First Solar’s full-year earnings are projected to hit between $4 and $4.50 a share, up from analyst projections of $3.60 a share this year. Sales are expected to come in between $3.8 billion and $4 billion, while operating income is estimated to be $430 million and $460 million.

The news is surprising in that First Solar had a pretty difficult year in 2012, and just reported those earnings in February. For the entire 2012, First Solar took in $3.4 billion in sales, up 22 percent from 2011, but it recorded a net loss of $96.3 million, or $1.11 per share.

First Solar has been focused on raising the efficiency of its solar panels. Higher efficiency means it can sell panels for more and raise its margins, but it also means the overall cost of installing the solar system can be lower (less panels, produce more power, with less space). In February it was touting a world record 18.7 percent efficiency for cells made from the material cadmium-telluride. This morning First Solar announced more efficiency records for cells.

Efficiency is also the reason behind First Solar’s aquisition of TetraSun. TetraSun has developed a solar cell design that can hit conversion efficiencies exceeding 21 percent. Investors in TetraSun include JX Nippon Oil & Energy Corporation.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• After Solyndra: analyzing the solar industry
• Warren Buffett and the true value of solar
• Green IT Q4: solar, subsidies and the outlook for EVs

The timing isn’t great for a thin film solar manufacturing startup to open up its first factory, and the company’s similarities with infamous Solyndra are discomforting. The company uses the same type of materials that Solyndra did for making thin film solar panels, and also, like Solyndra, charges more for its solar panels. Like Solyndra, too, SoloPower was awarded a federal loan guarantee ($197 million) to help it build out the site.

SoloPower’s solar panel booth

Of course, Solyndra went out in a blaze of glory a year ago after accumulating over $1 billion in private equity and using nearly all of a $535 million federal loan guarantee to build a factory. The market for solar manufactures is just as bad these days. There continues to be a glut of solar panels, and the prices for panels has plummeted. Several dozen manufacturers across the world have filed for bankruptcy or closed factories over the past year and a half.

SoloPower’s CEO, Tim Harris, said to us in an interview last week that SoloPower has more orders than it will be able to fill in the near term, and Harris is expecting to make a profit starting next year. SoloPower has raised over $200 million already from investors including Hudson Clean Energy Partners and Crosslink Capital.

Harris said he expects the company to produce 20 MW – maybe 30 MW — of solar panels per year by the end of 2012 and ship 2 to 5MW of solar panels during the fourth quarter. Harris says SoloPower should ramp up to full-scale production by the end of next year, and eventually complete the 400 MW factory by 2014. The total cost of building the entire 400 MW factory will be about $350 million. Harris told us last week that it is working on lining up investors and partners that can sell and distribute its solar panels.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Green IT Q1: Cleantech Breaking Out — and Bracing for Hard Times
• The fourth quarter of 2012 in cleantech
• Cleantech and investment in 2013

Miasole makes a type of next-generation solar panel technology that uses the combo of materials, copper, indium, gallium and selenium (CIGS), to convert sunlight into electricity. A group of these companies have raised billions of dollars to create this technology, and many of them are now suffering layoffs and even bankruptcies (the most famous of these is Solyndra).

Miasole had been struggling to survive in a solar market that has seen many large manufacturers shutter factories over the past year. The price of silicon (the main component in traditional solar panels) has plummeted and because of Chinese government subsidies, there is an oversupply of cheap solar panels. This environment has delivered a lethal blow to some of these CIGS firms.

Miasole said a couple months ago that it had raised $55 million to help it enter new markets and boost its sales staff, while it works on lining up more investors and partners in order to truly scale up its operation. In the announcement yesterday Miasole said it is continuing “strategic discussions with potential partners,” to try to ensure its long-term success, and that is is now focusing on cost cutting.

The company needs a white knight, or acquirer, to come to its rescue. In recent months Asian giants have played this role in cleantech. SK Group has backed Heliovolt, which makes a similar technology to Miasole, and Chinese auto giant Wanxiang has invested in A123 Systems, Smith Electric Vehicles and GreatPoint Energy.

