Solar Cells Info

By Simon Clark, Sept. 24, 2008
Source: Bloomberg.com
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601085&sid=aESker8lE5B4

As the sun rises over Seville in southern Spain, its blinding light bounces on a field of 624 mirrors surrounded by sunflowers.  The moving mirrors reflect sunbeams onto a 115-meter-high white tower that uses the concentrated heat to boil water, making steam that spins an electric turbine 97 times a second. This is Europe’s first commercial solar-thermal-electricity plant, at the forefront of a growing movement for green power.

“Look! Look!” exclaims plant manager Valerio Fernandez as he watches a computer screen showing that output is hovering short of the maximum. On hot, clear days, the 37 million-euro plant ($55 million) can generate 11 megawatts, enough power for 5,500 homes. The plant fails to reach its goal at noon on this June day, meaning a handful of the homes will use power from fossil fuels. “Ugh, we didn’t reach it,” Fernandez, 39, says. “We almost did.”

“Close but not quite” is a phrase that could be applied to solar power in general. Soaring oil and gas prices, concerns about the security of foreign supplies, and a system of subsidies in Spain and Germany are making solar energy more competitive now than it’s ever been.

Solar Problem-Solver
Those conditions have spurred European companies such as Seville-based Abengoa SA, which built the plant where Fernandez works, in the race to harness the sun’s rays for energy. Solar power, properly harnessed, could solve the world’s energy problems.

“In six hours, the yearly energy consumption of humanity is delivered as solar energy to deserts,” says German particle physicist Gerhard Knies. He’s devised an audacious plan to erect fields of mirrors in the Sahara Desert and connect North African countries to Europe’s power grid across the Mediterranean Sea.

“It’s a wonderful project,” says Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. “They’re not yet at the level of commercial technology,” he says, “but I am confident that they could get there.” Sachs says public financing will be a key to success.

Public awareness that being green is good — and political backing for subsidies — is also boosting solar projects. Al Gore’s documentary “An Inconvenient Truth,” which won two Oscars in 2007, increased acceptance among governments and ordinary citizens that burning fossil fuels is causing global warming.

Europe’s Green Goal
The European Union last year set a target of generating 20 percent of its energy from renewable sources by 2020, up from 9.2 percent in 2006.  Russia’s invasion of Georgia in August also drove home the risk of relying too much on one foreign supplier for fuel. Russia supplies more than 40 percent of Europe’s gas imports and a third of its imported oil, according to the European Commission, the EU’s executive arm.

“Given Russia’s intervention in Georgia, it’s crucial for Europe to diversify the technological and geographical sources of its energy,” says Michael Ware, a managing director at Good Energies Inc., which manages 4 billion euros of renewable energy investments for the billionaire Dutch Brenninkmeijer family.

In September, Good Energies invested an undisclosed amount in SolarReserve Inc., a Santa Monica, California-based solar tower company.

Gore and French President Nicolas Sarkozy are interested in the trans-Mediterranean solar power plan. Knies says Gore invited him to New York in April for a meeting.

“He was sucking information, basically,” Knies says. Kalee Kreider, Gore’s spokeswoman, confirms that Gore’s team knows Knies’s work.

Solar Meeting
Knies, an energetic 71-year-old who previously was a researcher at the Hamburg-based particle physics center Deutsches Elektronen- Synchrotron, organized a conference in April attended by 160 people including investors, companies such as Abengoa and politicians.  Knies, the son of a pastor, told them solar power is free, clean and almost inexhaustible. Sunlight can be gathered on empty deserts and used to power desalination plants, which can bring drinking water and irrigation to barren lands.

“If we manage to tap into the solar energy of the desert, then we have technology which could solve our problems,” Knies says. Putting mirrors on just 0.2 percent of the Sahara — an area 80 miles by 80 miles — could generate all of the EU’s electricity, he says.

Mediterranean Plan
France, which generated 77 percent of its electricity in nuclear plants last year, wants to create a Mediterranean Solar Plan as part of a new union of European and Mediterranean states Sarkozy founded earlier this year. The goal of the union is to boost trade, security and employment in North Africa, a big source of illegal immigration into Europe.  “We will build factories to bring jobs to North Africa,” says Antoine-Tristan Mocilnikar, a Sarkozy adviser who attended Knies’s conference in Hanover, Germany.

Knies’s outlook may be too . . . sunny. Solar power needs to compete with other forms of energy, ranging from wind to nuclear. Even by 2016, the cost of building a solar-thermal plant will make its power cost 14.6 cents per kilowatt-hour, more than twice as much as oil, gas and coal, says Christopher Namovicz, an analyst at the U.S. Energy Information Administration in Washington.  “The limit to solar-thermal power is its cost,” he says. “There are issues with system-reliability — it doesn’t work at night or on cloudy days — but they boil down to cost problems, too.”

