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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ABB is spending $6.35 a share for Power-One. Power-One has 3,300 employees, and in 2012 produced $120 million in earnings, with $1 billion in sales. Bloomberg reports that the deal is 7.7 times Power-One’s earnings (EBITDA), which is lower than the average price of 8.5 times earnings that has been paid over the past three years for clean power companies.

There was a record-breaking 3.3 gigawatts worth of solar panels — or 16 million individual solar panels — installed in the U.S. in 2012, making solar power the fastest-growing energy source domestically. Another record year is expected in 2013.

Solar panel makers are struggling because the price of solar panels is so cheap right now, and that has led to an oversupply of panels in the market. There will be more consolidation and bankruptcy this year for solar panel makers.

In recent years the solar inverter market has also been developing new technology, and have begun to introduce micro inverters, or smaller inverters coupled with each solar panel. Traditional solar inverters are larger are there have commonly been one per solar panel rooftop installation. ABB has been aggressively acquiring technology across the power grid sector, and has also been investing in clean power tech through its venture arm, over the past two years.

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Sol Voltaics, which is discussing its product and funding for the first time this week, said it has developed a low cost way to make tiny nanowires out of the semiconductor gallium arsenide. The company turns these nanowires into an ink, which can be layered onto basic solar panels and boost the efficiency of a standard panel by 25 percent.

The idea is that solar panel makers would want to buy this technology because they can sell the more efficient panels at a higher price, and raise their margins. In addition, the overall installed cost of the more efficient solar panels (they produce more power) could be lower by 15 percent to 20 percent.

Swedish solar innovation

Founded in 2008, Sol Voltaics won’t be producing its nanowire ink — called SolInk — at pilot scale until 2015, and commercial scale in 2016. But it’s already started to prove that its technology works, and has had its nanowire cells certified by research firm Fraunhofer for an efficiency of 13.8 percent. This year the company is focused on demoing how its ink boosts efficiency on a larger scale, and in 2014 they’ll work on perfecting the equipment that its customers will use to cover panels with the ink.

With just 20 employees, Sol Voltaics has been operating in a relatively lean mode for a solar manufacturing company. To date the startup has raised just $11 million in funding from private and public funders and family offices, including Industrifonden, Foundation Asset Management, Scatec, Nano Future Invest AS, Nordic Innovation and Vinnova. The company hopes to raise another $10 million to $20 million this year, and plans to cap all of its funding at $50 million by 2016.

Sol Voltaics has some well-known names in the solar and venture capital sectors. The company was founded by Lund University Professor Lars Samuelson, who is an expert on the type of semiconductor that Sol Voltaics uses to make its nanowires. The company is led by Dave Epstein, who is a serial entrepreneur and former partner with Crosslink Capital, and Magnus Ryde, who was the former CEO of TSMC America, is Sol Voltaics Chairman.

How does it work?

Sol Voltaic’s innovation is that it’s figured out how to make tiny wires using the normally expensive but highly efficient semiconductor gallium arsenide. Solar scientists have spent years using gallium arsenide in various ways to make ultra-efficient solar cells, but the only way the material can be cheap enough to actually be used on a commercial scale is if it’s used in very small amounts — hence the nanotech wire part. But, again, in previous years the production of nanowires has also been relatively expensive.

The breakthrough came when Samuelson figured out a way to make the gallium arsenide nanowires in a gas phase instead of in a solid phase. Sol Voltaics calls this their aerotaxy process. Under the right conditions, in an air reactor, the company can grow these nanowires in seconds and store them in a liquid, producing a sort of ink.

Sol Voltaics wants to take this ink and sell it to solar panel makers, alongside production equipment that they can use to layer the ink — inkjet style — onto their own solar panels. The nanowires in the ink act as guides for the light and concentrate it. The company says the capital expensive of the ink and machines add 1 to 2 cents per Watt for the panels.

Sol Voltaics is targeting Chinese and other global silicon solar makers that are struggling and producing many of their panels at a loss right now. Proving that the technology can help them out — and is worth the investment — will take quite a few key partners and demonstrations. The good thing, though, is that if one customer starts using it as a competitive advantage and it works, others will want to use it to keep up.

Some of these huge solar maker players will have to survive, and could adopt and invest in new technologies to do that. The ones that do survive, will see the continued solar panel market explode over the coming years. There was a record-breaking 3.3 gigawatts worth of solar panels — or 16 million individual solar panels — installed in the U.S. in 2012, making solar power the fastest-growing energy source domestically.

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Solar thermal technology uses mirrors to concentrated the sun’s rays to a liquid-filled collector point, which heats up and produces steam and powers a steam tubine, delivering electricity. Solar panels, on the other hand, convert sunlight directly into electricity.