Miasole’s CEO John Carrington says in the release:

The company is looking forward to aligning with a partner and collectively executing on our technology roadmap, flexible product launch and additional capacity to fulfill our 1GW+ commercial pipeline. I am confident based on current discussions we will finalize a partnership within the next 60-90 days.”

Miasole’s investors include Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers, VantagePoint Venture Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners, Firelake Capital and Passport Capital.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• After Solyndra: analyzing the solar industry
• Green IT’s Q4 Winners: Wind Power, Solar Power, Smart Energy
• 7 Things That Spell Growing Pains for 2011 Greentech

Investors in this latest round include OnPoint Technologies, Mohr Davidow Ventures, Ohana Holdings, and Family Offices. Nanosolar says the funds will be used to expand production.

The move highlights that some investors are still willing to support these thin film solar companies that have taken a decade and hundreds of millions of dollars to move into commercial production. Even in the wake of Solyndra, these investors are still willing to pony up funds, because they either believe in the company, or they are looking to protect their previous investment.

Nanosolar, like the other thin film solar companies, has had its ups and downs over the years. Though, Nanosolar in particular has built a reputation for not delivering on its promises. Part of that came from its co-founder Martin Roscheisen, who said the company began commercial production of solar panels in December 2007. Then Nanosolar announced in Sept. 2009 that it was only entering mass production then.

Earlier this year the company promoted Eugenia Corrales from the head of engineering and operations to CEO. Nanosolar’s solar shipments went from zero to 10 MW during the year and a half when Corrales was turning the company into a commercial-scale manufacturer while she was heading its engineering and operations. Shipping 10 MW is a “personal best” for Nanosolar, but also shows Nanosolar is falling behind some of its fellow CIGS solar manufacturers. MiaSole said it shipped 60 MW in 2011, and Solar Frontier has a new 900 MW factory and is shipping at much greater volumes.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• After Solyndra: analyzing the solar industry
• Green IT’s Q4 Winners: Wind Power, Solar Power, Smart Energy
• A 2011 Green IT Forecast

The Silicon Valley startup, backed by big VC firms such as Kleiner Perkins and VantagePoint Venture Partners, has been an interesting company to watch because it’s part of a tribe of solar startups that collectively have raised billions of dollars and stumbled along the way to commercialize a type of solar panel technology that uses the combo of materials, copper, indium, gallium and selenium (CIGS), to convert sunlight into electricity.

MiaSole declined to disclose how much venture capital it has raised since its inception in 2001, but published reports put the figure at somewhere between $400 million and $500 million before the latest round. The latest equity round came from primarily existing investors, said CEO John Carrington.

CIGS technology drew a lot of interest a couple years ago when silicon, which is found in most of the solar panels today, was expensive and commanded several hundred dollars per kilogram. CIGS solar panels are also called thin films because they use a thin layer of semiconductors to produce power, which is an approach that should cut material costs. But over production has since depressed the price of silicon price so much that nowadays it’s fetching below $30 per kilogram, reported Bloomberg recently. In addition, an oversupply of solar panels over the past year has forced many companies, from startups such as Solyndra to major players such as First Solar, to go bankrupt or shrink their operations significantly.

MiaSole and many fellow startup solar manufactures are trying to scale up production and cut costs during this difficult time. That means some of them need to roll out new and better products sooner than initially planned, or they need more money to build factories at a scale that makes it possible to significantly cut costs. Many investors of these startups have been willing to fork over money in the past year to keep the companies going while they re-worked long-term strategies. Nanosolar announced the arrival of a new CEO and a $20 million round since the start of this year. AQT Solar said it’s now working on a different type of thin film technology than CIGS.

Growing up

MiaSole has run into its fair share of technical development and other difficulties as it evolves from the R&D mode to mass production. It brought in Joseph Laia as its chief executive in 2007 to push its technology development – namely to figure out the right process to make more efficient thin films. It brought in experts from manufacturing giant Intel last year to improve the efficiency of manufacturing operations, such as tweaking equipment maintenance schedules and work shifts (the Intel experts are still around, Carrington said).