Subsidies Needed
There is one way to help solar energy catch on. “It requires subsidies,” Namovicz says. Whether they will be forthcoming is uncertain, he adds: “It’s hard to forecast the will of lawmakers.”

Knies and his countrymen know that. Almost a decade of guaranteed prices set by the government has made Germany the world leader in solar power and the site of 40 percent of the world’s installed solar panels, according to New Energy Finance Ltd., a London- based research company.

Then this year, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government scaled back consumer-funded solar subsidies, cutting the price for power from solar plants larger than 1 megawatt by 25 percent to 33 cents per kilowatt-hour. That puts pressure on German solar companies to seek export markets in sunny climates from North Africa to the U.S. and China.

Nuclear power, too, is a major rival to solar power — even in sun-rich North Africa and the Middle East. Sarkozy is signing nuclear power agreements with countries from the United Arab Emirates to Algeria, even as he touts a solar plan. Algeria has said it intends to build a nuclear plant within 10 years.

Bankers Interested
Still, solar energy is attracting the attention of some European bankers who want to finance projects. While the sun’s energy itself is free, building plants to use it is not. Nikolai Ulrich, head of the European renewable energy unit at Germany’s HSH Nordbank AG, says it will cost about 400 billion euros to build capacity for 700 terawatt-hours — about 20 percent of Europe’s annual consumption — of imported North African solar electricity.

That’s about what Europe spends every year on imported oil and gas at current prices.  Bankers need guarantees to ensure against the risks of lending in North Africa, a region fraught with instability where only one country — Tunisia — has an investment-grade credit rating from Standard & Poor’s for foreign-currency borrowing.  “The host country is a key part in the equation,” Ulrich says. “The benefits to both sides must be transparent.”

Knies’s trans-Mediterranean plan can work without any government funding, says Ziad Tassabehji, a director of Masdar, the renewable energy unit of oil-rich Abu Dhabi. “The project can only be viable if European governments are not required to subsidize it,” he says. “What’s needed is the political will and the legislative framework to make the plan work.”

The process has started, says European Commission spokesman Ferran Tarradellas Espuny. In January, the Commission proposed allowing imported renewable energy to count toward the 2020 goal for cutting fossil fuels. “The potential for North African solar electricity is huge,” he says.

Africa Wants Water
North African governments should favor the construction of solar thermal projects because they need power to run plants to desalinate seawater for drinking and irrigation in the parched lands, says Samer Zureikat, a Jordanian investor who started MENA Cleantech GmbH.  Zureikat’s Frankfurt-based company plans to use European and U.S. technology to build plants in North Africa and the Middle East. He has yet to start on a project.  “It’s not about what Europe needs,” Zureikat says. “It’s what the Middle East and North Africa need, and that’s water.”

North Africans aren’t swayed by arguments that solar power is better for the environment, says Youssef Arfaoui, an energy analyst at the African Development Bank in Tunis. “The consumer is too poor,” he says.  The obstacles in Africa also range from nonexistent roads to a lack of energy investment laws to flying grains of sand. “In the Sahara, you are fighting the problem of dust,” Arfaoui says.

Despite the obstacles, solar companies have announced plans to build 8.9 gigawatts of solar-thermal power worldwide, at a cost of $35 billion, according to New Energy Finance.

Saudi Sun
“We’re talking to a lot of people about projects throughout the Middle East and North Africa,” says David Mills, chairman of Palo Alto, California-based solar-thermal company Ausra Inc., who attended Knies’s conference.  Ausra, a startup backed by a $40 million investment from venture capitalists Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Vinod Khosla, agreed in November 2007 to build a 177-megawatt plant for San Francisco-based utility Pacific Gas & Electric.

In the Middle East, Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, Israel and the Palestinian Authority have all jumped on the solar bandwagon. “We will pursue what we believe is the most plentiful and cleanest form of alternative energy and that is solar,” Saudi Oil Minister Ali al-Naimi said in April.

Yoel Gilon, an Israel-based executive at BrightSource Energy Inc.’s Luz II Ltd. unit, says a trans-Mediterranean power network could promote peaceful trade.

‘Use It or Lose It’
Solar power generates positive dependencies between customers and suppliers because once a solar grid is built, the power it captures has to be sent over the grid or not at all, he says.  “You use it or you lose it,” Gilon says. “It’s not like barrels of oil underground.”

