Notes from the Solar PV America East Show in Philadelphia
I’m sitting in the press room at the PV America East show at the Pennsylvania Convention Center, where I’ve arrived about an hour before the main show floor opens. I’m using the time to have conversations with a few of the top vendors, including a very senior representative of Chinese solar PV giant Trina, currently #2 in the world.
The challenges facing these folks are obvious: while dealing with the precipitous decline in module prices, they need to operate a profitable business, bringing better monetization to their customers at all levels, with lower overall costs, lower degradation rates, and better efficiencies. The gentleman explains that Trina is breaking the mold as a Chinese company, whose traditional tack has been to keep everything inside, and aggressively partnering with innovative companies around the globe. An example is their relationship with QBotix, a unique approach to tracking the sun throughout the day and the year with a robot that runs around on a track, adjusting each panel from dawn to dusk. The result? He claims “dual-access functionality at a single-axis price.” Nice going.
It’s solutions like these that are driving this industry ever-closer to grid-parity, i.e., the point at which an incremental kilowatt of power from solar is the same cost as the incumbent fossil fuel resource. Btw, we’re already there in places like the Caribbean, and each year we get a bit closer to revolutionizing the power industry worldwide.
Craig, what happens when that “Robot” suffers a break-down? The simplest is often the best. I spoke to a Solar PV “Expert” about my scheme to increase each solar pv panel electrical output by a factor of three and this is easy to accomplish with no adjustments to follow the sun, just two larger than the active PV panel reflectors located above and below the PV panel reflecting additional light onto the PV panel even as the Sun moves across the sky. The only argument I received was the manufacturer wouldn’t honor the warranty if reflectors were used to increase output. And I note that another source stated the panels would withstand nine times the brightness of the sun at noon on a summer day leaving me to assume that the warranty clause was an attempt to assure more panel unit sales with no valid purpose. Simple flat sheet metal reflectors are just too inexpensive and take profits away from Solar PV panel suppliers and manufacturers. (send a request thru my web page at EVprofessor.com and I’ll send a simple sketch if you can’t visualize this scheme from my description.) Ever do solar hot water? what color gets hotter in the Sun? Black? NO, dark green gets hotter because it doesn’t re-radiate infra-red energy from the surface as much as black does.