Transcript: Advances in Systems Application of Solar Power for Critical Functions

THE CNA CORPORATION

ENERGY:  A CONVERSATION
ABOUT OUR NATIONAL ADDICTION

“SOLAR:  PHOTOVOTAIC ADVANCES IN SYSTEM APPLICATION FOR CRITICAL FUNCTIONS”


SPEAKERS:

SCOTT SKLAR,
PRESIDENT,
THE STELLA GROUP

DR. ROBERT BIRKMIRE,
INSTITUTE FOR ENERGY CONVERSION,
UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE


MONDAY, OCTOBER 16, 2006
6:00 P.M. TO 8:30 P.M.








Transcript by:
Federal News Service
Washington, D.C.




STEVE WEHRENBERG:  Well, good evening, ladies and gentlemen.  If you take your seats, we’ll get started.  I want to welcome all of you to our seventh evening – the seventh evening – the seventh ongoing conversation about energy.  My name is Steve Wehrenberg.  I’m the director of the Coast Guard’s Future Force effort and director of executive development as well.  By night, however, I’m more related to a nonprofit, the Energy Consensus, dedicated to educating the public, decision-makers, and those who influence them on the challenges and the opportunities that we face in our energy future.

I’ve been delighted so far to serve as your moderator for this series.  I hope that won’t end tonight.  We’ll see.  (Laughter.)  And it is my habit – that was one of our speakers, by the way; he must know what I mean – my habit, I would like to thank our hosts.  Mr. Terry Pudas is here – Terry, raise a hand.  Okay, Terry left already.  Oh, there you are.  I’m sorry.  (Chuckles.)  Terry is director of OSC’s Office of Force Transformation and is our co-host, as the Honorable Ken Krieg, undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics, all subjects that are very much related to energy.  At the end of the program I’ll make sure we give them a round of applause for their gracious hosting of this event.

Before we get started, just a couple of administrative issues.  We occasionally use an online survey.  I say occasionally because we were going to do it after every event, but the interval is too short to do anything about it, so we decided that we would use an occasional survey to gather your feedback about this program.  If you get an email inviting you to participate in the survey, please do.  It’s the feedback that we get that will allow us to tailor this to best meet your needs.  It should only take a few minutes.

Our website is fully functional.  This is a screen shot from our website.  Earl is at the top. 

MITZI WERTHEIM:  That’s an old one.  Look at the date at the bottom – September 18th – (off mike).

MR. WEHERENBERG:  Well, it’s an old screenshot, but it’s still the same website.  (Laughter.)  It’s okay.  And if you go there, you won’t see this page; you’ll see something more modern than this.  So that perhaps is the best way to look at it.

As you can see, there are transcripts of – all the programs we have are available there, as well as audio versions of this so that you could listen to our wonderful speakers in your car while you’re commuting – in your solar-powered car while you’re commuting.  (Laughter.)  I’m sorry; I should make that very clear.  We also put notices of future events and links to lots of good places, mostly related to the energy research that’s being done and the energy innovations that are being discovered in our military.  We also put a – it says weekly but I’m not sure it’s happening quite weekly right now.  We strive for that and will strive for that – just sort of a short weekly newsletter that we’re posting on the website as well.

I bring all this up because very soon, I think by the time we have our next event, we should have a new website that is a little more participative.  It’s sort of halfway between a standard website and a blog in that you’ll have the opportunity to help decide what is on that website so that it can indeed best meet your needs, remembering of course that our objective is to get you together with people who are interested in the same kinds of things so that you can share research and share your understanding of our energy community.

And we use that term “community” – that’s a pretty important term to us because we believe that the transformative power of a community of interest is really unlimited, and if we can bring together people who share a concern for our energy future, then we will doubtless all be better off than we would have been otherwise. 

Recent national polls suggest that both awareness and propensity to act regarding energy and environmental issues have increased in the American public over the past year, and I think you here bear at least some modest responsibility for that.  Thank you all for joining this community.

In the event that you need to dash off before our conclusion tonight, I’ll remind you that the topic of next month’s conversation, which will be on the 13th of November, will be Brian Appel, the CEO of Changing World Technologies, and he will educate us regarding his efforts at turning waste into fuel.  You might want to eat early.  (Laughter.)  Well, it’s not the most pleasant presentation that you can imagine.  So, well, turkey offal is turkey offal. 

MR.    :  This is Washington –

MR. WEHERENBERG:  This is Washington, so everybody here will be used to it; you’re absolutely right.

We have a very exciting conversation tonight, one that I’ve been looking forward to because I too want to put solar stuff on my house.  Our first speaker this evening is Scott Sklar, the founder and president of the Stella Group, a strategic marketing and policy firm for clean distributed energy users, and companies blending distributed energy technologies.  He’s not selling a particular product but a whole array of products to meet the solutions of the firms that he deals with.

He’s co-authored two books: “A Consumer’s Guide to Solar Energy,” and “The Forbidden Fuel:  Power Alcohol in the 20th Century.”  He’s a columnist – that’s columnist, okay – serves on numerous boards and is the chair of the Steering Committee’s Sustainable Energy Coalition.  Scott’s home in Arlington features a solar hot water system, a – let’s see, you have solar panels on all the roofs of everything that you own there just about.  A separate office building has not only solar PV roofing shingles that is hard to tell from regular roofing shingles, but he has a wind turbine, and the first commercial-leased fuel cell in the United States in his backyard.  I’m not sure how tickled his neighbors have always been about that prospect, but it is what it is. 

SCOTT SKLAR:  (Off mike.)

MR. WEHERENBERG:  It is what it is, Scott.  That’s absolutely right.

Following Scott will be Dr. Robert Birkmire, who is the director of the Institute of Energy Conversion, which recently, I understand, celebrated its 34th anniversary, which is not bad for soft money, when you think about it.  Organizations funded that way don’t usually last 34 years, so that says something to the constitution of that particular institution.

It is a United States Department of Energy Center of Excellence for Photovoltaic Research and Education.  He is also a professor of material science and engineering and professor of physics.  His current research efforts are related to thin-film semiconductors for photovoltaic and optoelectronic devices, and the relationship – I have all this memorized of course – the relationship of the growth process to film properties and performance of those devices. 

He is deeply committed to the transfer of his laboratory results to practical commercial enterprise.  That’s important to hear because so often we encounter people who aren’t as deeply committed to that transfer.  Bob has authored over 165 technical publications and awarded eight U.S. patents. 

I think what we’ll do is have both speakers give you an overview of what it is they do, and then after they’re through we’ll open it up for questions and answers – well, questions and we hope answers.

So on that note, Scott Sklar.

(Applause.)

MR. SKLAR:  Thank you very much.  As you can see from the brochure and my biography, I had a nine-year career on national hill doing military – in the Senate on Capitol Hill doing military affairs, then the oil embargo’s carrot (?), then worked with a small federally-funded applied research lab, the environmental community, and then ran the solar and biomass trade association side by side for 15 years. 

My company now blends distributed generation – all kinds, so I’m not promoting a particular kind – and helps commercial, industrial and government users of the technology pick the technologies, finance it, or troubleshoot the problems.  There’s problems with all technology – the ones we have now conventionally and the new ones, and part of it is to learn how to cope and survive.

With that – if I’ve got this right, which it’s not working – 

MR.    :  (Off mike) – left-right?

MR. SKLAR:  I’m doing left-right.  Oh, there it goes.  Okay, those are the different technologies I work with, and the blended financing or everything from conventional financing, bonds, leasing, and then of the myriad of federal and state programs that are out there.

