Tag Archives: factory
PV Manufacturers Ready for Good News
A new NPD Solarbuzz Marketbuzz report anticipates that photovoltaic manufacturers will start to see a rebound in profitability—if they can make it to 2017. By then the research company anticipates that the PV manufacturing market will reach $32 billion. But that’s still a couple years away, and prior to that Solarbuzz anticipates that the market [...]
The Solar Manufacturing Industry: No Improvements Yet
Recent solar module production capacity has been nearly twice the demand, resulting in significant overcapacity and excessive inventories. Solar manufacturers have reduced prices to record lows, often at or below the module cost of goods sold (COGS). Companies have been hunkering down until overall market conditions improve by laying off workers or actively seek creative [...]
1366 Technologies Kerfless PV Wafer Fab
Against the headwind of a chaotic solar market, 1366 Technologies of Lexington, Mass., a startup with VC funding and a DOE loan guarantee, just opened a $6 million, 25-megawatt wafer fabrication facility that could eventually employ 100 people. The company’s technology falls in the “kerfless wafer” category, a technology of special interest for outgoing DOE [...]
Volkswagen’s Passat: Built with Solar
Volkswagen started getting power from the Volkswagen Chattanooga Solar Park yesterday, the biggest solar system installed by an automaker in the US. The Passat sedan will now be made using solar in the greenest auto manufacturing plant in the world, the only one to earn LEED-Platinum. It is also Tennessee’s biggest solar system. 33,600 solar panels made by [...]
Lux Research: Solar Manufacturers Invest in Equipment
The last couple years have been hard on solar panel manufacturers and many might not have a lot of capital for equipment upgrades, but they will have to pony-up to compete, according to a report from Lux Research. The research and analytics firm released its “Turning lemons into lemonade: Opportunities in the turbulent photovoltaic equipment [...]
With DOE Loan Guarantee, SoloPower Opens Oregon Plant
SoloPower is preparing to receive dispersement of a $197 million U.S. DOE Loan Guarantee. Federal loan guarantees supporting solar manufacturing have gone the way of the Dodo since the demise of Solyndra, but SoloPower was grandfathered into the program, and as it prepares to open its new manufacturing facility this Thursday (Sep. 27), it’s [...]
Anheuser Busch Brewery: Wind, Solar & Biogas
Between biogas, wind and solar, Anheuser-Busch generates about half of its electricity from renewable energy to make beer at its Fairfield, California plant. The company is the largest in the US to use nutrients in its wastewater to make biogas, a process called bio-energy recovery systems (BERS). They also recover the steam that heats boilers in the brew house to produce energy, in addition [...]
SEMI: Solar Equipment Supplier Slump to Continue
For the third straight quarter the sales of new manufacturing equipment for solar photovoltaic has slipped, showing there’s less new PV manufacturing coming online, according to a new report from SEMI, a semiconductor industry trade group. While it doesn’t necessarily mean manufacturers are cutting back their production, it does show that the growth of the [...]
US Foods Goes Solar Across the Board
Food giant US Foods, which has locations across the US, has just signed a deal to put solar on another of its facilities. This time at it’s Albuquerque, N.M., distribution center. The company already has solar on four of its warehouses across the country with more to come. The most recent agreement is for a 430 [...]