The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory has completed a study that comes up with two ways to use compressed air technology to store wind energy in underground chambers, the national lab said Monday. The two ways both use data and computer modelling to figure out the best sites that could successfully bank wind energy to be used at a later time.

Compressed air, as its name suggests, makes use of an electrically powered air compressor that sends pressurized air into a storage facility, which can be man-made or an underground reservoir. The pressurized air is let out later to run a turbine and generator to produce electricity. As much as 80 percent of the electricity used to compress air can be recovered when the pressurized air is used to generate energy, the lab said. Power losses are common when converting one form of energy to another.

Power in under ground caves

Utilities in the Northwest have a good reason for taking a look at energy storage technology. Wind power makes up about 13 percent (8.6 GW) of the power supply for the Northwest, the national lab said. Wind power tends to be most plentiful at night, when demand is at the lowest. Storing wind power for use during the day would help utilities meet their customers’ demand and manage their grids, which run smoothly when there is a balance of supply and demand. That prompted the Bonneville Power Administration to work with the lab to look into whether compressed air would be a good fit.

Many U.S. utilities or power producers have done preliminary studies or even pilot projects to check out different types of energy storage technologies, including various types of batteries. Often their regulators require them to gradually increase the amount of renewable energy they supply to their customers. Wind and solar have been popular choices, but they don’t generate a steady supply of electricity around the clock. Here is where energy storage comes in handy to help utilities manage their supply and demand.

The researchers were looking for two suitable underground sites for storing compressed air. They used data from gas exploration in Washington state and a computer model that simulates the flow of fluids underground. The idea is to see how much air a site can hold and how easy it’d be for the air to be harvested for power generation. For the study, an ideal underground storage would be at least 1,500 feet deep and 30 feet thick, and it should be close to transmission lines, the lab said.

Pacific Northwest

They found two locations, a place by the Columbia River, just across from Boardman, Ore., and another one in the Yakima Canyon that is roughly 10 miles north of Selah, Wash.

Sasquatch watches over the lobby of Facebook’s data center in Oregon

The scientists then sketched out two different processes for storing and re-using energy. At the Columbia River location, which is close to a natural gas pipeline, a compressed air storage plant can use natural gas to heat the compressed air and in the process boost the amount of electricity that can be produced.

At the Yakima location, the facility can use geothermal heat to run a chiller, which will in turn cool the air compressor to make it run more efficiently. Geothermal energy also can heat up the compressed air when it’s released from storage.

Bonneville will now take the results of the $790,000 study and do a round of cost-and-benefit analysis to figure out if compressed air makes for a good business case.

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Adding energy storage reflects the evolution of the company, which started off as a solar cell and panel maker before it entered the power plant development business. SunPower has carried out pilot energy storage projects in recent years and worked with different energy storage technologies, including advanced lead acid and zinc bromide batteries.

But lithium-ion batteries “will likely be the first technology to have an impact,” said Jack Peurach, executive vice president of products. The emergence of electric cars plays a role in making lithium-ion battery the front runner for being paired with solar, he added.

SunPower & Flextronics Factory in Milpitas, CA

SunPower executives didn’t provide details, such as the timing and battery suppliers, for its energy storage plans. But the discussion puts SunPower on a growing roster of solar energy companies that are offering or plan to offer energy storage.

SolarCity, for example,  has been bundling lithium-ion batteries from Tesla Motors with its solar energy systems and applying for a California program that subsidizes energy storage installations. One Roof Energy is working with battery maker Silent Power to roll out products. Korean conglomerate Hanwha Group, which runs a solar panel manufacturing subsidiary, is an investor in both OneRoof and Silent Power. SunEdison has done a pilot project with a battery system from startup Seeo.

Energy storage will be part of SunPower’s plan to expand its reach in the commercial and residential market, where it sells power purchase agreements or leases via its dealers or its own project development business. The company designs the power purchase agreements for its commercial and government customers and leases for homeowners. Power purchase agreements and leases work in similar ways: business or home owners sign a long-term contract of up to 20 years and pay a monthly fee for the solar electricity from the SunPower solar energy systems on their rooftops.

SunPower’s foray into the energy storage business will prompt more comparison with SolarCity, which started in 2006 as purely a solar installer. SolarCity is most active in the residential and commercial markets, but it scored the first utility project last year. As a result, the two companies have been competing more intensely in recent years.