Okay, bear with me.  Oh, there we go.  I wanted to move about 60,000 feet up.  The presentation today is – I’m going to describe the car and then Dr. Birkmire is going to describe the engine of the car.  That’s how we’re going to do it.  But I want to talk to you about the planet.  We have 6 billion-plus people on this planet, and as I show you there, by 2025 minimum, we’re going to have about 8 billion people on this planet.  Of that, 6.7 (billion) will be in developing countries.  And as you can see from the next item, 1.2 billion live on less than $1 a day and 3 billion less than $2.  And that’s really what I want to talk to you about.  At the present time we have 2 billion people without electricity and a half a billion people without any access to clean water.  That is the fact.  They are not going to have power lines and they are burning dung and kerosene that actually costs more than the technology we’re about to talk to you today.

That is the real issue.  Half the planet will not have power lines in my granddaughter’s lifetime – and my daughter is only 13 years old, so that’s a long way away.  They will not have power lines.  And those that even do, the billion people that do have power lines in the developing world, at the lowest rung, are working off of watts, not kilowatts like we live here in America. 

So the energy needs and densities are very different.  And as we think about – in this country we always talk about living to our lifestyle and our energy density.  I just want to say that there are people that they’ll have barely any energy density and they aspire to something very different.

I also want to remind you that in Friday, the Nobel Prize Committee awarded the Nobel Prize to Muhammad Yunus, founder of the Grameen Bank.  And Yunus, starting in the ‘70s – I know him well; he’s a great man – and what he did was he decided that by giving targeted loans under $200 U.S. to the poorest of the poor, you could transform their life if the loans were given for productive uses, meaning things that could help them build their wealth base.  And that man gave out 80,000 loans under $200.  Less than one-hundredth of 1 percent defaulted – so a better ratio than Citibank.  And it was ridiculed at the time – of course – but the fact of the matter is he was quoted in the New York Times this weekend as saying, I got into this because if a little bit of money can change people’s lives so radically without me losing the money at the end, why wouldn’t I want to do more of it?

And so my challenge as you go through this dialogue is, if we have capability to provide little bits of clean power at the customer side of the meter that can radically change their lives, and it’s cheaper than what the do now, why wouldn’t we want to do more of it? 

And so that’s sort of the challenge as you think about it, and so here I’m back in Arlington, Virginia, where you’re sitting at Scott Sklar’s house, and, you know, I have photovoltaics in my Washington office downtown, and as I mentioned I have solar water heating and photovoltaics in my home in Arlington, but here’s the play:  I had a 5.5 kilowatt house, and I put a lot of energy efficiency in it – not everything I could do, by the way.  I could have brought the maximum load to my house instead of 3.85 kilowatts to one-and-a-half if I wanted to spend a lot more money, but I didn’t.  And my average load being – I’m not running an air conditioner or heaters or everything, but just today – my load at my house was about 1.8 kilowatts.

Now, as you can see in the bottom notch, I have a 2.2 kilowatt system, so I don’t take – I’m a zero-energy home about eight months to 10 months of the  year, and then during summertime when I have most of my air conditioners on, then obviously I pull some from the grid.

Now, a year is 8,760 hours.  In Virginia here we’re paying about 8 cents, so monthly bills for about 2 kilowatts is about $117 a month, and then the summer months are a little over $300 a month.  So of course I put in my system in ’84, 22 years ago, and for the first 15-year loan I took on my mortgage to pay for it, it cost me $210 a year.  So you can see I paid less for the two months that were $334 but obviously $100 a month more for 15 years.  Now, I had to replace the battery bank, but now I pay $79.31 for that battery bank basically, my second mortgage, and that’s it, rather than $117 a month.  So now I’m making money.

Is photovoltaics economic in the residential sector in the United States of America?  Probably not.  It’s marginal here.  But my business is commercial industrial.  I’m paid by the biggest corporations on this planet to bring in onsite energy.  And a good portion of it is photovoltaics, and why do they do that, and why would they want to?  And they were doing it before tax credits.

Well, first I want to talk about the military, and we’ll walk through this, but I want to say that many of you sitting in this room that come from the DOD family, this was just in October ’06 Aerospace Daily & Defense Report, and, you know, it’s just sort of showing the different things happening around the agency.  I have some more in my testimony I did for the House Armed Services Committee a few weeks ago that I passed around to you as well.  But you have all sorts of activities going on in wind and photovoltaics – Coronado’s photovoltaic carport, 5 million kilowatt hours produced, is just one example of what’s going on. 

And I’m going to pass around this, which is a thin-film product by a company in Michigan, UNI-SOLAR, and this powers field phones.  There are 10,000 of these in the Army today, and I want you to pass it around and I want you to touch it, and that’s thin film and the sunlight charges the field foam batteries.  They have smaller ones, by the way, that go in pockets.  They have vests.  And the spook side of it even is more exciting – (laughter) – and I’m not allowed to tell you that; I don’t want to be arrested. 

But the fact of the matter is the technology is around.  And I want you to think about this photovoltaic technology for a second that we’re talking about.  Think about electricity and what you know, what you learned in school, but I want to put it in start terms for it, because it really is revolutionary, what’s being passed around to you.  You know, we really – when I go and talk to schools – elementary or college, universities – I bring a teapot with me when I give them their energy lecture because fundamentally in this country, almost 90 percent our energy is actually all geared to create steam.  That’s all we’re doing.  We’re getting steam and we’re turning a generator.  And that’s how you generate electricity, whether you burn wood or natural gas or fuel oil or coal or nuclear, al you’re doing is heating water up to turn a generator, period, and then sending it on long lines to put 1.8 kilowatts in Scott Sklar’s house, if he didn’t have PV.

Two kinds of energy use mechanical means – wind and water – and they turn that generator instead of steam.  There are only two technologies actually that do neither.  One is fuel cells – a different program; I’m sorry, I'm not going to get into it today – and photovoltaics, the direct conversation of sunlight to electricity – no steam, no mechanical.  Both are using basic processes to create electricity.  It’s pretty astounding to think about it, that you can create massive amounts of electricity all over the planet without burning anything.  And that’s part of why the military is thinking about it, and we’ll get to that in a second.

As I told you, why would commercial companies buy this expensive stuff, or any of the portfolio I deal with, which includes fuel cells and combining power systems and micro-hydro systems and advanced battery banks.  Well, it’s really to do three things.  It’s really to first protect sophisticated equipment.  Twenty years ago it actually didn’t matter, but today we are a digital country, the industrialized world, and in fact, we spend $8 billion a year on surge protection – by the way, of which half does not work.  And I’m sure you all have them in your homes.  And I see them in every computer store and every electronic store I go to.  And the surges and swells and transients in the grid that didn’t matter in the tubed world, when you get to the sophisticated digital world actually wreak havoc.  And in fact, a third of the computer problems that you blame on Bill Gates or Dell are not them at all; it’s these little transients, these spurts of electrons that wreak havoc in your computer, and manufacturing controls and communications equipment.  And frankly, that is the highest value asset for distributed generation, particularly photovoltaics, today.

The second is the bottom one, which is sure that functions continue when the electric grid goes down.  Now, I want to tell you, one of my first – when I set up my business six years ago I got called by one of the biggest book sellers in the United States to five of their stores on the East Coast – I signed a nondisclosure so I can’t name the name – and I came in with a smart aleck like, you know, why do you want my stuff; it’s expensive – thinking they just want to do it for green branding.  And the guy from New Jersey, tough accent, says, “Do you know what you’re talking about?  Do you know how many outages my stores get per year that last an hour or longer?”  I go, “No sir.”  He goes, “Five.  Do you know how much I lose per hour per store?”  I go, “No, sir.”  “Ten-thousand dollars.  So can you put in systems in my five stores in this state that are under $100,000” – meaning two-year payback – “and power the card swipes and cash registers?  That’s all I care about.  I can do business with card swipes and cash registers.”  And, yes, I was able to do that with a blend of technology and all way under $100,000.

So this whole issue of, you know, the utility industry comes in and says, oh, we don’t have long outages, that’s true, but they themselves are not out the $10,000 an hour when they have that kind of problem.  So there is a range of industries, all the Fortune 500s going in that direction. 

