Day One of Solar Power International is over.  SPI landed in Los Angeles, California along with 27,000 of its closest friends and filled several exhibition halls with solar products and people.

Previous SPI events were big but not this big.  Solar is no longer a boutique industry. 

The mood was upbeat and the outlook positive with some visibility intothe next few quarters of strong growth and continued sold out factoriesfor the next quarter or three.  Forecasts are a bit murkier out furtherthan that with massive capacity coming on-line and some uncertainty over the German feed-in-tariff and the usual ignorance over what the UScongress might do, if anything.  Module prices are expected to continueto fall over the next quarters with approximately 15 gigawatts shippedin 2010 and the prospect of 20 gigawatts shipped in 2011.

Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter, spoke about his visionary businesspractices and the creation of cultural shift at Tuesday’s GeneralSession at SPI.  Biz Stone was a last-minute replacement for Peter Darbee, CEO and president of Pacific Gas and Electric.  (Secretary of the Interior Kenneth Salazar will speak on Wednesday onthe Obama administration’s efforts to make a rapid move to large-scaleproduction of renewable energy on public lands.)

Inverters, microinverters and DC optimizers were everywhere. And if you don’t know the term "AC Module" — well you do now.  Microinverterfirms had the photovoltaic panels of leading suppliers intergrated withtheir microinverters in their booths and panel manufacturers showed offtheir own AC modules.  We went into detail on that topic in this Microinverter Bubble article.

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