If solar power takes off, it could eliminate the need for new countries to try to join the nuclear power club, says Cedric Philibert, an analyst at the International Energy Agency in Paris.  “There should be no debate when you talk about Iran or Libya or countries that have a lot of sun,” he says.

Spain’s Abengoa is a pioneer in the region. Last year, the company won contracts to build the first mirror-powered plants in Algeria and Morocco. Both solar installations will be combined with gas plants, so they can work at night or with cloudy weather.

Abengoa, founded as an engineering company in 1941, expanded into renewable energy in the 1990s and today is Europe’s largest producer of ethanol. The company has a market value of 1.4 billion euros and trades on the Madrid Stock Exchange.

Spanish Subsidies
Spain became a leader in solar-thermal technology in 2004, when the government decided to support solar-generated electricity by forcing utilities to buy the power at a fixed price, currently about 27 cents per kilowatt-hour. The average European household paid 14.5 euro cents per kilowatt-hour in 2007, according to the European Commission.  The Spanish subsidy, funded by consumers, enabled builders to secure project loans, says the IEA’s Philibert. “The tariff allows the plants to be bankable and to come to life,” he says.

So far, investors plan to build 3.5 gigawatts of solar-thermal power in Spain, according to New Energy Finance.  Two hundred miles (320 kilometers) east of Seville, on a 1,100-meter-high (3,600-foot-high) plateau in the snowcapped Sierra Nevada mountains, sit fields of mirrors covering 6-meter-high parabolic troughs. They focus light onto glass pipes filled with oil, which then flows to a central power plant to make steam to turn a turbine.

Solar Cells
The 50-megawatt solar-thermal plant, built by Erlangen, Germany-based Solar Millennium AG and Madrid-based Grupo Cobra, cost 300 million euros. When it opens this year, the Sierra Nevada installation will sell electricity to Endesa SA, Spain’s second- largest power company.

Sun-tracking mirrors may face competition from solar cells, which are usually deployed on a small scale. Large solar-cell plants are too expensive to build, according to New Energy Finance analyst Jenny Chase. That may change as technology improves and the cost of silicon falls. Chase expects the cost of silicon to slump in 2009 as new plants in China start production.

Fewer Parts
Solar cells have the advantage of containing fewer mechanical parts, such as turbines and generators. “You directly get electricity,” says Bernd Schwartz, a manager in the solar unit of Osaka-based Sharp Corp., Japan’s biggest maker of solar batteries. “This makes it so easy to handle.”

The electricity made at solar-thermal plants is easier to store, its proponents say. In Solar Millennium’s Spanish mountain plant, the sunlight can be stored as heat in giant tanks of molten salt and then used to generate electricity at night or when there are clouds.

The technology to span the Mediterranean with a transmission cable already exists. ABB Ltd., the world’s largest builder of electricity networks, has laid a 580-kilometer underwater cable from Norway to the Netherlands.  At Knies’s conference in April, ABB manager Gunnar Asplund showed a world map with arrows linking deserts to densely populated places such as Europe. “What we like about these arrows is that they are quite long,” Asplund says.

Archimedes
Experiments with solar mirrors date back more than 2,000 years to the Greek mathematician and inventor Archimedes, who reputedly reflected the sun’s rays to set fire to enemy ships.  In modern times, the first experiments with solar-thermal power took place around 1860. French mathematician Auguste Mouchout grew fearful of his country’s dependence on foreign coal and began working on a solar motor.

In 1903, Aubrey Eneas’s Solar Motor Co. opened in Los Angeles, and in 1912, American Frank Shuman’s Sun Power Co. built a solar-powered water pump near Cairo.  “The human race must finally utilize direct sun power or revert to barbarism,” Shuman wrote in 1914, according to The Power of Light, a history of solar power by Frank T. Kryza (McGraw- Hill, 2003).

That same year, the human race resorted to barbarism with the outbreak of World War I. From then on, fossil fuels reigned as new discoveries of oil and gas reserves kept prices cheap and supply plentiful.

Interest Revives
Interest in solar power revived in the 1970s, when the cost of oil soared as Arab producers halted supply, Good Energies’ Ware says. In 1973, Ware worked on the U.S. government’s Project Independence, a push to be self-sufficient in energy. The project wasn’t in vain, Ware says.  “Out of the project came the federal spending for development of wind, solar-thermal and photovoltaic technologies,” he says.

The first solar-thermal plants were built in California in the 1980s. Political support for solar-thermal plants in the U.S. evaporated — along with their competitiveness — when oil prices halved between October 1990 and February 1991 to $17 a barrel. Luz International Ltd., the company that built the first U.S. solar fields, went bankrupt in 1991.