The last, which you don’t see in the residential markets much in the United States, is differentiated electric rates.  And when I go to an industrial concern, their bills like their cell phone bill, very complicated, but embedded in that bill are three kinds of rates rather than the standard one you’re quoted or the aggregated one you were quoted, or the aggregated one you were quoted.  And those are peak power rates, usually in the mid day, though not always; demand charges, which means after you use a certain amount of electricity your rate goes up; and what they now call ratchet rates, which means if it’s a summer day and the utility doesn’t have enough power, they do a spot contract, and if that spot contract is exorbitantly high, that’s what they charge you, not for just the time they need it but for that whole month. 

And I have to tell you, 20 percent of the United States pays more per kilowatt hour in each of those three rate areas than photovoltaics, which is quite costly.  So there are giant chunks of the market embedded where you’re paying high rates.  So for power quality, the surges, swells, transient, power liability, and of course targeted rates, that’s where these technologies begin making sense.

So let’s look at some of this stuff.  These industries all came out of the ‘70s oil embargoes.  Most of these companies that you’re seeing weren’t around even before 1990.  So in reality they’re 15 years old at best.  There are a few that are 20.  And these are two that give you totally two different examples.  One is a D.C. company, a top (?) called GridPoint, that’s a smart battery bank.  It’s for homes and small businesses.  It has all of the interconnection equipment: the inverters, the charge controllers, and the quick disconnects required by code, and the battery bank in the bottom as required by law.  In my house, all that stuff took three-and-a-half hours to put in; in my office building, where I have this, an hour-and-a-half. 

What is nice is it has remote diagnostics, which means they can call you up – and they did for me – said battery number four, too hot, half the charge; we’re coming in, displacing it before you have a problem.  And I will talk to you about other options on that.  I can go on the Web and see how much solar and wind came in that unit today and how much energy I saved and pollution I saved.  So it has maximum interface.  It’s a real innovation in the market, as it becomes more standardized, modular and plug-and-play. 

Back to most of the planet that has no resources, this is a unit by Solar One (ph) out of Massachusetts. It’s actually a portable solar pump and water purifier, and it can do 7,000 liters a day – pretty exciting for people who don’t have access to any clean water. And remember, half the horrible things you read about health-wise come from the bad water.  So it has immense impacts of being able to bring sophisticated people – and that’s what they do.  We shipped thousands of these units after the tsunami to ensure that people can survive.  And now there are companies working on how to distribute and prepare those things.

You know, my pictures for some reason aren’t coming up in this, but that actually was the picture of the blanket I’m sending you around.  So, the flexible PV that the military is looking at are charging field phones’ batteries.  All of you know that men and women on the field are using more and more batteries from 10 to 60 pounds, and the issue is how do we keep them charged?  Back up for vehicles when they’re sitting around, how to make sure the batteries are charged so they turn over.  Airport strip lighting – in Iraq and Afghanistan, a couple of companies have these nifty LED lights – and I’m going to talk about LEDs in one second, but I will hold this up again – that are able to be dropped down so that planes or helicopters can land – solar-powered of course – and then all kinds of gadget powering.  And in fact I brought, also for you to look at later, different kind of thin-film technology, Global Solar.  This backpack sold on the market charges PDAs and cell phones.  And so the fact of the matter is – and now they’re putting them on vests and other things.

So it gives you a sense of the versatility.  And of course, no heat signature and no noise.  When I was in Afghanistan, what some of the military people were telling me is that they were getting picked off because the enemy used very sophisticated technology – a plastic cup on the ground – and could pick up the vibration of the diesel gensets, and they just would work methodically until the sound got louder, and then blow it up.

So the fact of the matter is not having heat signature it pretty critical; not having noise, pretty critical; not seeing a plume coming off, emissions, pretty critical; and for those of you in homeland security, how many times am I called in to fix your units in the field because the emissions from the diesel, the particulates, foul the sensors?  How many times?  I can’t tell you, but my 13-year-old daughter is going to go to a very expensive college courtesy of this kind of technology failure.  (Laughter.)  I will tell you.

Technology is evolving – and I don’t want to get into Bob’s side, but I did want to bring commercial technology – it was mentioned, the roofing shingles.  I have them on my office building.  But it is the flexibility of doing this technology that actually is so exciting.  This displaces basic roofing shingles.  So when – and they come in strips, and you can get dummies for the north side so it matches – (laughter) – and, you know, it’s UL, 20-year certified – will probably last longer.  Ask Bob.  I don’t want to say it will.  But I’m going to pass this around too – your own roofing shingle.

And what I have up here, that tent, is from a company called Konarka that does light-sensitive dyes.  And Bob is going to talk about it.  But what they did is because the dyes can be made in color – and I always thought that colors were so important – this company does it in camouflage patters, and DARPA worked with several companies, two of which I mentioned here – UNI-SOLAR and Global Solar, but also Konarka – and they’re making tents that produce their own electricity, and they’re testing it now.  So there is that.  Remember, I want these back.  Don’t steal them. 

But, again, I want to talk about why this has value.  Battery bank augment and displacement, as you know, for those of you who’ve had experience in the military, there’s a lot of batteries moving in and out – as a matter of fact, retiring and recycling hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of tons of batteries all over the place.  Battery charging we already talked about.  And I also want to talk about dedicated building circuits because that’s really what I do in my business, and I’m doing it for the military as well. 

You know, we have this view you have to do all or nothing.  Well, actually that’s not true.  You know, if the grid is out or the diesel generator dies, it doesn’t mean necessarily you need every single light in the building we’re in.  Maybe all you need is one out of three lights, the telephone lines working, the Web server working, and the air-moving unit, whether it’s a fan or a heat pump, at the lowest cycle.  And you can do that pretty easily with these kinds of technology.

Cathodic protection, that’s something that no one knows about but it’s pretty important.  Every bridge you see, every railroad track, every pipeline has it.  It’s putting little bits of current, usually around 12 or 24 volt, into metal and miraculously it doesn’t rust.  That’s all it is.  And so I spent a lot of time looking at not only cathodic protection systems for pipelines, but why not since you have the little solar or wind power units out there, why don’t you put little sensors and surveillance to protect it at the same time?  My daughter goes, duh, makes sense.  And oil companies and gas companies are starting to do it.

In my handout I gave you, if you turn to this page – unfortunately, I don’t know why you don’t see all these, but the picture on page 10 is of a water unit we shipped on a flatbed truck to Mississippi for Katrina.  And it is – the city of Waveland was washed away, and their water system pumps are in the Gulf of Mexico, and they remembered that I had given a speech to a group like yours weeks before saying, you know, there’s a study out there that if you power about 5 percent of the pipeline pumps with distributed generation off the grid.  If you have catastrophic grid failure, you can keep everything moving in one direction.  And when the tree branch in Ohio fell and knocked out power for 11 states – and as someone mentioned last night, an event that we blamed it on the Canadians but they denied it and we admitted it, there was that tree branch – that they had backed up police and fire stations in Ohio and Michigan and western New York with solar and wind and had to evacuate them because the water and sewage lines backed up in the building. 

And we’ve had outages in Texas recently where it was so hot when the storm went through that they had evacuate, and of course you couldn’t have people in buildings that are over 100 degrees.  So for first responders to keep society going – and now we’re looking at military bases, the same thing.  If you have catastrophic grid failure, you want to have a certain portion of your infrastructure protected, and distributed generation does that cheaper.  And, again, power lines don’t help you here.

Lighting and monitoring and surveillance – solar and wind are used already all over the place.  From the commercial side, when you go down major highways like Baltimore-Washington Parkway, you see virtually every phone solar powered.  We have solar lighting systems all over the world. 

This is a small company in Berryville, Virginia called Elevated Security, and they make towers for surveillance and for cameras, motion detectors around airports, for the Guardian program around military bases, around nuclear power plants.  And they’re all doing a small-powered cellular system across Central America as we speak.  And here what they did is blend a small wind turbine on top of the tower, a small solar panel; there is a battery box at the bottom, and it powers your communication.  And again, the Department of Defense is buying these already, out there just like the blanket that I’m passing around, and it cannot be interfered with.  And in fact, if you try to even get near that it does all sorts of weird things to you – (laughter) – that I can’t even tell you about. 

