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

To: Krowbar who wrote (6938)	10/11/2002 8:10:09 PM
From: alfranco	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 8393

Del, 8.5% is the low end efficiency number we've heard on the new machine. Stan said around 9% in the May CC and any of these compare favorably to the 7.3-7.5% of the 5MW machine. Others have said 10%. Bekaert writes of up 11% in a Euro PV brochure in a few years. The average home PV system is just 2KW, so at 10% efficiency, all that is required is 200 suitably-located/oriented square feet of sun exposed surface to meet the goal of the homeowner, double that for people who want/need more. 10% would allow BESS to not be at a perceived W/square-foot disadvantage versus the rest of the market and allow them to say another sentence or two to the buyer such as: >our stuff will give you more energy payback per upfront PV watt expense >our stuff is the actual roof/siding not an extra structure so total material costs are reduced >installation costs are cheaper (clamped batten/seam,peelnstick & hopefully to come soon, polymer) >plus rocks/hailstorms won't render it useless. As for deposition techniques and this subcontract, I think the 30MW is fixed with set cathodes and tweaking only involves the recipe (gas flows/temperature/pressure/current) for each chamber to be optimized and I understand the tweaking for this machine is taking well under half the time that was needed for the 5MW, despite the 30MW having 4X greater number of chambers, perhaps due to the newly incorporated realtime monitoring capabilities for each junction. The contract mentions back reflector and this is a separate machine and presumably testing will be done on a small scale with a machine separate from the Auburn Hills plant, at the lab or the 5MW facility. If it works, then I would not rule out the larger back reflector machine for the 30MW being modified to incorporate these gains but this is only a guess. As for the cell deposition chambers, I can't say if they might or might not pull those cathodes in the future and replace them if the gains were significant enough. I muse about this possibility, replacing the cathodes with higher frequency cathodes later without rebuilding the machine, but I've never heard anyone at BESS/Unisolar/ECD suggest that this might be done in the future. Actually, I've avoided pestering them with novice questions, my motto is do not disturb their tweaking rhythm.<g> Del, the more I know the more I realize how little I knows. Here's a question I carry around in my pocket since Sept 2000(Stan at the Philly conf): if at 100MW scale our PV can compete with grid-distributed power, then why doesn't someone, say CVX-Bekaert, call Stan on this claim with a few corporate 'pennies' to do it? One might excuse our commercial/profit track record as reason for their keeping a discrete distance? Or are they waiting to kick our Ovonic tech into world-changing high gear only when they own it? I wish I knew. Regards, Al