In fact, a lawsuit filed by SunPower against SolarCity and five people last year highlighted that rivalry. The lawsuit accused five former SunPower employees of stealing confidential data and brought the data with them when they went to work for SolarCity. The two companies settled on Dec. 31, 2012, and a judge dismissed the lawsuit in January, SolarCity said in its 2012 annual report. It didn’t disclose the amount of the settlement.

SunPower executives didn’t say whether they will sell energy storage in the United States first or in other regions. Werner said that, for now, energy storage makes financial sense only in markets that offers government incentives. That would include California, Germany and Japan.

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Peer-to-peer car sharing service appeals to the urban and young people, and  that partly explains why college campuses and large cities like San Francisco have been the labs for companies such as RelayRides and Getaround.

One of the benefits of this type of the service is the ability for customers to rent a car by the minute or hour, something that traditional rental car companies don’t allow. But for San Francisco-based RelayRides, an increasing number of its customers are paying for daily, weekly or even monthly rentals, said Steve Webb, the company spokesman. The majority of RelayRides’ revenues come from those types of rentals, he said.

That trend is good news for car owners who are able to part with their cars for an extended period of time. They could make more money with fewer renters. That also cuts the amount of time the car owners would need to meet with their customers — RelayRides switched to promoting the in-person exchange of keys last year when it pushed for a national expansion.

The peer-to-peer car sharing market is growing but remains very small. To scale up, a car sharing service has to market well and sign up a large network of cars, create an easy way for car owners to manage rentals and get paid and for renters to reserve and find the types of cars they want. A good customer service unit to settle any dispute and resolve insurance and other issues is also a must. As GigaOm’s Katie Fehrenbacher pointed out, getting people to feel comfortable using the service remains a hurdle. Webb said many car owners prefer to meet their renters in person before handing over the keys.

Still, RelayRides decided it wanted a way for renters to access cars without having to arrange for a meet up. It announced yesterday the purchase of a competitor, Wheelz, which has developed software that allows renters to find, reserve and unlock cars using their smart phones. An electronic device installed inside the car makes unlocking with the phone possible.

This automated tech was something RelayRides used to hire people to install regularly. But it was too costly and time consuming that the company largely ditched that effort, though it still offers it to car owners who rent out their cars frequently, Webb said. The device and software aren’t proprietary technology and are designed for running fleet services. Buying Wheelz gives RelayRides its own technology that it can then customize and compete more effectively against the likes of Getaround, which gives the car owners the unlocking device that they can install themselves.

Will the long-term focus for peer-to-peer car sharing be a long-term trend? What do you guys think?

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What are the challenges of growing a solar installation company? SolarCity provides some good insight into that question as it reports earnings for the first full quarter since it became a public company last December.

Raising funds to support its financial product offerings, signing up a greater number of new customers, expanding its operations, and shortening the project completion process are just some of the issues outlined by SolarCity’s executives during their discussion with financial analysts yesterday.

These issues are nothing new, of course, but SolarCity’s financial results help to quantify some of their costs. Given that the solar market is still young, most of SolarCity’s competitors are private and often much smaller.

The California company installed more megawatts of solar energy projects during the first quarter than it initially anticipated (46MW instead of 41MW). But it didn’t raise its 2013 installation forecast, which remains at 250 MW this year. SolarCity boosted its first-quarter sales to $28.2 million but posted $31 million in losses.

“At this stage, we still find ourselves delivery constrained. It’s a matter of scaling our residential operation as well as bringing in our commercial projects on schedule that prevent us from increasing the guidance from 250MW right now,” said CEO Lyndon Rive during the conference call. “We are just focusing our operational capacity.”

SolarCity runs on a business model that is quite different from many of its competitors. The company does the sales, engineering, installation and maintenance with its in-house crew. Rivals such as Sungevity, OneRoof Energy, Sunrun and Clean Power Finance farm out the installation and maintenance work to roofers and other installers. Some of them want to build their brands and invest in marketing and sales to consumers while others sell their financial products and services to installers. Vivint, which has built a large home security system business before getting into solar, operates more like SolarCity.

SolarCity’s model requires much more capital to scale up the business. It needs to hire and train more people, maintain trucks and other tools of the trade and set up shop in expanding its reach across the country. It also has to aggressively court consumers.