Here’s my little – I’m having problems with this.  Ah, absolutely.  This is close to my heart because it’s a company I helped create.  We talked about power quality; I want to talk about power liability and mobile and movable genset.  You know, I get called by a lot of federal agencies, and I’ve done tours of military bases, and even the FBI, that when they had an emergency and the power went down, and the generator sometimes flipped on, and in one case with the FBI, I think two weeks after September 11th, dropped a few hundred-thousand gallons of diesel fuel in the FBI building and they had to evacuate it.  Some of you may remember that.  If you want the Washington Post article, I’ll send it to you.

And the problem with diesel gensets are that they’re nice and they’ve been around a long time – I wouldn’t want my daughter to marry one, but they’re very nice, I want to tell you.  I have nothing personal against them.  But, you know, they sit there, and the protocol is once a month you’re supposed to turn them on and maybe 50 percent of the time that’s done, but just because it worked on September 15th doesn’t mean if I turn it on tomorrow it’s going to work.  What’s wonderful with a lot of this distributed energy systems, particularly solar and wind systems – actually true for fuel cells as well, somewhat even for battery banks if you have remote diagnostics, if they’re running every day, pretty much.

So there is like a much better chance that if something is going to crap out, it’s not going to crap out when you really need it.  You’re going to have symptoms, just like when I got a call two-and-a-half months ago by my GridPoint people and said, battery number four is looking hot and low. 

So I want you to understand that, you know, I love dial phones but we don’t – they’re cheaper and they’re actually more reliable than push-button phones, but nobody wants them anymore.  And the fact is technology has evolved.  And I want you to think about that as we’re looking at remote and movable power gensets.  This is a unit that’s five minutes from here, and I know some of you in the room have seen this.  I’m happy to tour many of you that haven’t.  Just email me. 

General Zimler (sp) of Western Iraq Command has requested these.  These are shipping containers.  They’re solar and wind-driven – battery banks on the inside.  You can use the inside for a listening post.  You can use it for a border crossing station.  You can use it for a med center.  And you can expand those photovoltaics panels.  Those little feet move out to the ground and you can just keep them going, so this is a six-kilowatt unit, which is sort of enough power for a giant U.S. home, and it can go up to 150 kilowatts.  And Imputel (ph) has invested in this effort, and they’re obviously using it, and the fact of the matter is, other kinds of what I call plug and play, drop and plop technologies are evolving all over the place.

And wireless technology like this does not live up to what it’s supposed to be.  I’m telling you right now.

MR.    :  It’s solar.

MR. SKLAR:  No, it’s not solar.  That’s why.  It needs that extra oomph. 

This is actually a unit by Secra (ph) Power for Shell. They put solar on steel skids.  And you can see here it has battery banks, a welded – battery boxes welded to the steel skid as well as a small propane generator, and these are dropped all over Latin America right now, both government, hospitals, pumping stations, used for – larger units of these are used with cell towers.  And I do want to remind you that any of you that use cell phones – you know, I get this call all the time, and, Bob, I want you to deal with this issue on the materiel – you know, I cannot tell you how many people in the military I’ve sat in meeting rooms and discussed where they should use it, and they go, you know, I’m just nervous that it can stand up to the elements, and I look at them and say, can I have your cell phone?  And they look at me and hand it to me.  And I go, you know, 100 percent of your calls are on satellites that are in areas that are much hotter or colder than you ever will have on earth.  Is there a reason – or is this cell phone not working and we should just throw it away?  And of course they look at me and go, yeah, that’s a very good point.

We have these units in Antarctica.  We have them, unfortunately, in the warmer Artic these days, but they’re all doing very well.  We’ve not had any outages.  In fact, the weakest part of these systems frankly are the batteries, not the photovoltaics.  But there are strides in battery technology.

Oh, that’s another great picture.  For those of you that have page 14, that’s actually a wind and solar unit at a harbor, used both surveillance and cellular, and also doing some pipeline pump augmentation at the harbor there.  I want to tell you – make the case of why you blend technologies, and wind and solar are perfect examples.  You may remember, from going outside once in a while, the sun comes up in the morning, and it keeps getting – it goes up and it gets brightest around noontime.  Bob, you may correct me if I’m wrong on this.  And around 3:30, 4:00 it starts dimming, and it starts – it’s sent out.  And just around 3:00 to 5:00, in that timeframe, most of your wind regimes around the country pick up because they are based on temperature differentials and on that exact same cycle.

And so there are millions of solar wind systems on this planet that are hybrid systems, and just like this picture on page 14, the sun comes up; the power is produced.  As the sun goes down the wind takes over.  When the sun doesn’t come up – and it’s usually a rainy cloudy day is usually when the wind’s out – obviously the wind dies out around 4:00 a.m. in the morning as slowly temperature differentials start again, and that’s why we utilize battery banks and we pull the power – stored power out of the battery banks, and the cycle starts again.

And I have this solar wind unit in Arlington, Virginia, no less, the crappiest wind of any area probably on earth – and it’s still working like that – unbelievable.  So the fact of the matter is these technologies are all over the place in the real world, as I try again to move us forward.  And I apologize for these little – (inaudible) – here. 

I also want to talk about – we’ve talked about backup power.  I want to talk about emergency response.  I did a presentation – in fact, I mentioned to some people here tonight that I had some real depressing – wonderful experience with DOD and depressing activities with DHS and FEMA.  And the one I’ll share with you was that I had done a presentation to FEMA saying, you ought to use more of what you’ve seen here – the blankets, the shipping containers, the steel skids.  We’re not talking about hydro but we have micro-hydro on pontoons and biomass units on flatbed trucks, and all this what I call standardized modular plop-and-drop, plug-and-play.  And in fact, DOD is using all of this, so in an emergency you might want to look at this since it’s already being used in a hostile situation.

And I thought – well, I was hoping – I expected that they would laugh – would at least hold their laugher and say, yeah, we’ll try a few of these things and maybe learn.  But they rejected it, and they rejected it on the grounds that they’ve always used diesel generators.  They have always had diesel and they have a whole infrastructure to deal with these.

So I was rejected – and somewhat dejected in fact – and then Katrina came through – and this was probably about a week-and-a-half before Katrina, by the way, and I get a call at my home at 10:30 at night saying, can we have five of your units immediately?  And I go, aren’t you the same guy who said that you had all the diesel that you needed?  And he goes, well, we do, but we don’t have any electricity to pump it out of the ground. 

And so, I again want to remind you – and actually, when I went to the military bases to do this survey – I was part of an 18-month team that was looking at keeping five U.S. military bases operational here in the U.S. under catastrophic grid failure, one of the things we noticed is that those kind – they had plenty of diesel gensets out there.  I, again, questioned if they would all work – that’s another issue – but the fact is the chance of being able to actually get diesel to them was very low.  And so when you’re looking at being agile and having capability, having power where and when you need it is probably pretty critical.

I also wanted to mention that we found out with Katrina, and we found out during September 11th, particularly in New York, that, frankly, most of our first responders used the cellular networks, and in fact, FCC, to their credit, in the Gulf, basically sat the cell companies down and said, we will give you money to cost-share, to harden your cell towers for days, not just a couple of hours. 

The fact of the matter is, in this country, we do need now, for both emergency, security, anti-terrorism, to keep society in order, the capability to communicate.  So, again, onsite technologies are critical, with no fuel train.

