Notes from EUPVSEC 2010
Here are a few notes from the 25thEuropean Photovoltaic Solar Energy Conference and Exhibition held this month in Valencia, Spain. The exhibition had more than 900 booths and an expected attendance of 45,000 visitors.
Based on many conversations with attendees and vendors, I found people to be fairly optimistic about growth in the global PV business despite an expected slowdown in Germany in 2011. There is a huge amount of interest in India right now, and in potential projects in the Middle East, North Africa and selected European countries including Bulgaria and the United Kingdom. Expectations are also high for the U.S., market, with a number of European developers now planning on entering the market and setting up shop as developers or EPC contractors. From the standpoint of European developers, experience gained over the past three or more years can provide a competitive advantage in the U.S. marketplace.
In terms of silicon PV modules, there were a shockingly large number of manufacturers exhibiting at the show, many boasting hundreds of MW of capacity. There were 144 separate exhibitors selling wafer-based PV modules and 59 exhibitors selling thin film PV modules. Chinese companies often use the name of their city or province in their company name, and for example there were 14 different module makers from the province of Zhejiang, the 10thlargest in China with 52 million people and home to the city of Hangzhou. It looks like this province could become China’s “solar valley” but it is certainly not the only candidate.
While a few modules such as Sunpower’s boast higher efficiency, it really seems that most of the products on the market are commodity-like, and it is very hard for any one player to stand out from the crowd, despite their efforts with massive booths (many), faux Canadian Mounties in short skirts and faux footballers wearing Spanish national team jerseys, or rock bands and free drinks at their booths at the end of the day.
Mono and polycrystalline modules seem to be in the ascendancy, and while amorphous thin film a la Applied Materials has seen several manufacturers go bankrupt in the past year, I heard several people speak optimistically about micromorph thin film modules combining the Oerlikon a-Si technology with nano-crystalline coatings. Only 10% efficient but better temperature coefficient for hot locations and visibility on 50 Euro cents per watt manufacturing cost within a few years, at least according to a press release issued by Oerlikon during the show.
On the inverter side there is also increased competition, with 51 manufacturers exhibiting. For the big incumbents such as SMA, Fronius , Kaco and Schneider, challenges seem to be coming from two directions. First there are less expensive inverters from Chinese companies, which have been grabbing market share in Europe this year because of competitive prices and shorter lead times than for Tier 1 products. These include inverters from Beijing Kinglong, CHINT Solar, Jiangsu Sunel, Ligao Zhongshan, Ningbo GZX, Ningbo Sunbe, and Samil. Second, there is pressure from large electrical equipment makers getting into or growing their inverter businesses. Competitors include ABB, AEG, Mitsubishi and Siemens, plus Eaton and GE (both not at the show).
In terms of racking, the emphasis of a number of suppliers was on ease of installation, as they try to reduce the amount of time required and thus the total turnkey cost of installed systems. No one particular product jumped out at me but there were some interesting developments with both ground mount and rooftop racking systems, and some increasingly attractive looking carports.
