I've heard this from a source and with the documents for an initial public offering filed, I don't expect Solyndra to confirm it, but it gives an insight into why the company seems to have moved ahead of some of the other start-ups in cadmium indium gallium selenide (CIGS) solar cells.

CEO Chris Gronet gets a live video feed of the machinery on the factory floor. When and if production slows down, he knows quickly. He even gets the feed at home.

That sort of urgent paranoia lay at the heart of semiconductors and solar panel manufacturing. The multimillion dollar factories these companies must build can only become effectively profitable if utilized in a highly efficient manner. Intel became Intel through the "copy exactly" methodologies pioneered in part by former CEO Craig Barrett. The factories were literally identical: one of the few ways to tell if you are in Arizona versus Israel is the inordinate number of people named Gadi. Execs at rival AMD sometimes joked that they used a "copy somewhat exactly" methodology. That partly explains why so many green start up CEOs have come out of Intel.

Gronet, no coincidence, spent over a decade at Applied Materials, an equipment maker with its own exacting standards, before coming to Solyndra.

Solyndra has its pluses and minuses. Eric Wesoff dug through the S-1 and unearthed interesting details on Solyndra's costs per watt. The company also lost $232 million in fiscal 2009. On the other hand, it has customers and reports efficiencies in the 11 to 14 percent range, or higher than a lot of the other thin films out there. It's going to continue to be one of the big stories of 2010.

SAN MATEO, Calif. -- Former Vice President Al Gore says the White House will try to get a climate bill passed by late spring 2010 or earlier.

"The window for 2010 probably closes around when spring ends," he said during a speech at GreenBeat taking place in San Mateo. Things are looking a bit up. Senators Joe Lieberman (Gore's former running mate) and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina are already working with Democratic senators to write a piece of legislation that will get at least some bipartisan support. It will probably include more subsidies for nuclear power, but otherwise will be similar to the Waxman-Markey bill that the U.S. House of Representatives passed earlier this year.

If the White House can get a Spring victory, it can go to a international conference in June with a solid U.S. position on climate legislation. Otherwise, the next big international event for the White House to present what the U.S. has accomplished comes in Mexico City in late 2010.

While green power is important, Gore added that infusing the grid with intelligence will likely have a larger impact.

"The single largest solution is efficiency," he said. "The reason efficiency is the largest source of low carbon or no carbon energy is the fact that we waste so much energy."

Distributed generation and power will also increase the need for grid improvements. The average age of transformers in the U.S. is 42 years old. Lots of new products, jobs etc. Whirlpool has smart appliances coming.

Right now it takes 1 gigawatt worth of power just to provide power to TVs that are plugged in yet turned off, Gore stated.

Things will outnumber people on the internet, he stated. By early next year, there will be one billion transistors for every person in the world.

Other highlights of the speech so far: We face a masssive climate change and he used to listen to Minnie Pearl on the Grand Ol' Opry.

Platinum. It's one of the many banes of the fuel cell industry.

The catalytic membranes inside of methanol fuel cells are coated with it: it helps convert hydrocarbons into electric power. Platinum also helps eliminate particulates in the catalytic converter in your car. Although companies like Nanostellar are developing platinum substitutes, platinum remains the industry standard and it's not getting any cheaper. A few years ago, thieves would steal converters out of big rigs to get at platinum.

MIT researchers, led by associate professor of mechanical engineering and material science Yang Shao-Horn, have come up with a way to double the efficiency of fuel cells by creating textures on the membrane surface. Instead of forming a smooth layer, the platinum is arranged in a stair-step manner. This increases the reactive surface area of a finite amount of platinum and hence increases the power output. It's a classic nano play: increase the surface area and get better results. The platinum particles in fact get their stair-step arrangement because they are arranged on top of carbon nanotubes, the ultimate nano material.

Many have tried to promote methanol fuel cells for portable devices. They have yet to hit big. Oorja Protonics has taken a different tack. Instead of small fuel cells, it builds large scale methanol fuel cells for fork lifts. It has started selling some to Nissan.

