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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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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Details of the solar panel investment

I shared details on both the solar panel project and the car before, but let me step back and recap a bit. In October 2011, we added 41 solar panels to our southern-facing roof in southeastern Pennsylvania. Each panel is rated for 230W of Direct Current (DC) so that works out to an array of 9.43kW DC. In our family of four, with two work-at-home adults, we average around 7,500 kWh of electricity usage. So the system may be a bit oversized for our needs — about 125 percent — but we planned ahead. It’s a four-bedroom house so we thought that the next occupants could have at least one more family member and therefore use more electricity.

At the time, we were quoted a price of $5.50 per watt for the project. When you multiply that price times the 9,430 watts of the system, you get the total cost: $51,865. That’s just the gross cost, however. We received a 30 percent Federal tax credit for $15,560 and a state rebate check of $7,100, bringing the net cost to around $29,205. Our typical electric bill for a year had been roughly $2,500, which makes the break-even point around 11.7 years.

Adding an electric vehicle one year later

A year after the solar panels were installed — they generated 13.8 MWh in the first 12 months and you can see the real-time stats here — we opted to add an electric car to our garage. So we traded in an Acura RDX and, after shopping around, replaced it with a 2013 Volt. This was to be our primary car, just as the Acura was. We have another vehicle in the garage, but it’s a rarely driven sports car: A 2007 model that just passed 18,000 miles on the odometer.

Since the Acura was our primary vehicle, we racked up miles quickly. Even though we both work from home, my wife and I are often driving the two kids to activities or head a few miles into town most days for food or other goods. With the Acura we were averaging about $250 per month on gas as a result. Now, with the same general driving habits, we pay a maximum of $50 on gas in a given month.

With the Volt — you can see driving stats for that too — we’ve already turned 7,228 miles in the six months of ownership. That’s normal driving behavior for us: We typically drive about 15,000 miles on the main car. Of those miles, 5,255 have been solely on battery power and the car reports our gas mileage at 125.33 MPG so far. Even though we’re averaging 1,250 miles per month, we’re only filling up the gas tank once — or maybe twice — in a given month. The tank is small too: Just over 9 gallons.

So what does this do to our solar panel payback? It cuts it nearly in half to around six years. How so?

The reduced payback on our investment

Three-quarters of our driving is powered by electricity. Even with the addition of the Volt, which we charge every night, we still don’t have an electric bill. We’re at the point where we’re much closer to using all of the electricity our panels produce, but we’re not there yet. And we’ve cut down on our gasoline expenditures as a direct result of both the car and the solar panel system, saving around $200 per month that we used to spend.

That works out to $2,400 a year in gasoline savings and when added to the $2,500 in electricity bills we’re no longer paying each year, you get $4,900 in net cash flow savings. Divide that figure in to the net cost of the solar panel project and it works out to 5.96 years before break-even. Best of all, the payment for the Volt is slightly less than the Acura payment was, but I don’t consider that as part of the solar panel payback.

There was a recent intangible benefit gained by the solar investment, as well. Just before we bought the Volt, we decided to refinance our home. The appraiser added $30,000 in value to the house just for the solar panel array. That gave us the best possible rate because of our LTV, or loan to value, ratio.

Without that extra boost in the appraisal, we would have had to pay more in fees to get our low rate or simply have a marginally higher rate. I don’t consider this part of the payback either, but it sure helped!

This post was updated at 7:22 am, May 13, to reflect to correct Federal tax credit percentage.

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RedWave Energy says on its website that early markets for the technology could be industries like explosives detection and high speed communications. But later down the line, the end goal could be harvesting solar energy in a method that has twice the capacity of current solar cells and panels but at a lower cost.

Nanotechnology is being used to eek out as much efficiency as possible from solar cells and panels. For example, Swedish startup Sol Voltaics says it has developed a low cost way to make tiny nanowires out of the semiconductor gallium arsenide. Sol Voltaics 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.

But RedWave Energy’s nano scale antennas — or nantennas — work differently than solar cells. Nantennas act as an antenna or collector to absorb light of specific wavelengths and convert it into electricity. The technology has been around for decades, but RedWave Energy is now trying to commercialize nantenna technology licensed from Idaho National Labs, tech from University of Colorado, and is working with manufacturing company MicroContinuum.

