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ECD announced another "Multi-Year Supply Agreement" today. According to the press release, Mercury Solar Systems "expects to purchase approximately 15MW of laminates over the term of the agreement." Apparently, this agreement is not much different that the other recent "agreements" with Enfinity, Inovateus, EnergyPeak, and Johns Manville.
Mercury is described in the press release as "one of the leading
solar integrators on the East Coast. The company designs and installs
solar electric and solar thermal energy systems for the commercial and
residential marketplace and to date has installed hundreds of solar systems totaling several million watts of energy" [bold mine].
Impressive? Actually, Mercury appears rather small - about 2MW
installed since 2006, and about 1000 installations, mostly solar water
heaters (see this [cached] and this [cached] press releases) - if they were an installer in California, they wouldn't make the top-10 list.
Mercury "have consistently been attracted to UNI-SOLAR products," according to the quote in the press release. Unfortunately, the list of projects [cached]
on their web site shows only one Unisolar installation - a tiny 13.64
kW installation in Bronx, NY in 2006 (see the grant description on page II-52 [cached] - it comes to $7.33 per Watt - so much for "low installed cost"). Nothing since. Mercury's current partners [cached] are all among the top-15 PV manufacturers with leading market share, per CSI's reservation database. Unisolar, with their 0.1% share, would be an outlier.
Interestingly, AGT, no stranger to this blog, has been listing that Bronx project [cached] as their own for some time now (which is quite remarkable as AGT got incorporated [cached] only in April 2007). There might be more to this story than the press release reveals.