The company does business in 14 states, and in March it announced a plan to set up operations in Nevada. The company saw its operating expenses grow from $24.7 million in the first quarter of 2012 to $34.5 million a year later. It serves home and business owners, as well as schools and government agencies. It’s getting into the utility market, too. By the end of the first quarter, SolarCity had accumulated 54,416 customers, and most of those customers are in the residential space: 33MW of the 46MW it completed during the first quarter went to homes.

Raising enough money to finance leases and power purchase agreements is another big challenge for SolarCity and its competitors. With leases or power purchase agreements, customers pay a monthly fee for the electricity generated from the solar panels on their rooftop. They don’t own the panels, however, since they didn’t pay for the high upfront costs of the equipment and labor that can run around $20,000 for an average system in places like California.

The investors that give the funds that support those financing options own the solar electric systems, and they get to take advantage of a 30 percent federal investment tax credit and count on revenues from the monthly payments for the duration of the contracts, which usually run 20 years. As of May 10, SolarCity has enough funds to finance 158MW worth of projects.

SolarCity is a formidable fundraiser. In its 2012 annual report, the company said it had raised $1.7 billion to finance installations since its inception from companies such as U.S. Bancorp, Google, PG&E and Credit Suisse. SolarCity also puts in its own money in some of the funds to finance the installations. The pressure to raise money consistently is even greater now that SolarCity is a public company and must not only show growth but also generate profits at some point. It doesn’t want to be in a situation where the demand for its leases outstrips the funds available, something that happened to SunPower during the first quarter of this year.

SolarCity also needs to shorten the amount of time it takes from selling solar panel systems to installing each project. It has 195MW of backlog, some of which are planned as multi-year projects. But overall, the company wants to sell and install the equipment during the same month, Rive said. To accomplish that, the company is constantly looking for ways to simplify the installation process by using different designs for racks and other components. It also invests in software to reduce the time it takes to apply for permits and complete the sales process.

SolarCity has been an interesting company to watch since its start in 2006. It was one of a crop of venture-backed companies in the emerging residential solar market. Now, how well the company can grow its business and make a profit will be used by investors to evaluate other solar retail service companies that want to go public.

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Founded only last year, GridCOM’s technology uses something called quantum cryptography to generate codes using photons (tiny packets of light) that shield communications among a network of electronic equipment from the computers that control power transmission to smart meters. Quantum cryptography uses physics (instead of math like conventional encryption does) to secure cyber communications.

GridCOM’s approach is quite different from the conventional mathematically-based encryption methods traditional used to protect communications over the Internet, said Duncan Earl, co-founder and CTO of GridCOM and a former researcher in the Cyberspace Sciences and Information Intelligence Research group at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. These conventional methods have worked fairly well and have been around long enough to be affordable, but they also don’t offer the speed and potency that some owners of sensitive energy data might want, Earl said.

The startup, based in Carlsbad near San Diego, recently raised a round of seed money from Ellis Energy Investment. Earl declined to disclose the amount but said Ellis is “committed to funding us for the next two years.”

Smart grid cyber threats

GridCOM is counting on a growing concern by utility executives over the security of their networks. Up until now, cybersecurity attacks on utility grids have been pretty rare. The grid hasn’t been vulnerable mainly because the computers and other equipment historically used by utilities have been mostly analog, not digital, and they have been designed with proprietary, customized technologies for each utility’s closed-off network.

The push to deploy smart grid technologies, however, is transforming the grid to include more digital devices with common technical standards and communication protocols. In addition, the reliance of the Internet for some of the network creates a vulnerability that didn’t exist before.

While utility executives are thinking more about cybersecurity these days, they don’t necessarily want to spend much money to enhance it, as this report by the U.S. Department of Energy pointed out. The report said evolving regulations on cybersecurity, which is a fairly new problem, also makes it difficult for utilities to draft and deploy good plans.

The secret security sauce

GridCOM’s core technology lies in the quantum server that will generate lots of “keys,” each of which is a string of 200 random bits of 0′s and 1′s that can encrypt a message very quickly. The startup’s customers will be able to download as many of those keys as necessary. The keys can work within 4 milliseconds, which is the amount of time that a utility’s machines will need to communicate with one another should there be an emergency on the grid, Earl said. Conventional encryption methods take longer and allow for a hacker to eavesdrop and disrupt the communications.

The source of the keys comes from what’s called “quantum entangled photons.” Say what? Well, when a light source goes through a crystal, it generates a pair of photons that are twins with polar opposite characteristics. Those photons share a bond called entanglement, which makes it difficult to distinguish them and figure out what message they have encrypted. To break that encryption, the hacker will have to figure out which photon has which characteristic. And the act of measuring a photon will in fact alert the quantum server of the intrusion.