What’s going on out there that’s shaping the environment in the United States?  I don’t want to bore you with technicality, and so I’m not, but I have to mention a few things.  One is, as you remember, when we deregulated telephones, what Congress did is they mandated an interconnection standard, and what that meant is that anybody could make a telephone – it would still have to have its little UL certification, but in the end it had the same plug that you plug in the wall and the same voltage requirement.  So you could plug in a phone in New York or California with different carriers and it would work.   And we, in the distributed generation community, are saying the same thing, that in order for us to be able to play, whether you’re distributed along transmission lines, distribution lines, or on the customers’ side of the meter, you need to create an interconnection protocol that allows to do it.  And the technical association IEEE, which included the industries, the utilities, the interconnection equipment industries, came to a consensus standard, 1547 – and UL has its comparable standards and the fire people have theirs – but basically to allow to do this.

Now, 29 states have adopted this standard and actually require it, but I’m still saddened to tell you that the manufacturers have to make different equipment for every state because that interpret that standard differently, and that’s just in the 29 states that mandate it, and the other 21 states don’t.  You do not have the right to standard interconnection.  So just think about if we did that to refrigerators – the cost of refrigerators, by making a refrigerator different for every state, or a television, and we need to fundamentally change that, and the consensus standard is there and it needs to be mandated.

Procurement aggregation – if you’re going to make this stuff cheaper – and Bob Birkmire is going to talk to you about that – you’re going to have to have sustained, orderly, developed markets.  In the private sector that’s probably cellular in the short term, and maybe transportation, and in the government it’s probably DOD, hopefully DHS down the line, FEMA, and that means that you need to aggregate procurement, and that means you need to streamline GSA processes, you need to fund some of the initiatives we have and, for instance, the Guardian program, which was perimeter security after September 11th – explicitly said solar photovoltaics, fuel cells, advanced battery banks – a lot of the technologies we’re talking about today.

So this aggregation is going good, and in fact, it’s one of the few successes that have crossed ideological and political lines.  Democrats and Republicans agree every administration just adds more executive orders to do it – reasonably happy, actually.

The interface with existing systems has been haphazard, and that’s mostly due to government failure at the federal and state level.  I cannot tell you how many systems I am called into by DOD, postal service, FAA, state governments, transportation because they put out a spec for a uniquely made system.  Why would you do that? 

And so, every system is different, the person that designs the system moves away, and no one knows why the hell it works and what the hell you do.  It drives up costs, and nine times out of 10 we basically rip it apart and rebuild it because it’s the only way to do it. 

So for those of you that are in the procurement side of the business or are thinking of how we do this, how to make ourselves more agile, standardization and modularity are a must, and I don’t get why you’d want to do differently.  I have never seen a uniquely made system – reality be worth the cost for a few extra percent that you get out of it.

Securitizing infrastructure – I’ve talked about it a lot, but I do want to say this, that I also don’t want you just to think about the solar panels or the wind turbine or the fuel cell.  And in fact, that’s why I brought in my screw-in, bundled, 28-LED light.  And I do some teaching with National Defense University, and I was doing a presentation with senior military officers, and we were talking about energy efficiency, and I said, of course you want to do compact fluorescents in your lighting of your buildings – you know a 60-watt light bulb is 12 to 15 watts with a compact fluorescent, and where applicable I’d like you to start moving to bundled LEDs. 

And this general raised his hand and says, they’re not commercial.  I go, of course they’re commercial.  And he goes, no, they’re not commercial.  And I said, well, you’re really lucky I’m here today and happen to have it, but I just imported 400,000 of them and here are a couple of boxes, and I threw them around the room.  And I said, where did you hear that?  And he goes, well, from the National Lab guys, you know, sitting around the room.  And I said, well, what you learn from that is don’t ask National Labs about commercialized technologies – (laughter) – you know, ask companies.  You know, just a thought; don’t want to get radical.

And I want to remind that you to too.   You know, you just have to surf on the Web for installers of LEDs, and about 30 companies nationally put out – now most of them do signal lights – and by the way, Washington, D.C. has put LEDs in every signal light.  The average intersection has gone from four kilowatts to less than one.  And then they’re talking to me about now you won’t need as much area for a small wind turbine or PV; just take that off the grid.  Because when there’s an emergency, what do you have?  You have gridlock.  You could have the best ambulances in the world, but it’s very hard to get through gridlock.

So there are all sorts of things you can do, and that’s why I want to get this – you know, and I’m not being political here.  I worked for Senator Javits, and Republican, for nine years, and I worked with many Democrats, but when I heard the vice president say we needed, you know, 800 new power plants to keep this country going, I was agog.  First of all, I wanted to know who in their community would want something like that – where are you going to plop these babies down?  And secondly, do you really need them? 

And, you know, I was with Amory Lovins last night doing a presentation and, you know, he’s absolutely right; it’s frankly a lot cheaper to do a bond, tell everybody to put compact fluorescents and LEDs in – it’s about, oh, I would say about 18 percent of building a power plant, and just obviate the need.  You can just give them away; it’s cheaper.  But we’re a consuming nation; we think you have to consume more.  I’m not sure.  You can maintain the quality of life, and I am working with manufactured, upscale housing builders that are building zero-energy homes today.  They’re selling for $180,000, 3,000 – two-story – square-foot homes that are living as well as anybody in this room with every major gadget and appliance we have, including MP3 players for my daughter, and they’re zero energy, and they don’t connect to the grid.  We have the technology to do that.  In some places those make sense.  But the fat of the matter is, securitizing what we have may be a better play than just trying to build more. 

Environmental protection.  You are all clear about global warming.  You know it’s the burning – putting carbon into the atmosphere.  The extraction, conversion and use of energy is the single-largest cause of carbon in our atmosphere from humans, not termites.  And we have these regulated emissions – NOx, SOx and particulates – and you may remember, EPA put out a new particulates standard for diesels, but the coal plants here in Virginia are pumping them out.  And then we have unregulated emissions like mercury, which affects your immune system, and carcinogens that come out of that, and we don’t like to think about it, and of course we don’t monetize it at the moment, but you know we will.

And I think the issues is – again, I’m not promoting or saying you shouldn’t use a technology, but what I am saying to you is a portfolio of energy is the best solution for national security and economics we have.  Competition in the marketplace, critical because the market will actually sought (sic) that out, and it allows people and companies and governments to have options.  And for those of you in the security field, to me that is the play, maximum options: real multi-fuel vehicles that allow cars to pick their fuel for availability, for costs, or for access if one supply is cut off; systems in homes that allow you to maintain yourself with or without the grid, multi-fuel; and mine, I can go on a PDA and decide which circuit – there’s a grid failure, which circuits in my house go down and which stay up.  And generally it’s set up so that my kitchen – so my telephone in my kitchen, my light, my refrigerator, my electronic conditioner, my gas stove, my TV set there work, and then both bedrooms.  And if I’m entertaining, which has happened during grid failure in Arlington, I then go on PDA and say, I’ll put the dining room and living room on.  It’s very possible, and the technology is all here, and pretty cost-effective.

So the fact is, we can have impact on the environment and – as when I drive my Prius and can see by mileage I know – and you can do the same thing for your home or your business.

What’s the goal?  What’s the end game?  End game is leveraging resources and technology to do multiple things.  I go into states and companies and say, look at energy to solve multiple problems, look at it to have greater reliability, greater power quality, have lower emissions, have more agility, more options to maintain yourself and potentially save money.  Replicable installations – I’ve already talked about it, but you’ve got to think about it.  One of the problems – I believe the highest cost – when Bob Birkmire gets here, in a couple of minutes here, and talks about the evolution of this technology, those are panels, what we call modules.  Well, that’s 40 percent of a PV system, and it has to be integrated with something, whether it’s remote or in a building.  These are young industries.

So we’re growing at 30 percent a year, so how are we coping?  What do I do if I don’t have a solar installer in Iowa?  Well, what I’ve been thinking, and what I have been doing, I’ve been using the cellular industry.  What’s a cell tower?  You plop something down in the ground.  There’s a little box that actually powers the tower.  So those folks actually know how to drop these things down and deal with electronics.  Alarm system companies – think of it; what’s an alarm system in any building?  It’s a battery bank with an interconnect to the phone system and sensors.  What’s really a distributed generation unit?  All those things plus one more gadget added on, whatever you think it is.