This week utility PG&E and BrightSource agreed to mutually terminate agreements for PG&E to buy solar power from two 250 MW planned solar power plants, called Hidden Hills, located in Inyo County, near the Nevada border. The projects are estimated to cost a combined $2.6 billion, and the companies said the contract was terminated due to “challenges associated with the project schedule and uncertainty around the timing of transmission upgrades.”

BrightSource has been focused on adding energy storage technology to its projects, which would make its power plants more robust and be able to provide energy when the sun isn’t shining. BrightSource says its Hidden Hills site is a good candidate for a solar farm with the storage technology, but that such a change would require an amendment to the permit application and a reopening of the record to go over the new layout and plan. Suspending the current application saves time and expense, BrightSource spokesperson Keely Wachs tells me.

Back in January utility Southern California Edison and BrightSource also agreed to terminate a contract for a 200 MW solar plant for its Rio Mesa 2 project near Blythe, California. The California Public Utilities Commission had denied an adjacent contract next to Rio Mesa 2 due to cost concerns last year, and BrightSource suspended permitting for both Rio Mesa 1 and 2 earlier this year.

There’s three transmission lines at Ivanpah

BrightSource is completing its flagship solar thermal project called Ivanpah in the desert near Las Vegas this year. Wachs says that BrightSource is also currently focused on its Palen solar project in Riverside County, which has already been permitted by the California Energy Commission.

But still, the hurdles for BrightSource’s solar power plant contracts illustrate some of the inherent difficulties with trying to build massive solar plants, filled with mirrors and trackers and towers. Such large solar farms need transmission lines to shuttle the power to the cities that will use it, but transmission lines can be controversial, expensive and take a very long time to deploy.

Environmental reports can also take many months and a lot of money. Protests from environmentalists have derailed, and added significant costs, to solar thermal projects.

While solar thermal projects face such hurdles, solar panels continue to drop in price and are being deployed at a rapid pace. As GigaOM Pro research analyst explained this week: “3313 megawatts came online in the U.S. in 2012, a 76 percent increase over 2011 with GTM Research predicting that we’ll see continued growth up to 4300 megawatts this year.” And in particular utility-scale solar panel projects grew 134 percent last year and accounted for more than half of installed solar.

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Empower Micro Systems CCO Jon Bonanno told me that the company’s inverter tech “is a quantum change in how solar is done.” It can be attached to a solar panel system, on the rack or the frame, or embedded at the individual solar module level. Bonanno says the inverter is five times more reliable, five percent more efficient and costs 20 percent less than traditional “string” inverters, which have been used for decades. The potential of a lower inverter cost, is that the entire cost of the solar system could be lower, in addition to the recent dramatic drop in solar module prices.

Empower Micro Systems doesn’t plan to manufacture the inverter box itself. The company is a fabless chip firm and it sells its integrated circuits and architecture design to manufacturers like inverter makers and solar module producers. In that respect it’s adopting Intel’s mode, churning out the chips inside the inverter devices.

Bonanno is pretty confident of the disruptive power of the inverter tech, called the “Universal Micro Power Inverter.” He thinks it can “replace all solar inversion options, hands down.” The key technologies of the inverter are how the system on a chip synchronizes and controls the power flow at a low voltage, as well as the design of the inverter box itself.

Enphase Energy’s tech

Microinverters use energy storage tech to temporarily store the DC power from the solar panel and decouple it from the AC grid power. The Empower Micro System’s inverter uses a next-gen solid state capacitor for this energy storage tech, while other systems more commonly use more traditional liquid-filled electrolytic capacitors.

The next steps for any startup are bringing this hardware to market. Bonanno says the company has already signed one agreement with a “top-three” module maker, and is in discussions with many more module makers and power supply vendors. Just this Sunday, Bonanno said the company’s field trials went live with solar installers. This year the inverter will be certified and could be produced in pilot production by the third quarter of 2013.

The technology has attracted a list of angel investors including Jurgen Krehnke, recent President & General Manager of SMA Americas, Ken Lawler, General Partner at Battery Ventures and Silicon Ventures, Kiki Tidwell, Kauffman Fellow and cleantech investor, and Eugene Zhang, Managing Director at Tsinghua University Executive Entrepreneur Club. Chinese module manufacturers will be key for the company’s market strategy. Empower Micro Systems is currently in the process of raising a $5.5 million series A round.

There’s a lot of competition in the solar inverter space. Not only are there the new microinverters companies like Enphase Energy, and power optimizer tech from the likes of Solar Edge and Tigo Energy, but also the traditional inverter giants like SMA dominate the market. The company will need to launch and scale to prove a competitive edge.

