PHOENIX --$3.00 a watt.

Need I say more?

The state of Arizona currently gives consumers who buy solar systems a $3.00 a watt subsidy on systems they install. That's nearly twice the $1.55 per watt subsidy that California offers.

Put another way, a consumer that installs a 5-kilowatt system on his or her house can expect to pay only $13,000 for the system, according to Lori Singleton, manager of sustainability initiatives for the Salt River Project, a large publicly-owned utility, at Surviving the Shakeout, a conference taking place today and tomorrow sponsored by Greentech Media. The math works out at follows: The system costs $35,000, but consumers get a collective $22,000 in credits from the federal government, the state of Arizona and the utility.

Developers that build systems of 20 kilowatts or more only qualify for a $2.50 kilowatt credit.

But hurry. In about a month, utilities will start to knock down the consumer rebate to $2.70 and the commercial rebate will likely follow.

PHOENIX -- Borrego Solar Systems says it can put solar in the ground for about $5.50 to $6 a watt. But it will drop the price to $4.50 in the coming months.

How that will happen remains a mystery.

The new strategy largely revolves around organizing how solar systems are constructed, said Brian von Moos, director of business development at Borrego, at Surviving the Shakeout, a conference taking place today and tomorrow sponsored by Greentech Media.

"We've cracked that nut. We've figured out how to do it," he said. "We will be rolling it out soon."

In the past two decades, most of the research in the solar industry has focused on making solar panels more efficient or it has focused on reducing the cost of solar panels. Far less has been dedicated toward reducing the installation costs of solar systems, but that picture has been changing. Sungevity and SolarCity have developed software applications that have reduced the need for onsite job estimates (Sungevity) and organized installations geographically to make them more economical (SolarCity). Other companies have focused on integrating some of the electronics into solar panels to reduce the wiring that needs to be performed on the job site.

Again, von Moos wouldn't say exactly what Borrego is doing yet, but he said it has to do with the construction side of things, not integrating electronics into the panel or other equipment-centric innovations.

Borrego was once a large residential solar installer, but switched to concentrate on commercial solar projects. The company recently has become a specialist in installing solar systems at low-income housing developments. In those housing developments, the state of California gives a $3.30 to $4 per watt subsidy for solar. In ordinary residential installations, consumers get $1.55 per watt. The size of the projects at low-income housing projects make them very similar to commercial installations.

Critics and doomsayers have predicted for several years that fast-growing sunbelt cities would become ghost towns because of rapid population growth and limited water supplies.

It's not happening yet, says Phil Gordon, the Mayor of Phoenix.

Although the city has grown by 400,000 t0 500,000 residents in the past ten years, "we're using the exact same amount of water we did a decade ago," he said during a keynote speech at Surviving the Shakeout a conference taking place today and tomorrow sponsored by Greentech Media.

The city, moreover, has accomplished this without imposing mandates on water use or rationing, he said.

Instead, Phoenix has aggressively moved to recycle water. The Tres Rios project, for instance, is a reclaimed riverbed. It used to be a paved-over channel. Now, Tres Rios is an avian wetland. Water, which ultimately makes it to residential taps, is percolated through the sands there. (The city, he added also covers 535 square miles.)

Former governor Bruce Babbitt also gets a good amount of the credit for work his administration accomplished in the 1980s. Then, the state set up regulations that required developers in critical areas to show that their projects would have adequate water supplies for 99 years.

Like other cities, Phoenix is trying to attract greentech companies to set up operations in the state and using its own energy-efficiency plans as a selling point. New city buildings, Gordon added, are LEED certified.

Nuventix has raised $8 million more to develop new markets and improve the efficiency of its system to cool light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and servers with blasts of air.

The new funding includes $3 million from Braemar Energy Ventures, $1 million from Korean firm Uniquest and a $4 million line of credit from Silicon Valley Bank, the Austin, Texas-based startup announced Monday.

The new funding closes out the company's series C round at $18 million, and brings the company's total investment to $32.5 million since its 2005 funding, it said.

Nuventix raised $14 million in July from investors including Advanced Technology Ventures and Braemer Energy Ventures (see Wakonda, Nuventix Raise Millions).

Nuventix's SynJet technology allows LED makers to place more lights more closely together than would be possible with traditional passive cooling methods, meaning more light per unit of space, the company said.

LEDs are mainly used in outdoor traffic signals and roadside signs, though several companies are developing them for the indoor lighting market (see DOE Says LEDs Can Shine in 12 Markets).

LEDs are seen as a far more energy efficient replacement for traditional incandescent light bulbs, and they don't have compact fluorescent lights' problems of poorer light quality and use of toxic chemicals.

The main barrier to adoption remains their high price. But venture capitalists and mainstream lighting companies alike are spending millions to invest in or acquire promising LED startups (see Lighting the Way to Efficiency).

Beyond cooling LEDs, Nuventix is seeking to expand its business of supplying SynJet cooling for high-performance servers, it said.

Blogging from a sold-out, standing room only, Greentech Media solar event in Phoenix, Arizona --

A panel entitled Driving Costs out of Photovoltaic Manufacturing had three heavyweights in solar manufacturing giving us their views on scrubbing cost out of photovoltaics.

Dan Chen of 3M’s Renewable Energy Division used the history of the automotive industry’s (first) shakeout as a model. Between 1898 and 1930 there were 1,800 automotive startups -- and very few survived.  But these firms drove innovation in an industry that had decades of sustained growth -- an easy parallel to today’s solar industry:

• Tremendous scale opportunities

• Consolidation

• Commodification

• Lots of advanced materials

With an R&D budget of over one billion dollars, 3M is developing new materials for the solar industry in thin films, fasteners, flouropolymer backsheets, Fresnel lenses and solar mirror film.

Chen also cited the Dopeler effect -- the tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly.

Jonathan Pickering of Applied Materials gave his views on driving costs out of PV manufacturing.  Applied is a leading manufacturer of semiconductor and display manufacturing equipment. In 2006, it made a strategic decision to enter the solar business.

Pickering’s analogy for solar was not the automotive industry, but rather semiconductors and displays.  Since its invention, the cost per transistor has been reduced by 20,000,000 times.  Displays have undergone a cost reduction of 20 times in 15 years with a market expansion of 100 times.

With similar scaling and innovation applied to solar, Pickering remarked that a reduction in cost of just 2 times or 3 times would easily make affordable electricity from solar energy.

Pickering added that residential solar “will always be led by c-Si” and that utility solar will be led by thin film because it is “intrinsically the lowest cost solution”

Applied claims its tandem junction cost is $1.50/W and will drop to $1/W by next year.

Roger Little, the CEO of Spire Corp has a big idea -- distributed solar module assembly. He sees this as a means by which the US can become the world’s largest solar market.

Mr. Little sees U.S. solar incentives at the federal and state level creating an enormous shortfall in U.S. PV manufacturing, a shortfall that can be addressed with lots of 50-megawatt solar factories (which is what Spire happens to sell).

Spire can envision 3 gigawatts of c-Si production in the U.S. by 2012 with his distributed module manufacturing model.  This keeps manufacturing local and creates jobs, up to 10,000 jobs in the U.S., according to his claims.

He doesn’t want to create a situation he describes as “The Spanish put in a great program and they employed 8000 Chinese” but rather, “If you make it in the neighborhood you’re going to create a market in the neighborhood.”