So it takes time for industries to evolve, as you remember when you bought the early cell phones, as I did, from Tandy Corporation before Radio Shack, and they weighed a ton and they cost a lot and you had nobody to repair them.

I want to say that – while I’m talking about replicability I also want to say that there should be no remote or distributive power without remote communications and controls.  There is no reason with digital equipment why you wouldn’t want to know how it works on the inside.  It adds $4 to a system.  Why you would not spend tens of thousands, or millions of dollars for that matter, and not have remote monitoring is beyond me.  I see it every day. 

And lastly, economic development.  I’ve moved a solar water heating manufacturing plant into South Chicago – first new manufacturing plant in southern Chicago in four years.  Photovoltaic plants are being built all over this country.  Advanced battery banks, inverter companies – all the different technologies – silicon plants that feed the photovoltaic industry.  And I’m not going to go into all those details; I’ll let Bob do it.  But what I want to tell you is the wind and solar industries in Germany are one of its largest employers in the entire country now.  Yes, there are big subsidies in Germany – feed-in tariffs – to build these industries.  But, you know, when I had a little more hair, there weren’t computer companies and there weren’t MP3 players, and frankly there weren’t fax machines, and there weren’t CDs, and there weren’t software companies, and most of the people in this room, at least the ones with gray hair or no hair, probably remember those things.  And now, those are the drivers of our economy.

What I want to leave you is, yes, diesel gensets, coal plants, gas plants, they all work.  They’re very necessary.  And just like cellular, we have wired lines too.  They co-exist; it doesn’t have to be either/or.  But the fact is we didn’t go around snickering with a lot of these newer technologies, and I am stunned at the snickering going around on some of these newer technologies fundamentally for no reason.

So I appreciate the opportunity.  And I am honored to bring on Bob Birkmire, who will now tell you how this stuff actually works.  Thank you very much.

(Applause.)

BOB BIRKMIRE:  Well, it’s always interesting to do these kinds of things when people don’t review their – cross review their presentations.  I’ll probably address most of the issues that Scott suggested, probably be a bit of overlap and a little bit different type focus than from Scott.

MR. SKLAR:  Tell a little more jokes than me.

MR. BIRKMIRE:  No.  Geez, that’s the problem following you, how can you – (chuckles) – you know.

I thought I might just take a minute to give you a little background.  I’m the director of the Institute of Energy Conversion.  The Institute of Energy Conversion was established in 1972 at the University of Delaware.  It was really the first thin-film photovoltaic laboratories in the United States.  It’s one of the few institutes around the world that works on a big variety of PV technology.  And we have as a mission to develop the science and engineering base that’s required to translate these technologies from a laboratory scale to a manufacturing environment, which is kind of a unique position that we try to maintain.

And the last thing I was going to mention is that photovoltaics, and particularly thin-film photovoltaics, which is my background primarily, is a multi-disciplinary technology.  We have on staff at the institute people with physics backgrounds, chemistry, chemical engineering, electrical engineering – probably missed one – and occasionally we have mechanical engineers that work there.  So it is a very broad, inter-disciplinary technology, and that also which makes it a little bit more difficult to develop.

Anyway, what I would like to do is talk a little bit about – mine is maybe a little bit more global in nature than Scott’s, but I want to look at the energy for the future and what kind of roles can photovoltaics take and what are unique about photovoltaics in terms of this.

I think that the key thing that one needs to look at when you’re looking for energy for the, you know – what’s going to be the energy of the future, I think you can’t look at energy by itself because these are the – just the three critical points that I chose where you have the environment, you have the population, and you have security.  And energy is all intimately coupled with these.  And if you live in the United States we have about 4 percent of the world’s population, give or take a little bit, and we use about 25 percent of the energy.  So we have to keep that in mind as we move along.

And what I tried to do was highlight the points that I was trying to make.  The environmental side of things is – and this is something that everybody I think is becoming consensus about – is that burning of the fossil fuels is causing climate change – is accelerating climate change, causing it, whichever way you prefer to look at it.

If you look at it from a population point of view, the world’s population is over 6.5 billion people right now, and about one third have no access to – this is reiterating a little bit what Scott said.  But the critical part is that agriculture and health depend on access to electricity and water.  And there are the key things – there are the interconnects again that you see.

And then finally where security, which is something that is coming up – has come up more recently is that you have the electric grid, terrorists, unrest in the third world countries and – you know, the number that I use is that they’re talking about over 9 billion people by about 2050.

So all these things have to be considered when you’re developing your new – what’s going to be the new paradigm for energy, what is going to be the energy mix, as Scott as already kind of talked about a little bit.

One of the things – this is a little bit dated; I think it was a – I can’t read – I think about 1996, ’98 or something like that.  It came from Shell, and they were looking at, oh, what’s going to happen as you go out to 2050?  There are a number of these around right now; this just happened to be the one that I had downloaded a while ago.  (Chuckles.)  They’re not all that different.  But I think that the one thing that you can see is that you see that the start really is coming around 2020 on this one.  And I think that if you really look – that most people now think that we’re going to really start to see photovoltaics come into its own probably around the 2015-20 timeframe where you really, you know – you go over to this scale over here; you’re actually making a contribution to energy that makes a difference.

And the next question I said, well, why is photovoltaics unique?  And you probably – this could be an extended list.  Scott actually expanded a lot on these things a little bit more than I have.  It’s one of the things – it’s an environmentally neutral technology pretty much.  And it also is the safest form of nuclear power because you got your power plant is 93 million miles away.  So that makes it nice.  It’s a distributed energy resource and really it has the potential to really enhance grid security a lot in this country.

You can use it anywhere, from – and the big place – the big place that probably it may play a major role is in developing countries, but you see it on roads where it’s powering street lights or telephones, on buoys for navigation, so it can be used almost anywhere.

The other interesting thing about it is that it’s scale-insensitive.  And you can use it from a flashlight – and the reason I chose a flashlight for military is I’ll talk a little bit about a program that DARPA is funding right now – to a central power station.  So it’s kind of nice.  Not a lot of things have that kind of scalability to them.

And, you know, you can argue with this a little bit but it has the potential probably to provide anywhere from 15 to 20 percent of the world electric needs.  So you’re going to have other things.  It’s not going to be – PV is not going to be the only solution.  It’s going to be a big role or play a big role in that for the solution.

And the last thing, it’s sort of a little bit of a negative but I don’t think it’s overly, is that it requires storage for some applications, but not all applications.  There are applications that really you don’t need that for.  If you’re using it in a rural application to pump water, you can pump water when the sun is on and not have to worry about pumping it at night.  So there is a variety and a large number of applications that Scott has already talked about.

Let’s look at what the world – what’s happening in the solar module production.  This is – I think it’s updated to about 2005, which is as far as it goes, but as you can see there has been a big upsurge – oops, I didn’t want it to quite do that yet.  Can I go back?  Whoop, there I go. (Laughter.)  All right, let’s try– there we go.  I got the right – last button, right?

MR. SKLAR:  (Off mike.)

MR. BIRKMIRE:  Well, see he told me I had to make a little bit of a joke, so I thought that – (chuckles). 

So there’s been a big upturn in the world production of PV modules.  And this number actually didn’t get correct; this is well over 1.7 gigawatts, closer to 1.8 gigawatts in 2005.

So anyway, this is what is happening world –

MR. SKLAR:  And that’s gigawatts per year.

MR. BIRKMIRE:  Per year.  I’ll say something about cumulative in a little bit. okay?  But let’s take a little bit closer look at this.  And if we look at the world production by the region – and here is the sad news.  If you look at what has happened for the U.S., this is the percentage that the U.S. has produced in module production, and if you look at since about 1996 or so, we have steadily declined and continued to decline and now our share is below 10 percent.  It’s kind of a sad commentary on the U.S. in the sense that we developed a lot of this technology, in fact, most of it.  And I’ll make a few comments about that a little bit longer – a little bit later.