The company seemed to have finally nailed the manufacturing part of its operation, and it brought in Carrington, who was in charge of sales and marketing at First Solar, last November to go out and fight for customers’ attention. MiaSole is now making solar panels at an average efficiency of 14 percent, which is higher than what its rivals such as Nanosolar, Stion, HelioVolt and Solar Frontier, which stands out as the largest CIGS solar manufacture thanks to its new 900 MW factory.

MiaSole expects the average efficiency of its panels to hit 15 percent later this year, and at 14-15 percent, the startup’s solar panels are entering the efficiency territories of silicon solar panels out there. That means if it can sell its panels for less, than it’ll be a break out player. Prices for silicon solar panels have fallen to around $1 per watt over the past 12 months, though that price point has come largely because of the oversupply problem and is causing solar manufacturers to lose money. MiaSole’s production cost should hit $0.80 per watt sometime this year, Carrington said.

Still searching

The startup has been making solar panels by sandwiching CIGS thin films between glass, which protects CIGS from moisture and other environmental damage. This type of design is common in solar panels you see on rooftops today. MiaSole plans to start shipping thin films using other flexible materials for protecting the CIGS layer. These flexible thin films will be especially attractive for rooftops that can’t bear a lot of weight, and the company wants to sell the thin films to roofing companies.

What could stop MiaSole from growing as quickly as it wants is if it isn’t able to line up more investors or partners who not only can provide money but who have the deep sales and marketing experience to help MiaSole broaden its market reach. Carrington made a public appeal for these partners last December. The startup has 150 MW of annual production capacity (over 55 MW of MiaSole panels have been installed worldwide), and it won’t be able to grow much beyond that if it doesn’t find the right dance partner.

“I’m convinced that we will have a partnership done this year,” Carrington said. “I want a strategy similar to First Solar’s — I want to make sure we align with the strongest partners.”

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• After Solyndra: analyzing the solar industry
• Green IT’s Q4 Winners: Wind Power, Solar Power, Smart Energy
• 7 Things That Spell Growing Pains for 2011 Greentech

I haven’t been able to get ahold of Solexant execs, but will update this story when I hear more. The company raised another round of $12.5 million in funding, which included equity and options, about a year ago. At that time a company spokesperson told me that the total amount raised in that round was closer to $41.5 million.

Five-year-old Solexant, which was spun out of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, is based in San Jose, Calif., and fashions itself as a “third generation” solar photovoltaic maker. The company is working on producing “ultra-thin,” inorganic “nanocrystal solar cells,” in a roll-to-roll manufacturing process. The company uses the nanocrystal form of cadmium-telluride compound on metal foil and then sandwiches the cells in glass.

Solexant has been aiming for a cost that can get down to 50 cents per watt. In comparison thin film solar competitors MiaSole and First Solar say they can produce solar panels for 85 cents per watt ($0.75 for First Solar).

Solexant co-founder and CEO Damoder Reddy told us in October that investors have been “extremely shy” about investing in solar manufacturers, particularly since many of their solar investments haven’t paid off. However, at that time, Reddy said the company was still on a march to build his first full-scale factory.

Solexant reportedly finished building a 2MW pilot line in October 2009 that is creating nanocrystal cells. The Oregon loan was supposed to go toward a 100 MW commercial scale solar panel assembly line to be built near Portland in Oregon. But I’m not sure of the status, or planned location, of the 100 MW commercial line at this time.

According to local Oregon reports, Solexant let the Oregon loan expire, and told the media at the time that the technology was not ready to start to build a commercial-scale  factory.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• After Solyndra: analyzing the solar industry
• A 2011 Green IT Forecast
• Green IT’s Q4 Winners: Wind Power, Solar Power, Smart Energy

Solar:

• Thin film solar maker First Solar is down 5.87 percent.
• Solar panel maker SunPower fell 8.26 percent.
• Chinese solar panel maker Suntech has fallen 7.55 percent.

Biofuels:

• Biofuel maker Gevo is down 11 percent. Ouch.
• Algae oil company Solazyme crashed 8.80 percent.
• Biofuel maker KiOR is down 5.57 percent.
• Biofuel maker Amyris dropped 5.40 percent.

