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American solar Industry's secret Sauce:Innovation
A new Greentech Media market research report surveys the North American solar industry and finds the explosive growth in emerging technologies the key toUS dominance in the global solar market.
A brawn versus brains battle is brewing in the solar market.
Asia and Europe currently dominate the $50billion solar market,which itself is dominated by silicon crystalline panels.By contrast, most of the thin-film market is concentrated in the US. If thin film lives up to the promise of its proponents,the Us could conceivaly upend the balance of power.
Then again, US companies will have to establish their technologies quickly and fend off growing expertise in thin film by honda,BP,Sharp and other.
The report divides solar technologies into four areas:crystalline sillicon thin film,concentratrating solar and everything else.In some ways, the nature of the copetition differs between the crystalline soar cell and thin-film market. The crystalline market,The crystalline market is fairly mature.Thus, the manufactures japan,China and Germany largely compete on manufacturing scale building large factories and nailing the science of producing lots of products cheaply.
As a reasult, competition revolves around raising capital,landing patents, building a management team and establishing prototype plants.About 4.3 billion in venture capital has gone into solar technologies between 2005 and the third quarter of 2008,with majority of the money going to North American companies.
"The North American PV industry as a whole represents a strongly diversified technology portfolio,¡?àFurr wrote in the report ."
"There are more PV technology developers in North America than Europe and asia combined."
Furr pointed to solyndra and Nanosolar as good examples of thin-film starup with the potential to become large players.Both california companies make CIGS planels and have began commercial production of their products.
Competition between the two also has become intense.Nanosolar CEO Martin Roscheisen just wrote a long blog refuting claims made by Solyndra about its unusual solar panel designs.
It's a wonderful thing to increase cell efficiency, but you've got to be able to do it in scale and ramp up,¡?à furr said.
Of course,the world verse American line invaiably begins to get hazy in a global market .First solar achieves some of its lowest manufacturing costs in its factories in Malaysia while sun power manufactures heavily in the Philippines.
Meanwhile, Solarworld from Germany is building what it says will be the largest solar cell factory in hillsboro,Ore.
