Vanuatu and Sri Lanka might not be the biggest mobile phone markets in the world, but they could soon be the greenest. That's because the two island nations are seeing a big push by companies to replace the diesel generators that power their off-grid mobile base stations with solar and wind power, according to annoucements coming out of the GSM Association's meeting in Barcelona this week. Digicel, the Caribbean's largest mobile operator, is now carrying 60 percent of its network traffic on the Pacific island nation of Vanuatu through 25 base stations powered by sun and wind, the company said. Digicel operates in Vanuatu, Samoa, Tonga and Papua New Guinea through its Digicel Pacific subsidiary. And Dialog Telekom, the largest mobile communications provider for the Indian Ocean nation of Sri Lanka, plans to power 10 base stations with solar and wind power — five of them on-grid, interestingly. Two are being tested now and the rest are set to go live by April, the company said. It's all part of a push launched by GSMA in September to power more than 100,000 mobile base stations in developing countries with renewable energy by 2012. That could save 2.5 billion liters (660 million gallons) of diesel fuel each year, the association said. (The United States alone consumed 4.2 million barrels, or about 176 million gallons, of diesel fuel and fuel oil per day in 2007, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, so a reduction of 660 million gallons would equate to about 3.75 days of American thirst for the fuel. Still, every small reduction helps a little.) To speed up mobile communications' green footprint, Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE: ALU) said Tuesday it would start an "Alternative Energy Program" at its Villarceaux facility near its headquarters in Paris. While it made note of the environmental benefits of taking such a course in its press release, it also noted the commercial benefits that lie in reaching "a huge population of potential new subscribers -- the more than one billion people living in areas that are not served by an electrical grid." Alcatel has about 300 solar-powered radio sites installed so far, and is looking to solar, wind and fuel cell technologies for its future efforts. It's also testing power controllers from U.K.-based PowerOasis in its new research effort, it said. There are other mobile phone station powering schemes out there. Fuel cell makers Plug Power (NSDQ: PLUG) and Ballard Power Systems (NSDQ: BDLP) are looking to serve telecommunications companies that need back-up power systems (see Ballard to Deal 10,000 Fuel Cells to India). As for the phones themselves, Intel said in December that it is researching ways to charge cellphones and other mobile devices with radio waves that are abundant wherever cell and radio towers are broadcasting.

The Crown Estate, the body in the United Kingdom that dispenses the land rights in the country, has awarded 10 leases to companies to develop offshore wind farms. In all the wind farms will produce 6 gigawatts when completed. And at least two of the wind farms you will see the novel offshore wind turbines touted by SeaEnergy Renewables and Burntisland Fabrication. These turbines essentially are built on four-legged platforms initially devised for the oil industry, rather than the conventional monopile used to hold up turbines now. The platforms require less steel, and hence cost less, than traditional turbines and they can be planted further out to sea. Two were erected earlier in the decade by Talisman to power oil platforms in the Beatrice oil field off the coast from Aberdeen, Scotland. The people who designed the turbines left Talisman to found SeaEnergy. (Burntisland Fabrication makes the platforms. SeaEnergy then buys them, erects the wind turbine on top of them and then sells the energy to utilities.) We saw these turbines last week and got the technical rundown from SeaEnergy's Allan MacAskill last week. Read more here. SeaEnergy is part of a group that won the rights to develop a 920-megawatt turbine off Inch Cape and also in a group that won the righ to build a 905 megawatt farm in the Beatrice field. You will probably see the design pop up in other farms too. Burntisland says it already has orders for 44 platforms and will expand to 100 a year soon. One of the other winners in the Crown Estate was Fred Olsen Renewables. Olsen is an investor in SeaEnergy. They are nuts for wind in scotland, which hopes to get half of its energy from renewable sources by 2020. Twenty-five percent of Europe's wind resources are located offshore. If Scotland votes for indepedence in 2011, it's really going to through of the U.K.'s renewable energy plans.

Suntech Power Holdings (NYSE: STP) has invested about $8.1 million in Asia Silicon, which has been supplying Suntech with the raw material for making solar cells.

Suntech, based in Wuxi, China, said Tuesday it bought a minority stake from an existing shareholder of Asia Silicon, which is located in Qinghai, China.