Meanwhile, Osaka Gas and Panasonic have started selling methane fuel cells that can produce 1 kilowatt of power to homes in Japan.

SunPower's Doug Rose, the senior director of technology strategy, presented at the Silicon Valley PV Society in a talk titled, "Technology and Economics of High Efficiency c-Si PV." Of course, the thrust of the talk was the strength of SunPower's high-efficiency solar cells and panels, and the impact of efficiency on the cost and payback of a solar system.

The high efficiency of SunPower's solar cell stems in most part from its back-contact technology – a technology pioneered by founder Dick Swanson in the early 1980s at Stanford with low-cost manufacturing breakthroughs in 2001. The back contact design avoids gridlines on the front of the cell so there's no metal obscuring the cell and therefore more light gets converted to power. According to Rose, other design advantages are gained from the back-contact architecture – it allows better optimization of the front surface through texturing, an optimized backside mirror, localized contacts, and obviously backside gridlines.

The all back-contact cells allow SunPower to get to median production efficiency of 22 percent at the cell level. And while they're at it – cell thicknesses in the 150 micron range at about 6 grams of silicon per watt.

Rose raised the question: "How can high efficiency cells be cost effective? You're not using the same platform as everyone else." The response was: "Sunpower spends a little more in cell processing to deliver savings across the value chain."

That's the value proposition of high efficiency cells. The cells are more expensive but cost savings are realized all down the line. 

So how much exactly is this "efficiency bonus?"

According to research performed by crack Greentech Research analyst Shyam Mehta – gains in efficiency drive cost reductions at all steps of manufacturing on a $/W basis, from feedstock cost to module conversion – a 1 percent improvement in efficiency leads to a 5 percent to 7 percent decrease in fully loaded module cost. (Shyam's most recent report is on PV Manufacturing in the US and can be found here). His efficiency thesis is charted below:

In a solar market where prices are plunging, margins are crumbling and market consolidation is on the horizon – how much of a premium can SunPower command for its high-end product? A banker friend believes the dollar per watt premium is only 10 percent to 20 percent over conventional silicon or thin film PV.  With SunPower at a less than $2 per Watt module price in the fourth quarter of 2009 and some c-Si vendors below $1.50 per Watt – can SunPower command a 35 percent premium?

SunPower believes it can. My banker friend says no.

Here are some of the benefits of higher efficiency and the SunPower cell structure:

• Lower area-related costs
• Reduced installation costs
• Reduced shipping costs
• Reduced Balance of Plant (BOP) costs
• Allows more Watts in area-constrained sites, which reduces the $/W cost of project costs such as sales, permitting, design, etc.
• Delivers more energy per rated watt because of a better temperature coefficient, low light performance, broad spectral response, no LID

All factors resulting in a lower LCOE.

A Very Few Words on LCOE

A simplified formula for Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE) is:

LCOE = Panel cost + BoP cost + O&M costs / Sunlight collection * Conversion efficiency

But, unfortunately it's not really that simple.  SunPower has detailed calculations and displayed the many factors influencing LCOE in its presentation. NREL has its own byzantine formula for LCOE.

An accurate measure of LCOE will have to include:

• Initial investment
• Depreciation tax
• Annual costs
• System residual value
• System energy production

And LCOE calculations have a very high sensitivity to certain input variables such as:

• Annual panel degradation
• Differences in annual discount rate / cost of capital
• System life (inverter replacement, etc.)
• Annual O&M

The major contributors to LCOE are:

• Capital costs
• Modiule $/W
• Area related BoS
• Electrical BoS
• Project related costs

"If someone says the LCOE of my technology is x cents per kilowatt-hour, it still doesn't tell you a lot," said Rose.