Electric car and batteries:

• Lithium ion battery maker A123 Systems crashed a whopping 14.73 percent.
• Electric car maker Tesla Motors is down just a touch at 1.82 percent.
• Battery maker Ener1 is down 7.33 percent to 0.73.

Smart grid:

• Smart meter and network maker Itron fell by 9.05 percent.
• Demand response company Comverge crashed down 15.09 percent.
• Demand response leader EnerNOC dropped by just 4.75 percent.
• Smart meter and network maker Echelon fell by just 2.76 percent.

Random:

• Car sharing company Zipcar is down 15 percent. Another ouch.
• Clean Energy Fuels, which makes natural gas infrastructure for gas-powered cars, dropped 10.91 percent.

Image courtesy of Yoshimov, creative commons.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Cleantech first-quarter 2013 analysis and outlook
• A 2011 Green IT Forecast
• Green IT’s Q4 Winners: Wind Power, Solar Power, Smart Energy

Solyndra Solar Panels Ready To Ship

Updated: Solyndra, the thin-film solar tube maker, has been planning on raising even more funds this year, hoping to reach a cash-flow-positive state in the fourth quarter of this year, Solyndra Director of Corporate Communications David Miller told me in April during a factory tour. According to a filing on Thursday, Solyndra has raised another $10.66 million in options, warrants or rights to acquire another security.

We reached out to the company and are waiting to hear back on more details of the funds and future fund-raising efforts. Clearly, $10 million isn’t going to get them very far, so I’d bet the company will be filing more fund-raising docs this year. Update: Karen Alter, Senior Vice President, Marketing, Solyndra, tells me that the deal has to do with “a private transaction with an existing investor in anticipation of future growth.”

Solyndra has already raised around a billion dollars in private equity and a coveted a $535 million loan guarantee to get to this point. Miller told me Solyndra hit $140 million in revenues in 2010, and the company plans to grow that substantially in 2011, as well.

Solyndra has been expanding its manufacturing in order to get its costs of production down. The idea behind the design of its tube-shaped solar panels is that it’s meant to have a lower overall cost of installation, and can also be used in places where flat heavy panels can’t be installed. But the catch is that the original manufacturing costs of the tube-shaped panels are higher than panels on the market, and other thin-film solar competitors.

Solyndra Panels Getting Inspected

Back in April, Miller showed me all the machines that together produce Solyndra’s unusual tubular solar systems, including machines that spray Solyndra’s solar materials — copper, indium, gallium and selenium (CIGS) — onto uniform layers on tubes, machines that place the materials into glass tubes, machines that insert gas-filled bags into the tubes, machines that spray inert gas into the tubes, and machines that assemble the tubes into the racking system. It’s a complex process, which is why costs have been higher.

As we wrote back in February, it’s a make or break year for Solyndra. The company shipped 60 MW of modules to customers in 2010, is approaching 100 MW installed by its customers, and hopes to boost its annual production rate to 200 MW by the end of this year, and 300 MW by the end of 2013. Production costs have fallen to less than $2.50 per watt, Ben Bierman, Solyndra’s EVP of operations and engineering, told us in an interview earlier this year.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The race for cost-effective and efficient solar power
• After Solyndra: analyzing the solar industry
• What the Solyndra case says about the government and cleantech

As the New York Times explains it, such a sizable move by GE could potentially shake up the thin film solar market. First Solar is the leader in the U.S., but there’s a variety of other startups that have been struggling to ramp up production this year including MiaSole, Nanosolar, and Solyndra.

GE — via its PrimeStar acquisition — has been focusing on panels made of cadmium-telluride (CdTe). First Solar makes those types of panels, and has factories totaling 1.4 GW and plans to expand that to 2.7 GW by 2012. Abound Solar is also in this space and cinched a $400 million federal loan last year to build a new factory and expand an existing one. The new factories, along with an existing 65 MW plant, will give Abound 840 MW in production capacity by the end of 2014.

GE has been signaling this ramp up for awhile, and told us last month: “We’re continuing to make good progress in the lab and [are] on track to get a product out later this year,” said GE Global Research spokesman, Todd Alhart. “We think larger volume and bigger growth opportunities will come from scaling up this technology further, and that’s what we are working on now.”