Back in 2007, Suntech said it had signed a seven-year, $1.5 billion deal with Asia Silicon. Asia Silicon was to begin delivering the material in the second half of 2008. Suntech said at the time that the contract would give it the cheapest silicon it could find. The company also said it would pay more than $40 per kilogram for the first half of the deal, and less than $40 per kilogram for the remainder of the contract.

Asia Silicon is a new entrant in the market. The company said it began producing silicon at the end of last year, and is revving up its manufacturing pace to reach 2,000 metric tons per year by the middle of this year.

Owning a piece of a silicon company could prove a good move at a time when silicon prices are falling rapidly. The trend, coupled with the economic downturn that has softened market demand, has prompted many solar cell makers to renegotiate their contracts with silicon makers.

Silicon makers aren’t immune to market forces, however, and Suntech has seen its investments in two silicon makers, Nitol Solar and Hoku Materials, taking a dive. Suntech said last month that it would incur a charge between $49 million and $52 million in its fourth quarter financials as a result of its stakes in Nitol and Hoku.

Hoku, based in Pocatello, Idaho, recently said it could have trouble building its very first silicon factory because a few of its customers couldn’t make the advanced payments that would help to pay for building the factory in Idaho.

Suntech is scheduled to release its quarterly earnings Wednesday.

Oncor is providing rebates to its Texas customers for installing solar energy systems.

The utility launched the $16 million, four-year program Monday. That should be enough money for 1,400 systems of various sizes, the utility said. Oncor will pay $2.46 per DC watt and up to $24,600 for each residential energy system. Its business and government customers are eligible to get incentives worth as much as $246,000 per system.

The move follows many other utilities in the country that offer various types of incentives to promote solar energy use, which of course gives solar energy equipment and service companies a boost in business.

Xcel Energy, the largest utility in Colorado, has offered rebates for some years, though it recently reduced the rebates in light of the availability of a federal tax credit (see Xcel Cuts Solar Credits by 40%). Now, under the stimulus package just passed by Congress, the tax credit, which would offset the costs of installing a solar energy system by 30 percent, will be converted to cash payments.

Meanwhile, customers of the Gainesville Regional Utilities in Florida could become the first bunch in the country to profit by selling solar power from their systems at home or businesses. The program, which is awaiting the state’s approval, would pay more for solar energy than for power from conventional sources. For the first two years of the program, the utilities would guarantee $0.32 per kilowatt-hour under a 20-year contract.

Efficiency Promises versus Broken Promises The promise of CIGS cells is that high-efficiency cells can be achieved using less than 1/100th the semiconducting materials required for silicon-based PV cells. At the same time, CIGS cells present a challenge because four-layers of semiconducting material (copper, indium, gallium and di-selenide, or in some cases sulfur) must be deposited correctly to create an efficient cell.  (Image on right is a Global Solar CIGS cell)

Correction: An astute reader points out that I got this a bit wrong. "The CIGS in the solar cells is not a four-layer stack (and more particularly, di-selenide is not a material per se)  Rather, it is a chemical compound, a crystal where one copper atom, one indium or gallium atom and two selenium atoms (hence di-selenide) make up each basic unit. You can talk about the challenge of getting four-layer structures right, but then it’s the structure back contact–absorber–buffer–window."

I stand corrected.  On with the story... Every photovoltaic-themed PowerPoint ever presented since the birth of the sun includes the NREL PV efficiency chart. It’s tradition to include it, so here it is. The NREL chart bears some of the blame for the billions of dollars of VC investment (and public company investment) into CIGS development.  Here's a list of the top five recipients of VC funding in the CIGS/CIS universe.