Differentiation and Branding in a Commodifying Market

A healthy cost structure, a good balance sheet, and the right level of vertical integration are what will distinguish winners from losers in the coming solar shakeout. Differentiation is going to help as well. And SunPower has that technical differentiation by virtue of the highest efficiency commercial solar product – a 22 percent median efficiency in 2006 looking for over 23 percent in its Gen3 cells. Combined with itss one-axis trackers which increase capacity factor by about 30 percent to match energy production with summer load, an important point for utilities – SunPower has some of the crucial ingredients for survival in the demand-constrained solar landscape.

Single axis tracking is a tremendous lever to reduce the LCOE of power plant, and to deliver significantly more power when the utility companies most want it (late afternoon in summer).

Of further interest in the differentiation department is SunPower's recent plunge into consumer branding of its panels. Ride a bus in San Francsisco and you'll see a SunPower-branding consumer ad campaign. 

Three questions for our readers:

• Do consumers care which brand of solar panel they're buying?
• What is the real value, the real premium for high efficiency?
• And contrarily – what is the penalty for low efficiency?  Where does 6 percent to 8 percent efficient a-Si or OSC fit into the solar landscape?  Or does it?

We welcome your thoughts.

Dow Corning wants to bring space age solar to the masses.

Solar panels on satellites have been coated with silicone, the rubbery stuff for household repairs, for years. It protects the solar panel from solar radiation and it also allows the module to operate at a higher efficiency because it is more transparent than other coatings.

Now, the chemical giant has begun to sell it for garden variety solar panels. The company's silicone will give panels greater durability and efficiency, but Dow says there is another attribute too.

"We are able to produce modules much faster," said Gaetan Borgers, global industry director of the Dow Corning Solar business. By switching to silicone, PV manufacturers potentially will be able to get a module off of the factory lines every 90 seconds, he said, or four times faster than with the incumbents.

The official announcement came today and there's more in this video.

Digital technology – the cause of, and solution to, all of our energy problems.

That's the gist of dueling reports released this week, though they're not that far apart on closer examination.

The first, from the International Energy Agency, says devices like cellphones, laptops and other consumer electronics now make up about 15 percent of all household power use – and that, barring new energy efficient technologies, that could double by 2030, at a cost of about $200 billion in new power bills.

But at the same time, digital technology helps save massive amounts of energy, according to the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy. America's energy use would be about 20 percent higher today if technology that helps cut commuting, air travel, and other energy-hungry habits hadn't been adopted on a wide scale since 1976, the report said.

Further improvements could reduce power bills by $1.3 trillion by 2030, if billions of dollars continue to be invested in technological advances, the report found.

The IEA study concurs to some degree. Switching over to "least life-cycle cost" technologies could keep 2030 power consumption level with today, the report said.

And using the best technologies available could actually cut growth in electricity demand in half by 2030, saving the equivalent of $130 billion in power bills and 260 gigawatts of new generation capacity, the same amount that Japan has today.

Consumer electronics giants and startups alike are looking at ways to make this happen. A host of gadgets that seek to cut "vampire" power used by devices that are off, yet still plugged into the wall socket, are being developed (see CES Plugs Green Technology).

And electronics makers are happy to talk about all the ways they're cutting power needs for equipment when it's turned on as well (see Samsung's Low-Power TV, Mobile Phone Displays and Venture Power in Japan: Green Electronics).

If General Motors hasn't been kicked around enough in the past several weeks, the company today announced that it is working with Segway on the P.U.M.A. a two-wheeled vehicles for urban commuting that looks like a cross between a hot dog cart and an umbrella stand. Judge for yourself: You can already see hipsters lining up to get this. Didn't the Pope have something like this? It was demonstrated in New York City today. The personal transportation market has been the next big thing since Johnny Quest popularized the jet pack in the mid-1960s. So far, though, it's been the low-tech solutions like skateboards that have won out. Toyota has shown personalized vehicles, but only prototypes. Segway was supposed to revolutionize the planet back in the early part of the decade. The vehicles, though, cost quite a bit. Worse, it dovetailed with a growing concern about health and fitness in the U.S. Putting people on electric vehicles instead of walking didn't make a lot of sense. I mean, look what it did to 1976 Decathlon champion Bruce Jenner: