tax credits expiring in 2012, or the bioenergy tax credits which expired in 2009.


The Senate proposals ignore the cleantech sector almost entirely, but their energy bill demonstrates that this chamber has also missed the lessons of the stimulus bill. The bill it passed at the committee level in July 2009 would create a new “Green Bank” within the DOE, which appears largely the same as the loan guarantee program and Synfuels Corporation.

If Congress is serious about job creation and energy independence, it should make long-term extensions to the tax credit and grant programs. This would give banks confidence in their expected returns, spur lending and increase growth expectations for the sector.

The stimulus bill clearly demonstrates that these programs inject money at a fast pace to a wide pool of applicants. Because of technology advances and favorable tax policies, the cost of renewable energy has dropped considerably in the last several years and it is closing the gap with fossil fuels. However, the sector is still reliant on subsidies until it sees further economies of scale which will be necessary to achieve price parity with traditional energy sources. Bank lending is the key bottleneck right now, and it would be served best by a more silent partner in the government.

Robert Lahey is the Senior Legislative Analyst at Ardour Capital Investments LLC, and can be reached at rlahey@ardourcapital.com. Founded in 2002, Ardour Capital is the leading research and investment-banking firm exclusively focused on energy technology, alternative energy and power, and clean & renewable technologies. Ardour Capital publishes in-depth company coverage and industry specific research. Ardour Capital offers private and public companies a full range of corporate finance, investment banking and capital market services. Ardour Global Indexes is a family of pure play alternative energy indexes that is the primary measure of cleantech equity performance.