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

To: jacq who wrote (7633)	4/16/2004 5:52:47 AM
From: alfranco	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 8393

SIT update 2 It's fun to keep turning up new stuff every few days on SIT's website... spotted just this afternoon a fleeting glimpse> 200 kW of SR2001 (yep, that's US) landing on the Hawthorne Machinery Roof as of a March SIT date release and why it pops up just now via their web designer I can't say... furthermore I found it just this afternoon but I can't find it tonight as I go to post it. Maybe tomorrow it will reappear or sometime sooner. <g> Repeating the 3 points of my first SIT update: Sarnafil's salesforce is becoming our salesforce, FritoLay is adding another 300kW on top of the original 200kW plus linkup to UK and German plant PepsiCo managers as SIT opens new offices on their home turf plus SIT's mention of up to 5MW of orders from San Diego as they announced completion of the 100kW school roof project... Every single one of these mentioned projects is, SO FAR, based on Unisolar and Sarnafil. Good BIPV brings together some interesting couples: the world's leader in membrane roofing-Sarnafil, the 5th largest roofer in the US-So Cal Roofing, and Unisolar that accounted for 7MW or ~ 1% of world market exchange last year. But BIPV is compelling because of its' flexible deployment and we are ace for large-scale projects per these partners who have just shaken hands with us and look how they are releasing their last month-really-today releases as I write.<g> STILL> dwmeldrum's caution on the wizard of Oz rings true to me as evidenced by this 1996 reported statement which I don't think I have ever posted before: (from the South Coast Times 1996) "In cranking up their export production, solar companies in the United States are hoping to achieve new economies of scale to drive prices down significantly. The panels they make, which range in size from less than 1 watt of generating capacity to 300 or more watts, now cost about $4.50 a watt at the retail level. Stan Ovshinsky, president and chief executive of Energy Conversion Devices, has developed a manufacturing process at his new factory in Troy, Mich., that he said could send the price for his panels down to $1 a watt in three years. That price "will drive explosive demand, not just in the developing world, but everywhere," said Eric Ingersoll, a managing partner with Environmental Advantage, a consulting firm in New York that studies the renewable-energy industries. Visionaries speak with promise of timelines but the promise can not be counted on. I would like to end on a good note that I believe. First, CIGs was ditched funding-wise IMO by the defense industry for amorphous Si for thin film satellite (surprise for me as I watched & waited) with major support with real bucks, ECD's dollars are all non-cost sharing government grants for their amorphous Si thin film R&D on the 5MW machine. Imagine if our 5MW machine was selling output for thin film PV at JUST $20/watt for airships/satellites when typical (and very heavy with attendant expensive $/kg launch costs) GaAs crystalline PV selling at $100-300/watt... what might happen for us in this burgeoning satellite PV power industry in the next 3-5 years? Research has been underway to foldably deploy PV panels and was used for crystalline PV on the Int'l Space Station but the govt also has funded lightweight PV unfolding mechanisms suitable to their desire for thin film space PV. It is IMO just a matter of time and in a conservative 3-5 yea scenario called the one-way-big-bucks-space-launch-business ...MIR's Unisolar panel's beginning-of-life versus end-of-life stability may have given us the opportunity to deploy our PV on the higher-power demanding satellites of the future. For now, Unisolar is on the leading edge... at least by virtue of govt. funding choices. Lastly, I bumped into one of Unisolar's scientists at the MRS in San Francisco and he made it very clear to me, with the utmost politeness, that esoteric technicals that I would have enjoyed discussing e.g. hydrogen dilution gradients, multi-speed machines, microcrystalline bottom layers as potential substitutions for germanium layers, etc. are not, even for their research department, Unisolar's current prime focus... sales are the focus and sales are on the way. And the scale of those sales is well beyond that which interested Unisolar in the past. I believe this gentleman, Al