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With one swift 200.5KW non-profit installation reservation in Union City, CA on 8/31/2009 (is this the "recently awarded large rooftop project for a California college, funded in part by government incentives" mentioned by Mr. Morelli on the Aug 27th earnings call?)
, Unisolar effectively doubled its market share in California to 0.2%
(yes, zero point two percent), bringing cumulative reservations to
585KW since Jan 1st, 2008, per the CSI database!
Total cost: $795,760.
Projected installed cost per Watt: $3.97!
Wow, so is this how Mr. Morelli can claim installed cost below $5 per Watt in the June quarter (slide 6 of the earnings call presentation), when the analysis of other public data seem to indicate Unisolar's installed costs are stuck at $6 or higher?
The system seller is 3rd Rock Systems & Technologies, Inc, a familiar face. According to the CSI database, 3rd Rock has previously made 15 reservations
as a seller since December 2006. Of those 15, only two have been
completed (one 151KW with a mix of Unisolar laminates, BP and Schott
panels, in May 2008 [$7.08-per-Watt installed cost] and one 49KW with
Schott Solar panels in June of 2008 [$7.79-per-Watt installed cost],
per CSI). Everything else has been cancelled, withdrawn, or in a limbo.
But what is really interesting is the 3rd
Rock reservation first reviewed by the CSI on Jan 16th, 2007. It is a
200.1KW non-profit installation reservation in Union City, CA, with
projected cost of $1.6mill (or $8 per Watt). The current status of that
installation is "suspended", updated as of 4/4/2008. Does this
reservation remind you of some other, more recent, reservation? Oh, and
by the way, the NAICS code of that 2007 non-profit customer was entered
as 611112, which comes as invalid, but the more general code, 61111 comes as "61111 Elementary and Secondary Schools."
Now, I can't seem to find a college in Union City by trying google, but
I can find plenty of elementary, secondary, and professional schools.
However I do not live there, so I may be missing something. And, maybe,
Unisolar won some other large (college) project in California recently?
But
what appears very likely is that the this "new" 8/31/2009 reservation
is simply a refiling of the old 1/16/2007 reservation (but specifying
1,474 laminates rather than the original plan for 1,471 laminates, and
with sharply reduced projected cost). What happened here? Have the
laminates been sitting too long (2 years and 8 months?) in storage,
thus reducing their value to basically nothing, and thus, the projected
cost essentially reflects balance-of-system costs, rather than
installed (aka all-in) costs? Read the warning
on page 7 by Marcegaglia that the products should not be stored for no
more than 6 months in order to maintain the original performance
characteristics! Hopefully somebody "in the know" will be able to shed
some light on this mystery.
