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Technology Stocks : Energy Conversion Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: jacq who wrote (6908)	9/28/2002 4:02:30 AM
From: alfranco	Respond to of 8393

Jacq, glad the $6-$9 was sales price cited and not any recent Unisolar production costs, thanks for clearing up my confusion. Many buyers judge PV by two factors: cost/watt and module efficiency and Unisolar's sales force needs to be able to give these potential customers a simple and competitive answer: low price and high efficiency. All the rest is secondary to the average buyer, all the special factors about Unisolar BIPV become irrelevant for many buyers if the first two questions don't receive satisfactory low/high answers. And they aren't going to read the technical reports to figure out the minutiae that we dissect here, they are just going to tune out the salesperson's subsequent statements. Long answers in the marketplace, like this one is becoming <g>, lose. Jacq, as for $1/W or $2/W cost figures, we've heard a lot on Unisolar/Sovonics lifetime road to profits. $1/W has been mentioned but never specifically applied to an existing generation machine, still reserved for 100MW capacity. As for PV machine capital costs, they figure large in our PV process since our machine is more capital intensive to build than APWR/others line but we are told our energy use is less at lower temps and material use less with thin film and quality control higher with in line monitoring and assembly costs lower with greater automation. Bekaert is probably looking upon this new machine as their 'test machine' before considering duplicating an upgraded version or going to a next generation larger machine. BESS's bid to the Calif Power Auth promised significant volume at competitive price and got better year over year. BESS has said to expect falling/more competitive PV prices with the new 25MW machine over the next 2-3 years and that legal bid matched Bekaert's words... good IMO. If anyone is still wondering, how can Stan's stated 1000 miles/yr of 8.5% stabilized cells only equal 30MW annual capacity? Doesn't compute for me using 14" wide roll to roll, even if the rolls are trimmed down to 13.5" for module assembly. All for now, Al