Sounds hard to crack? The encryption and detection system is “nearly unbreakable,” says Earl. Each GridCom system is consisted of a quantum server, eight receivers and fiber optic lines. The startup plans to make money by charging a subscription fee, which in the near term would be $50 per device per month.

GridCOM still has to prove that its technology could do wonders in real life, though. Quantum cryptography has long been a subject of academic research, but it hasn’t been widely adopted. Using it for the typical email and Internet or even cellular communications is too expensive.

Those communications involve so many devices and high levels of data traffic that each network will need quite a few of quantum servers to generate tons and tons of keys, Earl said. Communications between machines in a power grid, on the other hand, happen less frequently. There are a handful of quantum cryptography companies out there, such as ID Quantique in Switzerland, Earl noted.

GridCOM is only in the early stages of developing its technology. It is now engineering the quantum servers and assembling them itself. The company aims to deploy a test network of 20-mile radius in the San Diego area by the end of this year. It would like to do a larger demonstration project with a first subscriber in 2014, Earl said. The company also plans to target the oil and gas industry.

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The announcement came after SunPower executives said last week that demand in the hot Japanese market exceeded what the company could deliver during the first quarter. Last month, market research firm IHS reported that the average wholesale prices for silicon panels delivered to Europe rose for the first time in several years.

The shift has come at a heavy cost to solar manufacturers like First Solar and SunPower, however. For over two years, solar panel makers have had to reduce production or even shutter factories while posting losses quarter after quarter. Dozens have filed for bankruptcy, including Germany’s Alfasolar, as reported by PV Magazine Monday. The bankruptcy of Suntech Power’s main subsidiary in March rattled the industry, particularly those who have bought the Chinese company’s solar panels.

First Solar, which makes solar panels and develops solar power plants, closed its big manufacturing plant in Germany last year and suspended plans to build new factories in Vietnam and Arizona. Those moves as well as First Solar’s efforts to reduce its spending on administration and, to a lesser extent, research development and sales, have allowed the company to survive the downturn. First Solar brought in new top executives over the past year and presented a convincing plan last month for improving its technology and sales in emerging markets for the next several years.

For the past three years, First Solar’s executives have discussed in earnest the need to grab market share in emerging markets such as India, China, the Middle East and Latin America. Germany was once its largest market, but the country, which has steadily reduced its government incentives for solar energy generation, accounted for just three percent of its sales in 2012, according to First Solar’s 2012 annual report.

In an earnings discussion with analysts on Monday, First Solar’s CEO Jim Hughes pointed out that the company has expanded its market reach since early 2012. Back then, it was talking mostly about sales in the United States, Canada, India, Europe and Australia. Its purchase of a Chilean solar power developer earlier this year created a new talking point about Latin America. The Chilean company was developing about 1.5 GW of projects when First Solar announced the acquisition. Overall, First Solar is working on about 1.8 GW of projects in Latin America, though those projects are under development and the company isn’t promising that all of them will succeed.

Hughes also announced that the company has signed a memorandum of understanding with the Chinese city of Ordos in Inner Mongolia for the second phase of a 2GW plan that it first announced in 2009. The second phase will see First Solar supplying 300 MW-500 MW of solar panels, and construction could start in the second half of 2014. The first phase, a 30MW project, is set to start construction in the third quarter of this year, he added.

Meanwhile, the company is building some of the world’s largest solar power plants right here in California. One of them, the 230MW Antelope Valley Solar Ranch One in Los Angeles County, has run into “weather-related delays” during the first quarter of this year. That partly contributed to lower earnings from the previous quarter. Completion of the project is now set for the end of this year rather than the second quarter.

The company generated $755 million in sales for the first quarter of this year, down $320 million from the previous quarter but up $258 million from the year-ago period. It posted $59.1 million in net income, or $0.66 per share for the first quarter, $154.2 million in net income, or $1.74 per share for the fourth quarter of 2012. It reported $449.4 million, or $5.20 per share, in losses for the first quarter of 2012.

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“Our residential lease business remains strong, with demand outstripping our financial capacity in the first quarter,” said Tom Werner, SunPower’s CEO, during a call with analysts to discuss quarterly earnings.