But Empower Micro Systems plans are actually even more audacious than just replacing solar inverters. The technology can be applied to energy storage and electric vehicles, and Bonanno says one day down the road they hope to move into those markets, too.

Updated at 3PM PST, to fix the spellings of Jon Bonanno, and Jurgen Krehnke.

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In comparison, a large nuclear or coal plant can generate about a gigawatt, so there was the equivalent of three of these types of large power plants installed across rooftops in the U.S. in 2012. The 3.3GW worth of solar panels was more than the three previous years combined, said the report, and showed a 76 percent growth over 2011.

A gigawatt of those solar panels were installed in California, while Arizona and New Jersey also installed hundreds of megawatts. The fourth quarter in particular in the U.S. saw 1.3 GW worth of solar panels installed, which was a record-breaking quarter, said the report.

The reason that solar panels were the fastest growing type of energy in the U.S. last year was due to the fact that the price of solar panels has dropped dramatically. Companies are also offering financing deals that cover the upfront costs of the systems, and states are offering strong incentives. It’s not a coincidence that states like California with the best subsidies for solar panels had the most installations.

The growth of solar panels in the U.S. is supposed to continue, says the report. For 2013, the researchers have estimated that there will be 4.3GW of solar panels installed, which would be an increase of 29 percent over 2012.

There are now 300,000 solar panel systems operating in the U.S. and a total of 7.2 GW of cumulative solar panel power in the U.S. Concentrating solar systems — which use the sun’s heat instead of light to produce electricity — deliver 546 MW worth of power in the U.S.

The report is note worthy because solar is becoming a game changer. It, along with wind power, are just starting to deliver real volumes and change the way electricity is created in the U.S.

In comparison, 13 GW of new wind power were installed in the U.S. in 2012. Last year natural gas rose to 27.2 percent of total energy consumption (including electricity, heat and transportation) from 23.4 percent in 2007, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance. Over the same time period, clean power, which includes wind, solar, biomass and hydropower, rose to 9.4 percent from 6.4 percent. Coal declined as part of the U.S. energy mix to 18.1 percent from 22.5 percent, as did oil to 36.7 percent from 39.3 percent.

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SolarCity said for the fourth quarter of 2012, it had a net loss attributed to shareholders of $3.04 million, while it had a positive net income attributed to shareholders of $14.07 million for the same period a year earlier. Per share, that was a loss excluding items of $1.10 for the fourth quarter of 2012, compared to a positive gain in net income of $0.24 for the same period a year earlier. Revenue for the quarter was up slightly at $25.27 million.

For the full year 2012, total revenues were $128.66 million, which was double the revenues in 2011 of $59.55 million. SolarCity CEO Lyndon Rive said the company is signing up a new customer every five minutes. There were 157 MW deployed in 2012, which was an increase of 118 percent over 2011.

SolarCity now has over 50,000 customers and has deployed close to 300 MW worth of solar panel projects over its lifetime. They also have close to 200 MW of backlog orders to deploy. Rive said on the earnings call on Wednesday that for 2012 “we could not have asked for a better year.”

Unfortunately now that the company is public, it’s a quarterly numbers game to Wall Street and analysts.

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Dean Nelson, eBay’s vice president of Global Foundation Services, says the effort, called the Digital Service Efficiency report, “is the miles per gallon measure for technical infrastructure for eBay.” Essentially, the company has boiled its business down to a single currency — transactions (specifically URL requests) associated with users’ buying and selling on the site — and created a slew of metrics that measure how efficiently it delivers those transactions in terms of revenue, performance, cost and carbon footprint.

The project has been about 18 months in the making, Nelson told me during a recent phone call, and eBay was finally able to set a baseline measurement of its performance in 2012. Now that it knows what’s in place and how its infrastructure performs over the course of a year, the goal in 2013 is to cut its computing-related carbon usage and costs by 10 percent and increase performance in terms of transactions per kilowatt-hour by 10 percent.

In order to meet these goals, he said, every member of the technical team — from facilities managers to software engineers — has be striving toward them and also be cognizant of how turning their “knobs” will affect the other metrics eBay is measuring. “Think of it like a Rubik’s cube,” Nelson explained. “You can solve one side but screw up the rest of them.”

eBay plans to release quarterly updates on its progress along with its earnings reports, but employees will have access to down-to-the-second visibility into what’s going on. “It makes it personal for them,” Nelson said. “They can see what their efforts mean.”

52,075 servers doing a lot of work

Nelson offered some pretty compelling examples of how the Digital Service Efficiency project works in practice. If the goal is to decrease cost per transactions, data center engineers might try to minimize power usage at the facility level while server engineers might look to lower-power gear or better utilization on existing gear. They essentially reduce the denominator in that equation “and the net result is we should make more money from those transactions,” he said.