You can see that the big push was in Japan.  Japan now produces – is the major producer of photovoltaics.  They’ve lost a little bit that – they have dropped a little bit below 50 percent.  That’s because Europe is staying fairly flat but the rest of the world is starting to increase.  I’m not quite sure what rest of the world, all that means, but that’s the way it –

MR. SKLAR:  (Off mike.)

MR. BIRKMIRE:  Yeah.  It’s kind of – so that is what is happening by region.

Then the other part that we want to look at is there is a number of different technologies.  There is single – there is crystalline silicon, which fall into two categories, one of which is – if you can’t hear me just yell because I’m not used to talking with a mike that much like this – the single crystal and polycrystalline, these are both crystalline silicon technologies.  And if you look at these, the single crystal technology was really the start of the PV.  That’s what is used in the space applications.  But the crystal and the silicon has actually started to diminish and the polycrystalline has gone up.  The reason for this is that the polycrystalline – the performance of the polycrystalline has become better and it’s also cheaper to make.

One of the other things that you’ll see is that there is a downturn in both the crystalline silicon technologies.  And it’s interesting to note why that is; it’s because the crystalline silicon industry used all the scraps from the semiconductor industry as their raw materials primarily.  And now the crystalline silicon area, their demand for the feedstock – it’s called metallurgical-grade silicon – has exceeded the demands from the semiconductor industry.  So now what is happening is you’re hearing what is called solar-grade silicon.  There is going to be manufacturing plants for making silicon.

So that’s why – and now, if you wanted to go out and buy PV for your roof, you might be told by an installer that he can’t get the panels for 18 months because everything is sold out.  And it’s in part not because they can’t increase the capacity but because they don’t have the feedstock materials.

The other one that I kind of put on here, which you see it up here, is HIT.  This is a marriage of crystalline silicon technology with amorphous silicon thin-film technology.  And it was primarily – it was developed by the Japanese, and it’s also a higher performance, better tolerant to temperature variations, than some of the pure single crystal technologies.

And then if you look now, the two thin-film technologies up here are amorphous silicon – and I’ll get into a little bit more what the difference between a thin-film and a crystalline silicon in a little bit – amorphous silicon and in cad-telluride, they are just starting to come on board here; cad-telluride here, amorphous silicon has been around for a while.  Percentage wise it dropped.  I think that this next year you’re going to see an upturn in both cad-telluride and the amorphous technologies.  You might even see a little blip on here with one of the copper indium diselenide technologies that is coming up.

If we look at where things are going – this is the – it’s by sector or where it is used, and it goes – and I talk about grid connected, residential and commercial, the off-grid residential and central applications.  And you can see central power applications; you see what is happening is the grid connected for both residential and commercial is increasing fairly dramatically.  But the one that’s interesting to watch is the central power part of it because it is increasing as well and it has got a pretty good slope.  The other two seem to be kind of, you know, staying about – not big changes going on in these sectors.

And to give you an idea the off-grid power generation, this is just an example in some third-world applications where there is no power at all.  Interesting – the number is that if you wanted to kind of power the 2 billion people with just about 10 watts of PV, you can come up with a number of $60 billion dollars if you wanted to do that.  That’s based on about $3 a watt for the power system.

You wind up with centralized power.  Here you have – whoops, I keep pushing the wrong button.  Here you have big power arrays.  This is a thin-film power sector.  I think it might be cad-telluride and this is a polycrystalline silicon technology here.  And there is a couple ways to do it is that you can do a fixed flat panel; you can do tracking, which they move and follow the sun during the day; and there is a number of applications that actually Scott has already mentioned.

This is the residential and commercial.  I should have had a picture of Scott’s house here; it would have been much more appropriate I think.  (Chuckles.)  It probably is on your website, I’m guessing.  And then you see some commercial applications here as well.

Let’s look at what the costs and so forth, and what has been happening to those. As we continue the increase – this is a – as we continue to increase the capacity that we have, what’s happening is that the costs are coming down fairly dramatically.  And if you look at it from – which this is – I hope nobody asks me too many questions about this because this is not my expertise, but anyway, if you look at an experience curve it basically says that for every doubling of the production you’re getting a price reduction by about 20 percent.  The reason for the – the reason for the bottom line is that this was as a DOE goal for many, many years and I think they have abandoned that.

One of the things that you – one of the things that I should mention is that PV is rated by what the output, as under some standard conditions: you have a 10-watt or a kilowatt array.  And I think that is going to change fairly dramatically in the future. Because really what – it’s regional in nature.  What you’re going to get out of power – out of a 100-watt module here and what you’re going to get out of power of a 100-watt module down in, say, Arizona somewhere is going to be a good bit different. 

So I think what is going to happen is that you’re going to find PV modules rated for probably something like average annual power per region that you’re located in.  And that’s probably going to happen.  And I think if people buy it, the companies that sell it already have that.

If we look at what the production – you know, what it costs for electricity in the U.S. – and note that this is from 2002 – I also need to probably apologize because I’ve stolen a lot of these slides from people, but I also have a set of references at the end that most of these slides can be taken from – but in this you’re going to see a little bit of a – this is about 25 to 50 cents for kilowatt hour in the U.S.  And it depends where you’re at.  And probably the 25 cents is a little bit on the high side, probably is closer to 20-35 cents a kilowatt hour right now.  But, you know, it just gives you an idea and a comparison to what the other technologies – the traditional technologies of coal, gas and oil, and then they have the wind, nuclear and the solar by far and away the highest at this point in time.

There is always these questions about land area requirements.  This one is kind of – it was taken from a presentation by Nate Lewis from Caltech.  Nate thinks that – you know, does these calculations allot in terms of let’s – if we produced all the energy that we needed in the U.S., which is about somewhere around 3.3 terawatts, how much of the land will we use?  So do we have – you know, people always ask, well, jeez, do we have enough land to make this is useful technology?  Well, it turns out that, you know, you could generate all the energy you needed using a little bit less than 2 percent of the land area in the U.S.  And to kind of put that a little bit more in perspective, this is roughly the land area that you would need.  It depends where you put it and so forth.  So this is not an issue.

MR. SKLAR:  Enrel (ph) said that the five nuclear test sites – (off mike).

MR. BIRKMIRE:  Yeah.  I always say –

MR. SKLAR:  (Off mike.)

MR. BIRKMIRE:  My thing was that if you could coat all of the state of Maryland with PV it gives you pretty close to all the electric power generation you need to – so, you know, there are different things, but you’re not going to use – you’re not going to generate all the electrical power that you need anyway.

Another thing that everybody asks about is, well, jeez, how am I going to get payback on these things?  And this has been – it comes up periodically so I thought I would throw it in here.  This is actually from an Enrel bulletin, but what it shows you is that if you look at the investment in energy and the time that it takes to get back, it’s – if you take an average of all the technologies this is around two years.  If it’s crystalline silicon it is probably a little bit greater than two years because it tends to be a fairly energy-intensive process, but it is less than three.  If you look at some of the thin films you might say it’s about a year.  But the point is that you’re going to get, after a year – a couple years, you’re going to start to get the energy back that you put into that technology, which is an important thing to consider.

And also, you know, if you look – I just cut this out, is that if you take a system that is about – meets about half the needs of an average household, you save about a half ton of sulfur dioxide, about a third a ton of nitrous oxide, and it offsets carbon dioxide from about two cars or something like that.  So it gives you kind of some perspective of maybe some things that it can do for you.

All right, now that we talked about them, let’s talk about what they are.  Basically a PV device is a fairly simple – in the scheme of electronic devices is pretty simple because it’s a simple diode. It just has – it’s what would be a simple junction-type device.  But it’s kind of interesting because you take light from the sun, which is the photons, and it converts it to electric current and voltage.  And the only fuel is sunlight.  That’s kind of nice.  It’s not like you don’t use the – you don’t spend the fuel – you know, the fuel is always coming in.  The sun is going to burn for a few more years I think.

