Photovoltaic Solar Looks to be Arriving in Scale in the U.S.

By: TraderMark Thursday, August 14, 2008 7:15 PM

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The company would install its patented SunPower® Tracker solar tracking systems at the site, which tilt toward the sun as it moves across the sky, increasing energy capture by up to 30 percent over fixed systems, while reducing land-use requirementsGreenWombat article - California's Game Changing Solar Deal

In a move that could alter the economics of the global solar industry, California utility PG&E on Thursday announced that it will buy 800 megawatts of elecricity produced from two massive photovoltaic power plants to be built in San Luis Obsipo County on the state’s central coast. The 550-megawatt thin-film plant from Bay Area startup OptiSolar and a 250-megawatt PV plant from Silicon Valley’s SunPower dwarf by orders of magnitude the five-to-15 megawatt photovoltaic power stations currently in operation around the world.
Most of the industrial-scale solar plants designed to replace fossil-fuel power use solar thermal technology, meaning they deploy mirrors to heat liquids to produce steam that drives electricity-generating turbines. Photovoltaic power plants essentially take the solar panels found on suburban rooftops and put them on the ground in gigantic arrays.
How gigantic? OptiSolar’s Topaz Solar Farm will cover 9 1/2 square miles of ranch land with thin-film panels like the ones in the photo above.
“Obviously this is huge and a bold move,” says Reese Tisdale, a senior analyst who studies the economics of solar power for Emerging Energy Research in Cambridge, Mass. “It’s a pretty big jump in manufacturing capacity and a big opportunity for the PV industry, particularly for thin-film.”
If the power plants are ultimately built - and that’s a big if, given the challenges to get such facilities online - and other utilities follow PG&E’s lead, demand for solar modules could skyrocket.
“If we were trying to do it this year, it would be all of our production,” says Julie Blunden, SunPower’s vice president for public policy. “SunPower is ramping very quickly. By 2010 our production will be at least 650 megawatts.”
The PG&E deal puts OptiSolar in the spotlight. Founded by veterans of the Canadian oil sands industry, the stealth Hayward, Calif., startup has kept its operations under cover, avoiding the media as it quietly set up a manufacturing plant in the East Bay and prepared to break ground on a million-square-foot factory in Sacramento. (can't wait for the IPO) ;)
It has long been an open secret that building massive photovoltaic power plants was not economically viable. So what has changed too make constructing gargantuan PV power plants profitable?
“Lots of things have changed,” says SunPower’s Blunden. “Power prices are going up and public policy is requiring utilities to have a portfolio of renewables.” And after building some 40 megawatts of power plants in Spain, SunPower has been able to improve its manufacturing processes and cut costs, according to Blunden. “We could see where the cost reductions were coming down and the benefits of scale,” she says. “We saw there was a way for us to be competitive with other renewables.”
Goldstein says OptiSolar’s business model of owning the supply chain - from building its own machines to making solar cells to constructing, owning and operating power plants - will allow it to reduce costs.

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