The Silicon Valley company signed over 2,100 leases during the first quarter, bringing the cumulative total to over 16,200. SunPower launched the lease program in 2011. The lease sign up rate is roughly the same as in 2012, during which it signed up 11,415 of them through its network of dealers, or roughly 2,800 of them per quarter.

Homeowners who sign leases, which run 20 years, pay a monthly fee for using the solar electricity from the solar panels installed on their rooftops. They don’t own the equipment and aren’t responsible for its maintenance or repairs. SunPower raises money from investors to finance the leases. The investors, which include banks and companies such as Google, put up the money partly to take advantage of a federal tax credit that amounts to 30 percent of the price of all the solar energy system installed using their funds.

Since the lease business is fairly new, it hasn’t been making a big impact on SunPower’s financial performance though. The company’s shares shot up 17 percent after its earnings announcement mainly because it delivered better financial results than expected.

The company generated $635.4 million in revenue for the first quarter, up 29 percent from the $494.1 million for the first quarter in 2012. It narrowed its losses to $54.7 million , or $0.46 per share, from $74.5 million, or $0.67 per share, year over year.

SunPower makes solar panels and develops power plants. It’s building two huge projects in California.  It has installed over 90 percent of the solar panels for the 250MW power plant called California Valley Solar Ranch, which is owned by NRG Solar. It recently started building two projects totaling 579MW that their owner, MidAmerican Solar, called Antelope Valley Solar Projects.

Internationally, SunPower continues to do well in Japan, a hot market that began offering fat incentives for solar energy generation after the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster in March 2011. Through mostly Toshiba and a little through Sharp, SunPower’s seeing more demand for its solar panels in Japan than it had anticipated, Werner said. Sales volumes doubled from 2011 to 2012 and could double again in 2013, said Howard Wenger, the company’s head of global sales and development.

Most of the company’s solar panels are going to residential rooftops in Japan. Living space tends to be small (and more efficiently used) in Japan than it’s the case in the United States, so SunPower’s highly efficient solar panels are a good fit, its executives said. Its silicon solar panels can convert about 21 percent of the sunlight into electricity, higher than other silicon solar panels on the market today. Silicon solar panels accounted for 89 percent of the solar panels made in 2012, according to GTM Research.

SunPower has had to cut production and costs in the past two years as the global solar market saw a pricing collapse from an oversupply of solar panels.

The average wholesale prices worldwide fell 50 percent from 2011 to 2012 while demand for them grew only 5 percent during 2012, said NPD SolarBuzz. Dozens of solar panel makers around the world have filed for bankruptcy.

SunPower executives said they have beaten their cost-cutting goals.

“It’s brutal to be exclusively a module manufacturer,” Werner said. “As you look at SunPower, we moved from modules originally to systems a few years ago, and what we sell today is energy in the form of leases or PPA (power purchase agreements).”

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While the Evanston, Ill.-based startup is only a year old, it’s made some substantial progress this year, and this month SiNode Systems won over $900,000 in the Rice Business Plan Competition. The startup is now working on raising an additional $1.5 million to bring its technology out of the lab, Guy Peterson, director of commercialization and manufacturing at SiNode, told us in an interview.

SiNode Systems is building on research developed by Northwestern Professor Harold Kung, whose work focuses on the use of a composite of silicon nanoparticles and graphene for the anode part of a battery. A battery is made up of an anode and a cathode and an electrolyte in between, and electrically charged lithium ions flow between the anode and the cathode to discharge or charge the battery.

SiNode’s core intellectual technology involves creating a porous structure in the graphene to speed up the movement of electrons between the anode and the cathode and to stabilize the silicon, creating a sort of scaffolding around it. Silicon swells and contracts quickly and could fall apart easily without a supporting structure.

Lithium ion batteries on the market today typically use graphite for the anode. For the cathode, cobalt oxide is commonly used for consumer electronics while other compounds, such as iron phosphate and manganese oxide are also found in electric cars and power tools.

Lab work has shown that SiNode’s technology could lead to an anode with roughly ten times more energy capacity than the conventional graphite anode, said Guy Peterson, director of commercialization and manufacturing at SiNode. A higher capacity will create a battery that can keep your mobile phone working longer before you have to charge it.

So what does a better anode mean for the overall energy capacity of the battery, which is ultimately what battery retailers and consumers would want to know? Peterson declined to say, partly because the company is still working on that number.

