Interim Chief for Oerlikon Solar

Jeannine Sargent, who took over the fledging solar business at Swiss thin-film factory equipment company, Oerlikon Solar, in 2007, is leaving.

The company issued a brief announcement about her departure, and the appointment of Jurg Henz as the interim CEO. Henz has been an executive within Oerlikon. 

Sargent joined Oerlikon Solar after serving as the executive vice president and general manager of Veeco Instruments' metrology and instrumentation business.

Oerlikon develops equipment for making amorphous-silicon solar panels, and has 10 customers with over 450 megawatts of generation capacities. 

The solar company saw its sales decline by 2 percent for the first nine months of this year to reach CHF 432 million.

Oerlikon won two big contracts during the second quarter: a 120-megawatt contract with Nano solar Technologies in Russia and a 30-megawatt contract with HelioSphera in Greece.

But it didn't sign any major contracts in the third quarter, and is expecting a weak forth quarter. 

For 2010, it expects to see a bit more orders but flat sales.

Having Our Coke and Drinking It Too; Carbon Capture and Sequestration

Virtually everyone reading this knows that coal is environmentally bad. It’s the dirtiest of the fossil fuels in terms of carbon emissions and historically the primary cause of acid rain, not to mention negative land and water impacts where it’s mined. But coal is also plentiful, domestically produced, and as a result, cheap. We rely on it to generate more than half of the electric power in the U.S., including the energy operating the computer on which I’m writing this blog. However, the sad but increasingly unavoidable fact is that as a power source, coal is probably here to stay for some time.

Coal will remain with us because there is simply too much global demand for electrical power to fill the gap with renewable sources such as wind, solar, hydro, and nuclear options, even assuming massive scale ups in all of these technologies. Not only the US, but China and India and other countries also rely on coal for power, with the expectation of even more use of it. According to the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), globally, coal fired plants now under construction or planned during the next 20 year will, during their operational lifetimes, emit more atmospheric carbon than all the coal combusted to date.

Intriguing as coal free – alternative energy scenarios, like Ed Mazria’s solar and conservation based, 2030 Challenge are, we simply have to find a way to burn coal more cleanly to make a dent in global warming. Such clean coal processes generally fall under the rubric of Carbon Capture and Sequestration, or CSS.

In one form or another, this is a multi step process requiring: a) removal of CO2 before – or – after coal combustion, b) compression of it into a liquid, c) piping it to a safe place, where d) it can be injected/sequestered permanently, generally underground. This storage place might be an oil field, a deep saline aquifer, or in some scenarios, in the ocean depths.

CSS is not a simple process, but neither are the alternatives. Society ran out of simple, cheap energy solutions some time ago. Rather, we exploited seemingly cheap energy solutions without regard to their actual environmental costs. Respected environmental organizations such as the NRDC support the role of CCS in mitigating the worst impacts of climate change. Stanford’s Global Climate and Energy Project among other educational institutions, is actively developing CCS technologies.

In the past, there have been arguments that CCS is some sort of smoke and mirrors scheme invented by the power industry to maintain business as usual. While there may be truth to such wishful thinking by some in the power industry hoping for a silver bullet, others are moving ahead with sizeable CCS utility pilot projects; among them Southern Company.

One thing that CCS won’t be is cheap. In all likelihood it will drive up the cost of coal fired power considerably. The good news is that this makes other renewable sources such and solar and wind technologies more price competitive. But if past experience with scrubbers on power plants is any indicator, costs should come down as R & D drives innovation and scale up creates efficiencies. However, any way you look at it, renewable, fossil, or nuclear, power is going to cost a lot more more in the future, making energy efficiency and conservation all the more important.

A final note on terminology. Excuse the somewhat inaccurate reference to “coke” in the title above. The coal coking process and coal combustion to produce power are not the same, but I couldn’t resist the pun.

Eric Carlson is a greentech analyst, consultant and architect, based in Washington, D.C. and Seattle.

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.).