Odersun to Make CIS-on-Copper Goods in China

Ever since the Chinese government began discussing solar incentives earlier this year, non-Chinese companies have wondered how they could get a slice of this potentially huge market.

The consensus so far is it would be tough to crack the Chinese market because it's so new and because the government's policies are seen as measures to help its own solar manufacturers.

Teaming up with Chinese companies, then, seems a good strategy. Odersun, a German thin-film developer, is taking that route by creating a joint venture with Advanced Technology & Materials (AT&M), Odersun said Monday.

The Beijing-based joint venture would produce solar cells and panels using Odersun's technology, which deposits copper-indium-disulphide on copper stripes that are only 1 centimeter wide and 0.1 millimeter thick.

Odersun and AT&M have known each other since 2004, when AT&M invested in the German company.

The handful of non-Chinese companies that have announced plans for the Chinese market include Enfinity, a Netherlands-based project developer that has teamed up with LDK Solar and China Guandong Nuclear Power for a 10-megawatt project in Dunhuang City, Gansu province.

Two months ago, Tempe, Ariz.-based First Solar said it had a deal with the Chinese government to build a 2-gigawatt solar power plant in Inner Mongolia.

LEDs in Deep Freeze: Light Power Cut Drastically in Cold Storage Warehouse

Albeo Technologies, which produces LED light fixtures, replaced a set of 400-watt metal halide lights at a cold storage unit at Dole, the pineapple people, and cut light power by 95 percent.

Cold storage – along with retail, hotels, streetlights and grocery stores – will be an early market for LED lights. The light from LEDs do not generate heat. Therefore, the air conditioning in cold storage units doesn't have to work as hard. Others have proposed piping in lights with fiber optic cables. (The back of LEDs generate heat, but not the light, so it can be sucked away from produce that needs to be kept cold.). LEDs on retail produce counters won't prematurely age fruit.

LEDs also require less maintenance and hardly every need to be replaced. Hence, industrial users see a quicker payback than consumers, which only gain from lower power consumption.

Lighting consumes approximately 22 percent of the electricity in the U.S. and many light fixtures are inefficient. The incandescent bulb, which will be shoved off the market in the next five years, turns 130 years old on Dec. 31, 2009.

LEDs and lighting controls probably represent the best way to crank down light power. In a recent test, PG&E was able to cut lighting power in office buildings by 50 percent or more with lighting controls.

GT Solar Gets New CEO

GT Solar (NSDQ: SOLR), which makes equipment for producing silicon and ingots, has hired Tom Gutierrez as its new CEO, the company said Monday.

Gutierrez replaced Tom Zarrella, who had been the CEO since 2007. The new CEO took office last week.

Gutierrez was CEO at Xerium Technologies from 2001 to 2008; Xerium makes synthetic textiles. Previously, Gutierrez was CEO of Invensys Power Systems, which makes energy storage products. Gutierrez is on the boards of Verso Paper and Comverge.

The Merrimack, N.H.-based company, which also sells equipment for making solar cells and panels, also released preliminary financial results for its second fiscal quarter ending Sept. 26 this year.

GT Solar said it expects the second-quarter revenue to be around $100 million to $105 million. Net income would fall between $9 million and $10 million, or 6 to 7 cents per share.

For the full 2010 fiscal year, the company expects to generate $450 million to $550 million in revenue, and 45 to 60 cents per share.

GT Solar plans to release the full second-quarter results next week

The company’s shares were down 3 percent to reach $5.09 per share in recent trading.

250M Smart Meters, $3.9B Market by 2015, Says Pike Research

The world will have 250 million smart meters by 2015, representing a $3.9 billion market, according to a report from Pike Research released Monday.

But that growth – representing $19.5 billion in new meters installed, and an increase from about 46 million smart meters installed worldwide last year – will be uneven, according to Pike's executive summary of the report.

North America, which is set to overtake Europe as the fastest-growing smart meter market next year, will see smart meters make up 55 percent of its installed meter base by 2015, for example, while worldwide penetration of smart meters will be 18 percent by that time, Clint Wheelock, managing director, said in a news release.

The report also differentiates between "basic" smart meters capable of two-way communication of electricity consumption data, and "advanced" meters that can be remotely disconnected and, more importantly, enable so-called home area networks, or energy management systems within homes and businesses (see The Smart Home, Part I and The Smart Home, Part II).

Pike's report also noted that the big expansion in smart metering won't last forever. Government financial support - including the Department of Energy's awarding of $3.4 billion in smart grid stimulus grants last week - has broken utilities' traditional 15 to 20 year meter replacement cycle, Wheelock noted (see DOE's $3.4B Smart Grid Grant Program: The Winners).

Pike's report matches the views of other industry observers, who say smart meter makers like General Electric, Itron, Landis+Gyr, Sensus and Elster – as well as the companies such as Silver Spring Networks, Trilliant, SmartSynch, Grid Net and others seeking to provide networking and communications for those smart meters – are vying to establish their technologies in this big new round of deployments (see 8.3M Smart Meters and Counting in U.S.).

Geoengineering at MIT: The Spike on the Steering Wheel

There's serious concern in the scientific and environmental communities about the geoengineering moral hazard – the fear that studying or even just talking about geoengineering will cause people to give up on or at least lose focus on our primary mission: reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The issue came up several times at the MIT geoengineering workshop Friday.

It's an important concern, especially given the entrenched interests who are opposed to reducing emissions and the difficulty of convincing the public to make sacrifices when faced with a long-term, difficult-to-perceive threats.

I don't think researchers should avoid studying geoengineering. We might want to be careful about the name, however. It implies a greater degree of control and precision than we have or are likely to gain in the next generation or so. A misperception about precision could make it easier to persuade the public to accept geoengineering uncritically.

You can't restrict a term to its teleological argument, said Jim Fleming, a science historian from Colby College. In other words, no matter how imprecise or unsuccessful the practice may be, it is still engineering.

It's important to capture intentionality, said David Keith, an environmental sciences and chemical engineering professor at the University of Calgary. In other words, it's engineering because engineers are attempting to achieve the degree of control and precision we associate with the term engineering.

Looking through the pessimism-brings-optimism lens, I see an inverse of the moral hazard. If these really smart people who understand climate as well as anyone say that geoengineering is fraught with peril and may not work but we should still consider it, then the threat from global warming must be truly scary and we should curb emissions now. I'm not counting on this idea to get much traction in Washington or with the public, however.

Better still, why not go on the offensive? MIT's Kerry Emanuel, who moderated the panel discussion at the workshop, proposed threatening people with geoengineering: he cited British academic, environmentalist and risks expert John Adams' rhetorical suggestion that if we want lower automobile accident rates, we should put spikes sticking out of every car's steering wheel. "The [spike] is geoengineering, and it's what we're going to do if you don't take your foot off the gas," said Emanuel.

There are two unrelated categories of climate management, or geoengineering: solar radiation management and carbon dioxide removal. Much of the MIT workshop focused on solar radiation management, which could be implemented cheaply and would take effect quickly.

Solar radiation management calls for blocking sunlight with mirrors in space, aerosols in the stratosphere or artificially produced clouds. It would lower the planet's temperature relatively quickly. However, it wouldn't directly reduce CO2 levels. It would also alter precipitation patterns. And it could cause a rapid rebound in temperatures if it failed or was otherwise stopped.

There are two types of carbon dioxide removal: ocean and terrestrial. They're more expensive and longer-term.

Ocean carbon dioxide removal involves fertilizing the oceans to amplify the natural carbon cycle, which sequesters carbon in the deep ocean. A consensus is emerging that this is a bad idea. It's not clear that any of the proposals would work, and it appears that many if not all of them would be carbon positive, meaning they would produce more carbon in emissions than the carbon they would remove from the atmosphere.

Terrestrial carbon dioxide removal schemes could reduce carbon dioxide levels. The schemes range from forest management to industrial-scale chemical processes. Many of the scientists at the workshop said that terrestrial carbon dioxide removal could be an important or even necessary complement to emissions reductions. The principal downside is local and regional impacts: social, economic and environmental impacts of industrial facilities, and resource and land-use trade-offs involved in biomass management.

I'm still extremely wary of geoengineering. I think the proper context is climate scientist Ken Caldiera's analogy to a parachute. You only use it in the face of certain disaster. We also don't know yet whether what we have in geoengineering is a functional parachute.

Eric Smalley is the editor of Energy Research News. He has written about technology since 1987 and has freelanced for many publications including Discover, Scientific American, Wired News and The Boston Globe on topics ranging from quantum cryptography to global warming.

Most Jobs for Chinese Wind Farm in Texas to Go to China: WSJ

A consortium of Chinese and U.S. companies want to build a 600-megawatt wind farm in Texas that they say will create jobs in the U.S.

Well, some.

The project, which will cost an estimated $1.5 billion, will create 2,800 jobs, backers told the Wall Street Journal. Fifteen percent – or around 240 – will be in the U.S. The rest will be in China. The wind farm is being developed by a joint venture formed by Shenyang Power Group, the U.S. Renewable Energy Group and Cielo Wind Power. Shenyang will own 49 percent of the project. It will employ turbines from A-Power Generation. Jinxiang Lu is CEO of both SPG and A-Power. Commercial banks in China will provide financing.

The backers will also seek stimulus funds and tax credits.

The deal is fascinating and bears worth watching for several reasons. First, the deal – like the deal between Duke Energy and China's ENN to build solar farms – will not just involve bringing comparatively inexpensive wind turbines or solar panels to the U.S. Chinese companies and banks will likely be actively involved in building and managing these power plants. In other words, Chinese companies will be involved in the sort of higher-value services that white-collar America craves.

Second, alternative energy appears to be China's opportunity to establish brands worldwide. Companies like Toyota, Sony and Toshiba helped Japan move from a back-end manufacturer to a maker of goods in its own right. South Korea's economy was greatly enhanced when Samsung and LG became respected leaders in consumer electronics. China hasn't really had a brand yet. Many thought Haier, the electronics maker would be the first, but that hasn't happened. But in alternative energy, Suntech is already a brand name in solar and some of the companies listed above will likely become familiar, at least in some regions in the U.S.

Don't get me wrong. I actually admire Chinese companies. The quality and ambition of the entrepreneurs behind companies in China has consistently impressed me. They also pay their CEOs less than U.S. companies. The companies behind the wind venture also wouldn't be the first international entries into the stimulus derby: Spanish and South Korean companies have received millions through U.S. joint ventures. But it is an interesting trend. In the near future, one of the best places to work might be a U.S. subsidiary of a Chinese company.