Applied Buys Advent Solar

Applied Materials has purchased most of the assets of Advent Solar in cash to boost its offering of factory equipment for making crystalline silicon cells and panels.

Albuquerque, N.M.-based Advent has developed a process that makes use of thinner silicon wafers to make cells with electrical lines on the back of the cell. Many manufacturers make cells with the contact lines – which transport electricity produced – on the front of the cells.

Putting the lines on the back would leave more room on the front to trap light, and that should boost electricity production. Founded in 2002, Advent also developed a process that it said would completely automate the assembly of solar cells into panels.

Advent had wanted to make its own cells and panels, and even signed a deal last year to buy $350 million worth of silicon wafers from Deutsche Solar.

In September 2008, Advent said it had lined up Enerpoint, MHH Solartechnik and SunConnex as its distributors. Advent had planned to ship 250 megawatts to these companies through 2013.

By March this year, Advent said it was in the business of licensing its knowhow.

The company raised $70 million in Series D in 2007, and that brought the total to $110 million. Investors included ZBI Ventures, Sun Mountain Capital, Globespan Capital Partners, Battery Ventures and @Ventures.  

Applied declined to disclose the purchase price.

Also on Friday, San Diego-based Applied Solar Inc. said it had completed the sale of its assets to Quercus APSO, a subsidiary of The Quercus Trust.

Quercus APSO plans to change its name to do business as Applied Solar LLC. Applied Solar plans to launch a product in 2010 that will be built into asphalt roof shingles, the company said Friday.

The company has listed some production descriptions on its website. One of them touted a panel embedded with crystalline silicon cells made by Suntech Power that would take place of the regular shingles.

Applied Solar, by the way, used to be called Open Energy. It announced the name change in January this year. 

EPA Wants Real-World Environmental Data From the Smart Grid

The Environmental Protection Agency is eager to see some utility data on the positive environmental impacts of smart grid deployments around the country. Just what it wants to do with the data is still up in the air.

That's the gist of comments EPA representative Stacy Angel made in a Thursday conference call hosted by the Electric Power Research Institute.

"What I would like is to see results from the deployments of where environmental benefits have been achieved," Angel said. Perhaps the utility industry could create a clearinghouse for such data, she suggested.

Estimates of the smart grid's impact on reduced greenhouse gas emissions, pollution from fossil fuel-fired power plants, and overall energy efficiency gains are all over the place.

A big one, EPRI's Green Grid study from last year, put the potential energy savings at 56 to 203 billion kilowatt-hours across the country. That could equal a carbon emission cut of 60 to 211 million metric tons, depending on factors such as how dirty the energy of a particular utility was to begin with, before it started using less of it through smart grid systems.

A more recent one from the Utility Telecom Council (see Smart Grid News) says a generic one-million smart meter deployment with distribution automation and some distributed power generation sources could cut about 300,000 tons of carbon emissions from a utility's footprint (see Smart Grid's Low-Tech Savings: Fewer Truck Rolls).

But Angel noted that emissions reductions claims and methodologies to calculate them differ. "What's the common – or any – approach to what we can attribute to smart grid?" she asked the 140 or so participants on the call.

The EPA would also like to see a distinction between direct improvements from smart grid systems – say, efficiencies from utility-controlled distribution grid automation systems – and the indirect impacts of enabling more energy-saving technology in utility customer's homes and businesses, she said.

A measure of the direct impacts comes from EPRI, which says that hooking up distribution and transmission grids with smart control systems could save the country about 300 billion kilowatt-hours, or a little less than 10 percent of the country's generating capacity.

The indirect impacts of things like home energy management systems, on the other hand, are harder to preduct, since they deal with the complexities of how customers will react (see Utilities Mull Price Points, Policies for Home Energy Management).

Angel was quick to point out that EPA wasn't demanding such data, nor was it actively engaged in measuring the environmental impacts of smart grid systems at present.

Rather, she said, "I hope that that clearinghouse is something useful for all parties."

GE to Close U.S. Solar Panel Factory

General Electric plans to close its only U.S. solar panel factory because production costs have exceeded sale prices.

The Fairfield, Conn.-based company told the Dow Jones Clean Technology Insight that silicon panel manufacturing at its facility in Delaware, will stop in January.

GE will shutter the factory all together by June. The factory can produce 34 megawatts of solar panels per year and employs 82 people. GE plans to layoff the workers with severance packages.

The move reflects the tough times experienced by solar energy equipment makers worldwide as supply far exceeded demand over the past year. Recession and a big reduction in solar subsidies in Spain - once a booming market - are key contributors.

Some manufacturers have seen prices for their products fall by anywhere from 30 percent to 50 percent over the past year.

Some solar company executives say the decline has slowed in recent months as demand picked up, mostly in Europe. But they remain worried about the pace of market recovery.

Earlier this week, Marlboro, Mass.-based Evergreen Solar said it would move panel production from its factory in Devens, Mass., to China next year in order to cut costs.

Earlier this year, BP Solar announced it would close its solar panel factory in Maryland and outsource that work to a contract manufacturer. BP said back then that it would continue to make silicon ingots, wafers and cells in Maryland.

