Communities go solar together and save

[jpak]

http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/neighbors-go-solar-together-save/story.aspx?guid=%7BDA1E6E39-0126-4459-9A3F-2298B88EE487%7D

Convincing a group of neighbors to agree on anything is rarely easy. But in a growing number of communities in the U.S. over the past year neighbors have proven fairly persuasive at influencing dozens of their peers to spend $25,000 or more on a rooftop solar system.

It started in Portola Valley, Calif., a sunny community 35 miles south of San Francisco. In December, 78 of the town's 1,700 homes decided to pool their purchasing power and call in a large order for residential solar system

California-based SolarCity offered the community a group discount on the rooftop and backyard photovoltaic systems and installed them. The company, which started out installing individual orders for homeowners, began filling bulk orders for neighborhoods in California in 2006 as a way to try to drive down the cost of solar systems.

"If an entire group comes together they get a discount," said Lyndon Rive, founder and chief executive officer of SolarCity. "With three or four homes you don't get economies of scale."

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[Gregorian]

1. On top of which, Nanosolar is predicting sales to the public in 2008.

That may also bring costs down. We still have a weak link in battery technology. But the Portola installations are tied to grid. There is no doubt about that. By the way, my guess on average home value in Portola is most likely well above two million (the median price for a four bedroom home in 2006 was three million! I just checked.). So it's a community with more cash to spare than just about any other in the nation.

It's a great idea, especially being grid tied.

[Dover]

2. Nanosolar loses chief scientist

June 7, 2007 5:01 PM PDT
Nanosolar loses chief scientist

Chris Eberspacher, a recognized expert in thin film technology and one of the higher-level technical executives at Nanosolar, has left the company.

Eberspacher had been serving as chief scientist for the company, and before that he was the vice president of research and development.

An analyst termed the departure "significant" because of the technical complexities involved in manufacturing, although Nanosolar CEO Martin Roscheisen said the departure does not impact the company. Nanosolar hopes to produce copper-indium-gallium-selenide (CIGS) solar cells by printing the active CIGS material onto thin foils or other substrates. Eberspacher is an expert in this field. He holds patents and has published patents on printing CIGS.

Prior to working at Nanosolar, he was a co-founder of Unisun and before that, Eberspacher headed up research and development at Arco Solar, which is now owned by Shell.

Like most other CIGS companies, Nanosolar doesn't commercially produce products yet, but hopes to start in 2008. Most of the competitors use a somewhat similar chemical formula for CIGS: the challenge comes in mass manufacturing.

CIGS companies will overcome these challenges, but it will take time and it's unclear at this point which process will work best, wrote Rommel Noufi, a researcher at the National Renewable Energy Lab, in an e-mail. (Noufi wrote the email in response to a question about CIGS in general a few weeks ago and not in response to Eberspacher's departure.)

"There are as many ways to deposit CIGS as there are industries. Some will overcome, and some will fail. Unlike silicon, where everyone almost makes the wafers the same way, in the CIGS case, each industry has to build its own equipment to match their process," Noufi wrote.

Nanosolar will print its CIGS cells. Others will sputter the material onto substrates. Miasole and DayStar, two other CIGS companies, have recently experienced delays....>

http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9727336-7.html