The graphene structure also makes it possible to cut the charging time of the anode by about 10 times compared with the typical charging time of a smart phone at home, Peterson said.

A promising technology needs to marry a low-cost manufacturing process to find success in the market, especially when the technology is targeting the consumer electronics market and there is no shortage of major battery makers and startups working on using silicon and other compounds to improve the anode’s performance (see our list of 13 battery startups to watch).

Peterson said SiNode is working on a production process that promises to be less complicated than some of the existing methods. The process creates a sheet of material at the end rather than a powder.

“A lot of competitors take two steps forward in performance and four steps back in scalability,” Peterson said. “We can offer performance and scalability.”

SiNode plans to supply the anode material or license its technology or both. The company is still working on its business model and manufacturing plans.

From the Rice competition, the startup is set to receive $700,000 in equity investments, $110,000 in cash and $101,400 in office space, marketing and other business services. Before the competition, the company had raised just over $200,000.

Photos courtesy of Northwestern University

Updated at 3:30 PM on April 29, to correct that the technology boosts the amount of energy that a battery’s anode can hold, it does not boost the amount of energy that a battery in general can hold.

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As with any retail service, consumers should expect a straight-forward dealing with installers and get what they’re promised. Most consumers, though, have no previous experiences shopping for solar, so that makes it more difficult to spot shady language in a contract or missing steps in the purchase process. An online search of solar installers in your town could turn up a long list of companies.

To help you combat the mass of information, as well as any misinformation, we created this cheat sheet of things you should consider:

1). The initial query: While you could start with a Google search for solar installers in your area, a better way is contacting your local utility or the city or state agency that oversees these utilities. Often times they have a list of installers who have already gotten the necessary certification to perform solar panel installations. California has such a statewide database. Nevada has one, too. So does New York.

2). Learn about the incentives in your region: Incentives are gonna be the key for you to figure out if you can afford solar panels. The best resource we’ve found for solar incentives by state is this great website, funded by the Department of Energy. You also could find out about rebates or tax breaks from your local utility or installers. Still, it’s a good idea to find an alternative source of information to verify what you’ve been told. The DOE-backed database not only lists incentives by states, it also includes a link to each state’s agency that administers the subsidies. From there you also could find whom to contact to ask about certified installers.

3). How to pay for it:  An average-size system of solar panels, between 3KW and 5KW, costs around $18,000-$25,000 in California, according to the current pricing posted by the state’s solar program website, which is filled with other good information. The pricing in your region may be different, so comparison shop! If you can afford to buy and own a system, then you can reap the most savings over time.

If you can’t put up that much money upfront, then you now have many options to lease or get loans. You could sign up for leases in which you pay a monthly fee for solar electricity without owning the equipment. The company that provides the financing would own the system. A lease typically runs 15-20 years. Because of the growing popularity of the leases, you will likely hear about them from the installers you are interviewing. Check your local banks for loans. Admirals Bank, for example, recently launched a division that provides solar loans nationwide.

4). Lease vs. PPA: Some installers offer leases, while others do power purchase agreements. In a lease, you would usually pay a fixed amount each month regardless of how much electricity the solar panels produce (though that monthly fee may go up at some point during the lifetime of the contract). In a power purchase agreement, you agree to an electric rate and pay for the amount of electricity produced. That means your payment will likely vary from month to month, and the electric rate generally will go up over time. Sometimes installers can only provide one or the other because of local regulations governing electricity sales.

5). Gear research: There is no shortage of solar panel makers, who have more or less standardized the designs and warranties of the equipment (here’s a video about how a solar panel generates electricity). There isn’t a consumer-friendly rating system to say which manufacturers produce better products than others.

You can do your own online research, such as checking out who are among the top 10 solar panel makers in the world. But those make it onto the list because of the size of their factories. Many of those who aren’t on the top 10 also make quality products.

The key is to ask your installers about how long a manufacturer has been in business, any complaints from other consumers, and the repair and return policy. It’s no different than shopping for electronic equipment or appliances.

6). The promise: As with any financing contract, you want to read it very carefully and make sure you understand what you’ve been promised. Many installers promote the idea that if you go solar, you will end up paying less for electricity than you would otherwise. That’s an attractive proposition, especially if you have a high energy bill. But understand that those savings may not happen right away but over time.

No one can predict energy prices many years from now. Those prices depend heavily on the types of fuels used, changing regulations that might add to the cost of generation electricity and market demand. If your utility can’t promise what your electric rate will be in 10 years, how can anyone else promise that you will always pay a lower rate by going solar?