RedWave Energy says it will start to talk more about its energy capture technology after it builds its prototype in the second quarter of 2013. We’ve reached out to the company and will update this if we hear back.

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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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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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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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Some of these ideas were on display this week at the Printed Electronics Europe 2013 event in Berlin, which took in a variety of sub-events including the Energy Harvesting & Storage Europe show. The concepts ranged from the practical to the experimental, so let’s start with the practical.

Here’s Perpetuum‘s Vibration Energy Harvester (VEH), being carried around (appropriately) on a model train.

The VEH is a wireless sensor that gets attached to rotating components, such as wheel bearings, on trains. Cleverly, the device both measures and is powered by mechanical vibration. It also measures temperature, and it wirelessly transmits the results to the train’s operator so they can immediately spot a failure in its early stages.

It’s a simple, low-maintenance idea (there’s no battery that needs replacing) that promises big savings, as Perpetuum CEO Roy Freeland told me, referring to an unnamed operator:

“The user has achieved a very fast payback because the system has enabled him to delay maintenance on the bearings until the fleet was due for a major train overhaul.”

Perpetuum is part of an EU-funded consortium called Wibrate, which aims to introduce this kind of self-powered vibration monitoring technology into a variety of industrial systems.

Meanwhile, a similar principle was at play in Cherry’s energy-harvesting switch.

The light you see in that picture can be wirelessly turned on and off by a switch that does not itself require any external powering: the act of pressing the switch creates enough mechanical energy to briefly power its wireless transmission capabilities. This is somewhat preferable to wiring up switches, in terms of both effort and flexibility, and who knows? Perhaps the principle could be employed in certain internet-of-things scenarios, too.

Then there’s good old photovoltaic technology, which may soon find itself woven into a new generation of smart fabrics. Another EU-funded project called Powerweave aims to create two kinds of fiber – one for harvesting solar energy and the other for storing it – that can be woven together into one self-contained system. This could theoretically be used to power soft sensors in clothing, but there are far more large-scale applications in store.

According to Christian Dalsgaard, founder of consortium member Ohmatex, the goal is to create a fabric that can generate 10W per square meter. Once that is achieved, he noted, there are “no limits how big such a fabric can be made”, and a 100m2 piece of fabric would in theory be able to generate a kilowatt of power. Commercial applications could range from flexible roofing, tents and sun awnings to a new generation of autonomous airship (balloon manufacturer Lindstrand is also in the consortium). The fabric could even be a valuable part of aid packages, Dalsgaard noted:

“The end fabric should be foldable, so you can fold a large fabric – 100m2 – into a package. It’s not enough to roll it up… The requirement is to fold it, put it in a package and drop it from an airplane.”

Powerweave isn’t quite there yet, though. While a lot of progress has been made on the solar cell and storage fibers, “the challenge is to ensure the solar fibers are on top of the fabric and battery fibers are beneath, and that there is a supporting layer to provide strength,” Dalsgaard added.

But what about fabrics that can harvest energy from movement, rather than light? Yep, people are working on that idea too, although problems remain. As Steve Beeby of the University of Southhampton said at the conference: “Textiles offer a good opportunity for energy harvesting… but clothes are designed for [comfort], not to resist your movement.” And don’t forget, any flexible electronics built into the fabric of clothes need to be machine-washable, too, connectors and all.

And finally, a less technically interesting but nonetheless worthwhile little gadget that was on show: the Clicc.

These dinky little solar panels can be clipped into tiny units that store the captured energy for charging mobile devices — I wouldn’t expect vast amounts of charge, but it’s handy in a pinch — or they can be chained as the picture shows, to increase the total amount of energy captured. Unfortunately the firm behind them, Sonnenrepublik, hasn’t yet come up with a unit to store and output that aggregated power, but it’s a nice thought nonetheless.

In the end, all ideas that take us closer to sustainable energy use are welcome.

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Midsummer, based in Jarfalla, Sweden, has developed equipment and processes to make thin film solar panels, using the material copper indium gallium (di)selenide, or CIGS. If the term CIGS rings a bell, that’s because the ashes of CIGS firms have burned brightly — and burned their investors’ cash – in recent years.

Silicon Valley’s MiaSolé, which had originally impressed investors with its high conversion efficiencies, was sold at a bargain-basement price to Chinese renewable energy firm Hanergy earlier this year. Reports are that the firm was snapped up for 10 percent of the price tag the board was after. There was also Solyndra, Nanosolar, Heliovolt, and others that have struggled.