Last month, BP said it had hired Jabil Circuit to assemble panels at a Jabil factory in Poland. 

Optimism in Venture Capital and IPO Outlook

Always On previewed its December Venture Summit with a breakfast at the offices of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati (WSGR) this morning where it examined trends in finance and the VC outlook for 2010.

Tony Perkins runs Always On, christened Silicon Valley the "Athens of the Information Age." He asked the panel "if the economic recovery is real?"

Doug Merritt of SAP is in charge of sales to SAP's largest clients  (SAP will have revenues of $14 billion this year) and gave a 30,000-foot view.  "People were so panicked at the end of 2008, they didn't even know how to act," he said. But now "the largest organizations I deal with are actively investing." On the Greentech front, he detailed how Cisco's travel budget has dropped from $750 million to about $250 million, not because the company has reduced travel so much but because it has massivly increased meetings via telepresence.

Mark Reinstra of WSGR spoke of the IPO climate: "There have been ten VC-backed IPOs in 2009, but from an informal survey within the firm, we've seen many more companies preparing for IPOs just within WSGR."  The litmus test remains that a company needs $30M to $60M annual revenues to IPO." 

Ted Smith of Union Square Advisors said: "There's a lot of stuff coming in the top of the funnel but as far as actual M&A exits – it's a very high bar."

Jim Anderson of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) works in the analytics group, and specailizes in valuations. "There is no question that valuations have dropped precipitously," he said, adding that there is a disconnect between the state of the economy and the multiples and valuations in the stock market.  He likened the state of the economy to a near-comatose patient on pain killers.  Unemployment goes to 10.2 per cent and the Dow jumps. "The U.S. economy is driven by consumer savings but consumers are hunkered down," he said. Anderson certainly sees significant growth from 2009 to 2010.

"But the little corner of the world that we operate in – the world of VC – innovators will continue to innovate. Adverse environment can actuallly produce the best start-ups," he said.

Sandy Miller, a veteran VC at Institutional Venture Partners (IVP) is "much more optimistic" than Anderson of SVB. He believes that "the financial markets almost invariably precede the recovery by two to three quarters. The financial markets have already recovered. There's an appetite for IPOs from institutional buyers, adding "The actual paramenters to go public have been virtually the same for the last thirty years." He also noted that "2010 will be a reasonably active year in the IPO market," and that "when the IPO market rises the M&A market responds as well." 

"Greentech company valuations are twice what we would expect for other sectors," he said. (Which is why he's staying away from those investments.)

"It's a great time to be an investor," Miller concluded.

Evergreen Solar Plans to Move U.S. Panel Production to China

Evergreen Solar (NSDQ: ESLR) plans to stop producing panels at its factory in Devens, Mass., and shift that work to China, the company said this week.

The Marlboro, Mass.-based company has been producing silicon wafers and cells, and assembling them into panels at the Devens factory.

But running the factory proves expensive, especially when its operation in China will be able to do it for less, the company said.

Evergreen decided to shift some of its manufacturing to China earlier this year. It is contracting with Jiawei Solar to produce cells and turn them into panels.

Evergreen will manufacture the wafers for the cell production in China, and do so in a leased factory being built by Jiawei, the company said when it announced the final agreement with Jiawei. The companies plan to build 100 megawatts of annual production capacities initially. Manufacturing is set to start in spring 2010.

Evergreen plans to shift panel production from Devens to China in mid-2010.

Before inking the deal with Jiawei, Evergreen had considered building its own factory to make wafers, cells and panels in China. But lining up financing for the factory proved difficult. Outsourcing some of the manufacturing would cut costs significantly, the company said.

The company shipped 31.3 megawatts of solar panels from Devens in the third quarter of this year, a 35 percent boost from the second quarter, Evergreen executives said Wednesday.

The company said it could restart panel production at Devens if demand in the United States picks up.

Evergreen's shares rose 9 percent to close at $1.55 per share Thursday.

Sanyo Opens Factories in Oregon, Mexico

Sanyo celebrated the opening of two factories this week: a silicon ingot and wafer in Salem, Ore., and a panel assembly plant in Nuevo Leon, Mexico.

The silicon ingot/wafer factory has begun production and is set to reach its full production capacity of 70 megawatts per year by April next year, the company said.

Sanyo will use the monocrystalline silicon from the factory to produce its HIT solar panels, which wraps amorphous silicon around monocrystalline silicon.

Monocrystalline silicon already is more efficient at converting sunlight into electricity than multicrystalline silicon, though it's also more expensive. Sanyo further boosts a HIT panel's performance by adding amorphous silicon.

The new assembly plant in Mexico will put together the HIT panels. The plant has the capacity to produce 50 megawatts of solar panels per year, the company said. It's the only Sanyo solar panel assembly plant outside of Japan.

Sanyo had 260 megawatts of cell manufacturing capacity before it completed the two factories. The company hopes to boost that figure to 600 megawatts by the end of March 2011. 

The company is also teaming up with Nippon Oil to make solar panels that would use a layer of amorphous silicon and a layer of microcrystalline silicon.