7). Keeping the system running: If you own the solar panels, then you are responsible for their upkeep. The equipment usually doesn’t require a lot of cleaning, though you may not be in such luck if you live in a dusty area or your roof is a magnet for birds. Sometimes squirrels can develop a taste for electrical cables of the system.

Your solar panels are connected to an inverter, which converts the direct current from the solar panels to the alternating current for use around the house. The inverter, therefore, can tell you if the power production dips lower than usual. You should regularly check on the inverter’s reading , and you should be able to do that on your computer or even smart phone.

If you opt for a lease or power purchase agreement, then the company that provides the financing is responsible for the equipment’s upkeep. The financing company may not be the installer who set up the solar panels on your roof, and it may end up hiring someone else to do any maintenance and repair work. You should understand who is in charge of servicing the equipment.

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The Arizona-based thin film solar giant announced the pending acquisition on Tuesday during its analyst day — its first since 2009 — in which it laid out a persuasive technology and business development plan for the next five years. Investors liked what they heard and pushed the company’s stock up by nearly 50 percent during trading.

Courtesy of Southern California Edison

The announcement also came after the company’s top executives spent the entire day taking shots at silicon solar technology, which they said hasn’t been able to make a big leap in its sunlight-to-electricity conversion rate for years and is approaching the theoretical limit of its efficiency. First Solar’s bread and butter cadmium telluride, on the other hand, has a higher theoretical efficiency limit, and First Solar has shifted its businesses focus from building large factories to make panels with cadmium-telluride cells to developing more efficient panels, said CEO Jim Hughes during the event.

Who is TetraSun?

So why TetraSun? Apparently Silicon Valley-based TetraSun has some disruptive silicon cell designs that set it apart from the rest of the silicon solar companies. Its designs require fewer manufacturing steps to produce conventional silicon cells, and eliminates the need for silver and transparent conductive oxide. Silver is used to transport electricity produced by the cells, while the oxide is a coating that protects the cells and helps the semiconductor material (such as silicon or cadmium telluride) to grab the light more effectively to produce electricity.

First Solar claims that TetraSun’s cells also can perform better in hot climates than conventional silicon cells. That feature will make solar panels with TetraSun’s cells more desirable in places like the Middle East and India, two markets with a lot of potentials for growth. First Solar says it plans to start making TetraSun’s cells in the second half of 2014.

First Solar believes TetraSun’s technology could produce cells at an over 21 percent efficiency at a cost that is comparable to the expense of making conventional — yet less efficient– silicon solar cells. Most silicon cells today have efficiencies in the mid-teens. SunPower stands out in its ability to make silicon cells at nearly 23 percent, but the company uses a more expensive type of silicon and has its own special cell designs to achieve that high efficiency. First Solar didn’t specify what type of silicon TetraSun has used.

TetraSun has been quiet about its technology development, and its website is just a landing page. Its name did show up as a recipient of a U.S. Department of Energy grant, announced back in January 2010.

First Solar is buying TetraSun from JX Nippon Oil & Energy Corp. and other investors, and it expects to complete the acquisition in the second quarter of 2013. It’s not disclosing the price for the acquisition.

First Solar also talking to JX Nippon about selling solar panels with TetraSun’s cells in Japan, which has become a hot market since the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster in March 2011 prompted the government to offer generous subsidies for renewable energy generation.

An efficiency play

First Solar previously used its manufacturing scale and efficient production process to roll out solar panels more quickly than its competitors. That enabled First Solar to sell its panels at a much lower price even though the panels weren’t as efficient. But the plummeting prices for silicon, which is used in the majority of the solar panels made today, has eroded that pricing advantage for First Solar and prompted the company to focus on improving its solar panels’ efficiency. More efficient solar panels could fetch higher prices because they allow developers to build a same-size power plant with less land.

But First Solar apparently doesn’t want to rely on just one semiconductor material for its solar panels. It once worked on developing solar panels with copper, indium, gallium and selenium (CIGS), but it scrapped that program over a year ago. Supposedly the decision to ditch that effort came partly because First Solar was posting losses and looking for ways to cut costs. The company’s chief technology officer, Raffi Garabedian, told analysts on Tuesday that CIGS technology has taken the most private and public funding, yet it still isn’t likely be able to deliver the big efficiency improvements that cadmium telluride can over time.

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