But beyond just CIGS, the entire solar panel market is laboring under the weight of oversupply, and manufacturers have production capacities for about twice as many solar panels than the market needs. Even the big manufacturers are struggling and one of the biggest, China’s Suntech, has been unable to pay bondholders, with the subsidiary responsible for much of its manufacturing slipping into insolvency.

So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that it’ll be difficult to sell new equipment to prospective manufacturers. But that hasn’t stopped Sweden’s Midsummer. It believes its new approach to CIGS deposition offers major advantages.

Optical disk approach to solar panels

Midsummer’s approach is to produce individual CIGS thin film cells on a stainless steel substrate. The cells are “punched out” of the stainless roll before deposition. “We wanted to produce many small thin film solar cells and then later on put them together in a module,” says CEO Sven Lindström.

This approach draws on optical disc manufacturing techniques, treating each individual CIGS cells in much the same was a CD or DVD would be created. It certainly marks a departure from current thin film semiconductor deposition, which tends to be employed in a continuous process, either onto a glass substrate or a roll of stainless steel. The closest relative to the Midsummer process in PV would be MiaSolé, which uses a stainless steel substrate cut into cells. But even MiaSolé uses a continuous deposition process with the cells being sorted into efficiencies batches afterwards.

What’s the advantages of the CIGS semiconductor deposition onto individual cells? Lindström believes that it allows R&D improvements to be made more quickly and incrementally, one cell at a time. The company is aiming to produce 200 to 400 cells per hour on its equipment, and says it can change the process parameters a little for each individual cell. Midsummer employs its 2D bar coding system for the substrate, so individual cells can be logged on a database and efficiencies assessed.

Midsummer claims that other advantages include that its cells can be employed in a flexible module, which is a market segment that has been largely left open after Global Solar and Uni-Solar ceased production. The difference between Midsummer’s approach and those companies’ technologies is that Midsummer’s cells are significantly more efficient. Midsummer can produce modules with an efficiency of 14 to 15 percent, while Global Solar and Unisolar were producing modules for closer to 8 to 10 percent.

In addition, Lindstöm says the weight per square meter of Midsummer’s modules is below three kilograms per square meter, which is more lightweight than competitors. Flexible modules have been touted as a solution for commercial rooftop panels or membrane roofing, where weight load is an issue. Light weight, flexible panels could also open up other more unusual markets, like on the roofs of trains.

In terms of costs, the Midsummer claims its flexible module can be made for $1.10/W and with glass for $0.70. It has a roadmap for $0.50/W by the end of 2014, which is slightly ahead of competitors. It also believes that such costs can be achieved at a relatively small scale, tens of megawatts instead of hundreds or gigawatts.

It should be noted that while Midsummer has a line up and running in its labs in Sweden, but that the efficiency and cost results have not yet been tested in scale production. And with very few solar panel manufacturers looking to add capacity, there’s a chance that won’t happen soon.

“Nobody is buying”

While all of these advantages and this new approach appears promising, it could be incredibly hard to find buyers willing to invest in new solar panel equipment. “Nobody is adding new capacity,” at least for the next 12 to 18 months, says Finlay Colville, VP at NPD Solarbuzz. “This makes it a really big problem for anybody who is introducing a new tool,” particularly turnkey thin film lines.

But that doesn’t mean all is lost for Midsummer. It reports that an unnamed Chinese customer has one of the Midsummer lines currently installed for testing. The solar market’s geographical shift away from traditional European markets and to new ones in the Middle East and East Asia may also provide opportunities.

A GTM Research report released recently predicted that the Middle East and Africa will provide 1 GW of demand for solar panels in 2013, an increase of over 600 percent on 2012. The strong performance of thin film panels and CIGS’ in hotter temperatures could also give that technology an advantage. GTM Research’s Shyam Mehta thinks that if some of the CIGS cells that have reached 19 percent efficiency in a lab setting, could be applied to commercial production, there could be good prospects for the technology.

Even with a PV manufacturing market under considerable stress, innovation is still required to drive efficiencies up and costs down and Midsummer may allow for iterative improvements, cell by cell, for the first time in thin film. CEO Lindstöm reports that the company is well funded at present, but for its approach to make an impression it will have to start selling equipment sooner rather than later.

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