Solar Outlooks
Paula Mints, principal analyst for the PV Service Market Research Program, and an associate director at Navigant Consulting Inc., offers perspective on the photovoltaics market and its changing dynamics.
Wait! Don’t Pop My Bubble
The annual surges in demand for anything PV (or solar, for that matter) are not indicative of the same sort of business disaster as either the dot-com or the housing bubbles wrought on the stock-buying public. There are, however, troubling similarities nonetheless to both, though not to all parts of either. The internet bubble involved investment in companies that in many cases had no revenue stre ...... Read More
Comments (1)To Cap or Not to Cap – That Is the Question
Whether ‘tis nobler to allow a market to be oversold, thus suffering the risk of a significant decrease in the available tariff or a cessation of the program altogether, or to set a reasonable cap that encourages growth while controlling costs and extending the life of the incentive. Using (and admittedly abusing) the third-act soliloquy of Shakespeare’s Hamlet to make a point about ...... Read More
Comments (1)Happy New Year – Let the Confusion Begin
This is the time of year when a lot of counting and announcing goes on - and much of it can be very confusing. In general, 2009 will be a confounding and frustrating year to parse — cheap cell and module prices all year long led to a lot of cross buying and the 2-gigawatts of inventory at the beginning of the year doesn’t help un-confuse things. Add to this the usual flood of announc ...... Read More
Comments (1)Happy End of Year – Top 10 Things Solar in 2009
Yes, it is time for another boring Top 10 list. Subjective though these lists are, and almost always omitting someone’s favorite item, it’s tradition as the old tired year fades and the new hopeful year emerges to note what stood out as important, and what will continue to influence us in the new year. It’s a tough job, frankly, for the year 2009 in solar — a Top 20 wou ...... Read More
Comments (0)Which Comes First, the Vision or the Egg?
At a recent conference, a venture capitalist on the panel ‘Securing Venture Capital’ said, “We aren’t the technology experts, but we know how things should work.” The VC went on to explain that they should not be tasked with being experts themselves; they needed to trust that those with the ideas had the expertise to understand whether or not the idea was viable. ...... Read More
Comments (0)Yes, Installing PV Is Capital-Intensive – Other Things Are Costlier
Warning, what follows is basically a rant to an audience that is likely (more or less) in agreement with it. Here goes … THE COST OF CLEANING UP OUR ENVIRONMENT AFTER YEARS OF ABUSING IT THROUGH THE USE OF FOSSIL FUELS, ET AL., IS HIGHER THAN THAT OF INSTALLING SOLAR OR IMPLEMENTING OTHER RENEWABLE TECHNOLOGIES. Yes, this takes into account carbon capture and storage/sequestration (clean co ...... Read More
Comments (3)Doom and Gloom, an Overreaction
Undeniably the solar boom that lasted from 2004 through 2008 brought exciting times to the solar industry. Suddenly — seemingly overnight (though an overnight that took ~35 years) — the industry went from futuristic and too expensive to the here and now. The photovoltaic industry became interesting magazine and newspaper fodder. Demand soared and along with it ideas for technologies, ...... Read More
Comments (4)Bottleneck or Roadblock: The Demand Question, Yet Again
After years of slim margins, difficult sales and begging for long-term incentives, when good times came to the photovoltaic industry they rocked and they rolled. Margins swelled, conferences multiplied like guppies and the future seemed sunny — no pun intended (well, maybe just a little pun). The feed-in tariff model of incentives in Europe spurred demand that grew, in the four-year period ...... Read More
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