Firm                   VC Received Solyndra             $600M+ Nanosolar           $500M MiaSolé               $300M SoloPower           $235M+ SulfurCell            $165M+

That’s $1.8 billion dollars right there and the figure easily exceeds $2.3 billion when one counts the remaining CIGS players. Some of that irrational VC exuberance is due to the hero experiments charted by NREL. Its champion numbers show a potential efficiency for CIGS of 19.9 percent -- exceeding CdTe’s 16.5 percent, equal to polycrystalline silicon, and approaching the neighborhood of single crystal silicon’s 24.5 percent. Those numbers are encouraging to investors as it means that there exists a thin film solution that can potentially disruptively displace the incumbent material, silicon, in a high growth $20 billion dollar market. However, according to an industry source, that pioneering CIGS work was performed in ultra-high vacuum (UHV) in a tool with 10 E10 (10 range) vacuum, a pristine vacuum environment. How much performance does one give up when relaxing the vacuum environment for the sake of manufacturing? CIGS efficiency is sacrificed by relaxing the deposition conditions for the sake of manufacturing:

• By ~8 percent to 9 percent in going from UHV to normal vacuum levels

• By ~9 percent to 10 percent in going from UHV to ambient conditions

Bottom line here is that real-life CIGS efficiencies, when manufactured in anything less than a pristine vacuum environment are never going to come close to the incumbent silicon efficiencies.  The following chart bears that out.

CIGS Firm                      Claimed Efficiency for Cell or Module Ascent Solar                       9.6%* Daystar                               10%-11.5% Global Solar                       10.2%* HelioVolt                            12.2% MiaSolé                              10.2%? NanoSolar                          9-10%? Shell Solar                          12.8%* Solyndra                             NA Wuerth Solar                      13.0% * confirmed by NREL

Despite theoretical CIGS efficiencies approaching 20 percent -- it appears that the best this crop of CIGS firms is going to be able to produce is in the 10 percent to 12 percent range.  That’s still better than CdTe and low efficiency is certainly not preventing First Solar from ramping up to GW scale. But efficiency is not going to be a significant differentiator amongst the CIGS rivals. One other caution about these efficiency claims: Even with an NREL confirmation -- most of these figures represent best efforts on small samples, not production averages on large areas over time. This is an excerpt from the February issue of the Greentech Innovations Report. This issue focuses on CIGS manufacturing and also reports on every greentech funding in January 2009. Upcoming issues focus on ocean power, algae, and energy storage. You can buy this individual issue or purchase an annual subscription here.

The controversial, 420-megawatt wind project off the Massachusetts coast is facing a new hurdle barely a month after winning a critical regulatory support for the project.

The Federal Aviation Administration on Friday issued a “notice of presumed hazard� for the project, saying the wind farm could hamper the performance of three nearby radar systems operated by the FAA.

The notice the wind farm could cause the most impact on one of the radar systems. To upgrade or replace this radar system would be some of the possible solutions. The most expensive option would cost the project developer, Cape Wind Associates, up to $15 million.

The project has encountered stiff opposition from some residents of Nantucket, Martha’s Vineyard and Cape Cod since it was proposed in 2001. U.S. Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., has sided with the residents in opposition to the project, citing the wind farm’s potentially negative impact on the environment in Nantucket Sound. Cape Wind set out to build the first offshore wind farm in the United States. The project would consist of 130 wind turbines.

Cape Wind won an important support last month when the federal Minerals Management Service, part of the U.S. Department of Interior, released an environmental impact report that favored the project (see Cape Wind Project Gets Thumbs UP). The service had to wait for at least 30 days before it could issue a decision to give the developer a lease to build and operate the wind farm.

Mark Rodgers, a spokesman for Cape Wind, said the company has had to work with the FAA to address other concerns in the past, so it expects to resolve the latest issue in the next few months.

EDINBURGH, Scotland -- There's a theory floating around about the the carbon emissions produced by manufacturing, erecting and monitoring wind turbines actually exceed the greenhouse gases generated by fossil fuel plants. "That's garbage. I know how [the doubters] get their figures and they are absolutely wrong," said Ian Bryden, professor of renewable energy at the Institute of Energy Systems at the University of Edinburgh, in an interview. Bryden was giving us a tour of his labs. He also serves as the director of the European Marine Energy Centre. Bryden has been researching wave power for years. Some of the early experiments took place at Edinburgh. It takes about 20 months to recover all of the carbon emissions in a wind turbine, Bryden said. Wind turbines operate for two or more decades so the emissions balance is quite positive. Wave and tidal devices may be able to recover their carbon emissions in 18 months or so, he added. Right now, though, it's hard to say because the industry is in its infancy.