`A Dark Night’
“Concentrating solar power went into a dark night, which lasted for about 15 years,” says Michael Geyer, international director of Abengoa.  “There was no countercyclical thinking that, while energy costs were low, new technologies for the future had to be prepared.”

Juno Beach, Florida-based FPL Group Inc. still runs seven of the original solar fields, with combined capacity of 310 megawatts, enough to power about 230,000 Southern California homes.  Geyer, who graduated from the University of Tubingen in Germany, says he became interested in solar power in 1977 while studying for a year at the University of Oregon in Eugene.

His professor experimented with the solar heating of water. The following year, he visited the solar towers at the Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico. “I really got the kick on this trip,” he says.

In 1985, Geyer was working on solar research for the German space agency, which sent him to work at the Plataforma Solar de Almeria, a solar research center in southern Spain founded by the IEA.

Chernobyl’s Fallout
Then came the event that prevented Europe’s solar power industry from tumbling into complete oblivion.  On April 26, 1986, reactor No. 4 at the Chernobyl nuclear plant in Ukraine exploded, sending a plume of radioactivity into the atmosphere. Winds carried the fallout across Europe to Germany.

“It had been determined that all funding for solar research would run out — until Chernobyl,” says Geyer, who worked for the space agency until 2001. “That saved the German budget for solar research.”

`Alternatives’
Chernobyl also galvanized Knies. “The accident showed that nuclear power has too many risks,” says the physicist. “Are we so stupid not to think of better alternatives?”  Knies says he came up with the idea of a trans-Mediterranean grid in 1995. When he retired from Deutsches Elektronen- Synchrotron in 2002, he resolved to promote his idea worldwide.

In 2003, he teamed up with the Club of Rome, a Winterthur, Switzerland-based research group best known for a 1972 report titled “The Limits to Growth.”  The publication, which mapped out how finite natural resources and a growing population would restrict the global economy, sold 12 million copies in 30 languages.

Europe’s continued stake in nuclear power makes it much harder for the EU to agree on a detailed solar plan. In July, 25 European lawmakers wrote to France’s Sarkozy to urge him to build a trans- Mediterranean electricity link as an alternative to nuclear power.

“The major hurdle to harness this potential is not technical know-how but political will,” wrote Rebecca Harms, a German Green Party member.

`Consumers to Pay Double’
Abengoa’s Geyer agrees. “If you have the right regulatory instruments you can mobilize private investment, private industrial development,” he says.  Consumers, though, will have to help shoulder the burden. “The private electricity consumer may have to pay twice as much as he pays today,” he says.

Abengoa’s Fernandez says he’s working on how to install a more advanced boiler capable of heating solar steam to 550 degrees Celsius (1,022 degrees Fahrenheit), compared with 250 degrees now. That would increase productivity and cut costs, he says.  Fernandez, who designed software for solar power towers for his Ph.D. thesis in industrial engineering at the University of Seville, says he first got the solar bug as a teenager after visiting the Almeria research center where Geyer worked.

It was a summer in the mid-1980s when Fernandez’s parents took him to see the towers and mirrors. “The interest was born there,” Fernandez says.

Inspiration
In the Seville plant’s control room, he points to a weather map displayed on a flat-screen television. White clouds swirl over the blue Atlantic Ocean and the green lands of northern Europe. An orange, cloudless expanse marks the Sahara Desert in North Africa.  “We receive gas by pipes from Algeria to Spain and Italy,” he says. “It’s easier to transport electricity.”

For all its potential, though, solar power will only be one part of Europe’s future energy supply, says Valeriano Ruiz Hernandez, a professor of thermodynamics at the University of Seville.  Ruiz Hernandez, a family friend of Fernandez, whom he taught at university, is skeptical of the plan to import solar power from North Africa.

`No Miracles’
“Don’t think it’s a miracle,” he says of the trans- Mediterranean solar network, as he sips coffee in a bar behind Seville’s cathedral. “There are no miracles in technology.”  Ruiz Hernandez, 65, says people must understand that future energy depends on a combination of wind, sun, tides, dams, biomass and other fuels — as well as on more efficient energy consumption.

The professor opposes grand plans based on a single source, especially if it’s nuclear. He taps the side of his head with his left forefinger. “The problem is here, for the politicians, for the consumers, for the journalists.”

Out in the sunflower fields, Fernandez shades his eyes as he watches Abengoa workers cleaning mirrors. Abengoa is constructing sun-tracking mirrors on about 1,000 hectares (2,500 acres). When it’s finished in 2013, the plant will be capable of generating 300 megawatts.  That would be all that’s needed to power Seville — as long as the sun is shining.