In one real-world instance, a software engineer tweaked some code that affected how much memory an application requires and the company was able to eliminate 400 servers. That cut energy usage by 1 megawatt and a $2 million savings in capital expense when the time would have come to refresh those servers.

eBay also has created a “list of fame” and a “list of shame” that highlight the 1,000 best- and worst-utilized servers within the company. “We have a hit list,” Nelson said, and it’s going to examine the bottom 20 percent to figure out why they’re as wasteful as they are.

However, he added, it’s important to remember on the server front that improving cost, performance and carbon usage doesn’t always mean buying lower-power gear. If eBay can improve the power density of its racks using technology such as liquid cooling — something its Project Mercury data center in Phoenix is pre-equipped for — it can handle more transactions on less gear. It already has some racks running at a sustained rate of 35 kilowatts and thinks it can push that up to 50 kilowatts, Nelson said.

Clean transactions with solar panels and Bloom boxes

On the carbon front, eBay has nothing but an open field in front of it thanks to some big clean-energy projects set to go live in 2013 in its new Salt Lake City, Utah, data center called Project Topaz. For starters, it’s using Bloom Energy boxes as the primary power source, which mean a slightly higher cost per transaction, but also a 13 percent reduction in carbon emissions and increased reliability (downtime costs eBay a lot of money).

Also, the company has finally cleared some regulatory hurdles to tie an on-site solar array back to the grid. Because of changes to a Utah law that eBay lobbied for, it’s about to start sourcing off-site clean energy for its data centers, as well.

“That is a corporate priority,” Nelson said. “We want to create the cleanest commerce engine on the freakin’ planet.”

Trying to change an industry

Of course, the Digital Service Efficiency methodology isn’t the only attempt by a major data center operator to show the world how efficient it is. Google publishes annual Power Utilization Efficiency (PUE) ratings for its data centers, and Facebook occasionally does as well. On Monday, Salesforce.com released a statement underscoring its commitment to sourcing renewable energy.

However, Nelson pointed out, what eBay is doing — and encouraging others to do — is more transparent in that it gives a lot more depth about operations, including the company’s server count. Even if companies don’t publish their results, tying operational efficiency to other business objectives should have a positive effect on the bottom line and the environment, regardless. Every company will have its own base currency, Nelson explained, and they’ll have to find their own metrics to measure and figure out what are the knobs that each part of the company can turn to meet goals.

“We all have the same challenges, the same things to solve for, but we have numerous ways to solve it,” Nelson said. …”[Their implementations] may change completely, but the point is the conversation is starting.”

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Oh how times have changed — one of the first stories I did for GigaOM’s cleantech channel was “10 questions for Nanosolar CEO Martin Roschiesen” in the summer of 2007. Back then Roschiesen told me the company was starting pilot production that year and had raised enough money to make it profitable. In 2008, the company was valued at $2 billion.

Fast forward to 2012, and Nanosolar raised $70 million from investors, reportedly at a pre-money valuation of $50 million. Aeris Capital, a fund that manages finances for SAP founder Klaus Tschira, partly funded that round as a way to pick up solar assets on the cheap. Other investors in that round included OnPoint Technologies, Mohr Davidow Ventures, Ohana Holdings, and Family Offices. Nanosolar has taken in at least $450 million since its start in 2002.

Nanosolar makes thin solar panels out of a material called copper-indium-gallium-selenide (CIGS). At one time in Silicon Valley, CIGS was the great white hope — Solyndra, Heliovolt, Miasole, and others raised hundreds of millions of dollars to build the next-generation of solar tech. But the price of silicon-based solar dropped dramatically and made the economics of selling more expensive CIGS panels much more difficult. Some of these companies have gone bankrupt, done major layoffs, retrenched or been sold off in fire sales.

Solar Frontier, part of Japan’s Showa Shell, is one of the only companies to reach scale with its CIGS solar panels. The company completed a 900 MW factory in late 2010 and brought all of its production lines into commercial production mode by the summer of 2011.

Nanosolar could end up being acquired for cheap from international investors. South Korean and Chinese power conglomerates have particuarly shown interest in investing in and buying discounted U.S. clean power assets. Or there’s always the Solyndra route — a very public, abrupt bankruptcy.

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In contrast, two years prior China accounted for less than 10 percent of the world’s solar panel sales. The shift is a combo of slowing sales in Europe and strong subsidies for solar panels in China.

Selling solar panels into China is a bit different than selling them to European or U.S. markets. NPD analyst Michael Barker, says:

“The Chinese end-market has different module supplier preferences, pricing expectations, and routes to market. However, threatened by the impact of global trade barriers, the biggest challenge will fall on Chinese manufacturers that are restricted to domestic demand only.”

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