GE’s involvement in solar is interesting, because the tech giant already is a formidable player in the power plant equipment and construction business, from fossil fuel to nuclear energy. In the renewable power space, the company is a big player in the wind market. It turned its attention to solar only in recent years and decided to sell its only silicon solar panel assembly plant in the U.S. back in 2009 in order to focus on, apparently, solar technologies that use non-silicon materials.

Last October, GE offered an outline of its plan to tackle the solar market by announcing a deal to sell copper-indium-gallium-selenide (CIGS) solar panels from Solar Frontier in Japan. In Solar Frontier, GE found a partner that can supply in high volumes. Solar Frontier recently opened a 900 MW factory and is bringing its factory equipment online to reach that full production capacity.

But now GE is becoming a thin film player in its own right. GE recently showed off CdTe solar panels by hooking them up to run a carousel at the South by Southwest conference in Austin.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Green IT Q4: solar, subsidies and the outlook for EVs
• The opportunities for the Internet and clean power
• The growth and promise of the LED market

GE’s Cd-Te partner is Denver, Colo.-based PrimeStar Solar, which intends to start producing panels at its 30MW plant next year, and which GE has previously invested in. GE has three customers for those panels already, though it isn’t naming them, and says it’s looking at expanding production, either at today’s Colorado plant or elsewhere, Matt Guyette, global strategy leader for GE’s Renewable Energy business, told me in a Tuesday interview.

As for the next-gen CIGS panels, GE is working with Showa Shell Sekiyu’s business unit Solar Frontier, which plans to have 900MWs of capacity up and running next year. Competing CIGS players include startups Nanosolar, Miasole, and HelioVolt.

Both GE’s CIGS and cadmium-telluride panels can claim 11 percent efficiency, Guyette said — within reach of the 11.2-percent efficiencies of First Solar’s panels. Recent cells running off PrimeStar’s Cd-Tel line have reached 15 percent efficiency, Guyette said, though getting panel efficiencies to that level is certainly farther out. GE sold its more conventional polysilicon solar panel manufacturing business to Taiwanese solar company Motech last year, largely because GE didn’t see “technical innovation” in the space, he said.

Guyette declined to compare GE’s thin-film panels costs to First Solar’s, which stood at 78 cents per watt as of the second quarter. Instead, he said GE’s integrated solar offering is expected to bring its levelized cost of energy — the price of power over a system’s lifetime — lower than the competition. Beyond its own inverters, custom racking system and system-wide integration, GE will offer a range of services aimed at designing and maintaining both utility-scale and rooftop installations, he said.

These kinds of balance-of-systems (BOS) costs are an increasing focus of the solar industry, with microinverters, power electronics and solar power monitoring and management technologies offering efficiency increases that are becoming harder and harder to squeeze out of the panels themselves. GE’s depth of direct involvement in every part of the balance-of-system chain could give it big advantages over developers that piece theirs together.

Indeed, integration over the entire system is emerging fast and furious. Inverter maker PowerOne bought solar monitoring/management startup Fat Spaniel last week, in a move that Fat Spaniel investor Element Partners ascribed to wanting to package solar monitoring in a broader solar equipment and services offering. Last week, Chinese solar panel giant Suntech said it would incorporate solar optimization technology from both stealthy startup Azuray and chipmaking giant National Semiconductor.

Much of GE’s integrated solar offering is following in the footsteps of its $6 billion wind power business, Guyette noted. That includes GE’s 700KW and 1MW Brilliance inverters and its SunIQ system — the “brains behind managing a solar farm” — based on similar systems its developed to manage intermittent wind power.

GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt has said he wants GE’s solar business to rival its wind business in the future, but Guyette said the company hasn’t set any specific goals for its solar business. It will have ample competition, as rival announcements from the first day of this week’s Solar Power International conference indicate.

For more research, check out GigaOM Pro (subscription required):

• The Real Reason Google Is Buying Wind Power
• Facebook’s Coal-Powered Problem
• Green IT Overview Q2 2010