But there is three critical parts of it that happens.  First of all you got to, somehow or another, take that light that is coming down and you need to absorb it.  So the fact that the incident light is different from a spectral point of view and also an intensity point of view throughout the country is what makes the variation in the performance of these devices.  And you need to generate something – and call them electrons and hulls – people are probably more familiar with looking at it as electrons – and then it flows and powers some sort of system that you want, which is the load.

And the device structure is pretty similar for almost all devices.  There are some variations.  This turns out to be more of a crystalline silicon device – is that you have to have some way that you have a back contact, which is one of the leads.  Then you need – a semiconductor is usually a P-type semiconductor, an N-type semiconductor.  They can be both the same material as in the case of silicon, or they can be different materials in the case of – the III-V’s are that way; most of the thin-film technologies are that way.

Then you need some kind of way of connecting it and getting the current out of the top, so that gives you the top, which they call the front contact.  And usually since you want to get more of the light, what you do is you put something that is an anti-reflection coating that keeps the – more of the light going into the cell.  And then you got to protect it by some sort of cover glass and encapsulate it.

And the efficiency is really how much energy is going in and how much energy – the ratio of how much energy did you get out.  And typically, to give you some numbers, if you look at something that is 10-percent efficiency it’s about 100 watts per meter squared or 10 watts per square foot – just to kind to give you some seat-of-the-pants numbers that you can kind of use.

And there is a bunch of different types of PV devices.  I kind of broke them up this way, where you have elemental semiconductors.  And these are primarily – I keep hitting the wrong button – silicon and germanium.  Germanium is only used really primarily in the amorphous silicon films, or the amorphous films, but there is also the single multicrystalline and polycrystalline thin films of these.  There is organic – there is inorganic compounds, and they can be both single-crystalline and polycrystalline.  The single crystalline are primarily what they call III-V compounds.  The polycrystalline thin films are generally – the most looked at these days are cap-telluride and copper indium diselenide-based materials.  And then there is the organic compounds, which are just kind of coming online.

Scott already showed you some pictures of a product from Konarka.  They tend to be a little bit lower performance, and also there is a question about the longer-term stability, but if you get the cost enough you can throw them away and replace them is the concept that I think that Konarka is working with.  And you may not need to have as much power come out of them.

The crystalline silicon technology, which as already said, is the dominant technology out there from a commercial point of view.  It’s over 90 percent of the market, and I already mentioned that you either have single crystalline or a large-grain multicrystalline wafers.

Typically you use a fair amount of material.  It probably should have been 250 to 350 microns.  This is a fair amount of material to use for a solar cell, particularly compared to the thin films.  And this is actually turning out to be an issue that is being addressed very heavily by the silicon industry right now.  And what happens is – and then I’ll show you a picture of this where you have to slice a big chunk into thin wafers and you lose material that way.

And there is a number of innovations that are going on.  Unfortunately, a lot of them are not being driven entirely within the U.S.  They are using a way of passivating the surfaces of these materials, which improves the voltage of these devices, and actually that technology now is moving into a commercial environment.  There are some new concepts of how you contact and get the power out without those contacts shading the device.

The biggest push is probably to make the wafers thinner, because what you’re doing is you reduce the amount of silicon, and in most of the silicon technologies, about a third of the cost of the module is the silicon itself.  So that is a big cost.

And then I already mentioned this HIT cell structure, which couples amorphous silicon with the crystalline silicon technology.  The thing that I didn’t mention is that it gets rid of a lot of high-temperature processing, which reduces some of the power intensities of it, other than growing the ingot itself.

Just to kind of – this is the only one that I’m going to do this for, is that if you look at crystalline silicon and where things can go, this column gives you sort of what’s the best performance you can get out of it.  And it’s pushing about 29 percent efficiency –means 29 percentage of the light – the light that comes in, 29 percent of it gets used for power.  If you look at the best crystalline silicon, which is called a pearl (?) structure, which was done by the University of New South Wales, it’s just pushing about 25 percent.  So you’re about a little bit less than 15 percent of where you can for – (inaudible).

So improving the performance is a goal, but it’s a tough goal, and this is a laboratory cell, so then translating that to a commercial is another issue.  Right now probably we’re looking at somewhere in the 15-percent range for these technologies.

To kind of give you an example of the crystalline – the single crystals in general are grown by what’s called a Czochralaski silicon growth, you basically – this would be an ingot of silicon, which is around, and you pull it out of a melt of silicon and it makes a single crystal, then that is sliced up into wafers.  This is a ribbon technology.  This one is from a company called Evergreen Solar.  What they do is pull a very thin wafer, which is – in most cases is about 300 microns from a melt, and it makes this long ribbon.  So this ribbon here is already – pretty close to being a single crystal silicon.  So that would be taking this, and this would be slicing them down.  This is pulling it so you don’t – you get rid of the slicing step, and you lose – and you don’t lose the material when you cut it up.

This is cast silicon, which is polycrystalline, and this is what the – I was looking for a picture that kind of addressed how you grew this.  Basically they have somebody come in and dumb a bunch of feed-stock material into a big hopper and then heat the heck out of it and make it into a mold, and then they take it out, and this is the – what the blocks look like, and they cut the edges off, and then they cut it into wafers. 

And then what you do is that you make it into a module.  This one didn’t come out real good.  But what you do is you take the silicon cells and you tie them – you put the – you tie them together, and then you connect this cell to the next cell, to the next cell, and then you make them into a module so that you get something that is – this is the cell one connected to cell two by this wire here.  Sorry this didn’t come out real well.  And I have got these out of order a little bit.

This is what a single crystal silicon wafer looks like, and that is a single crystalline module, and this is a polycrystalline silicon.  And you can see here these shiny areas.  I don’t know how well you can see from the audience.  But these are the polycrystalline grain structures in that.  In other words, each one of these structures here would be – this is a – this would be – this is a single crystal.  Each of these shapes here are actually crystals – single crystals within a polycrystalline material.

I want to shift gears now a little bit to thin film technologies because there is a lot of – been a lot of promise about thin film technologies, and the biggest things is to drive the cost down if you can.  And where things stand on thin film technologies right now is that they are pushing about the same performance level as a polycrystal or a multicrystalline silicon.

The materials utilization here – remember I said that you were using the order of 300 microns.  Here you are using typically less than 5 microns, in some cases even less than a micron.  So you have very high – and also you have high materials utilization.  And here – remember I said you have to slaw these in general, and you have a very poor materials utilization, which is one of the reasons that it is so costly for the – or costly for the silicon that you use.

You can envision high throughput continuous manufacturing, which I’ll show some examples of that.  You can then make something that is called monolithic integration.  Instead of taking all of these individual cells like this and connecting them together by hand into a module like this, what you can do is what is called monolithic integration, and I’ll show you that in a minute.  And they have really demonstrated really good stability and reliability.  Scott has – his shingles are made out of thin-film amorphous-silicon and he has them on his roof.  I think they are obsolete now, Scott.

MR. SKLAR:  (Off mike.)

MR. BIRKMIRE:  And so there is a lot less steps here.  And when I say monolithic integration, what I do – and in fact I should have had a second image or a third image here – is this is a – the substrate is a piece of glass, and it will probably be – it could be – I think they are getting up to more square meters in some of this silicon – amorphous-silicon technology.  So you coat the whole piece of glass with all of these layers, the amorphous solar cell.

Then what you do is you take via laser technology, you take and you take and you scribe them – you segment it so this region here would be equivalent to a cell, and if you looked at this as coming out of the screen as being about a foot – say, four feet – that would be a cell.  And then this cell is then via monolithic integration laser technology is connected to this one, to this one, and to this one.  So basically, you whole a huge piece of glass, and then you monolithically integrate it.  And the idea is that – and this should wind up with a real big cost savings in terms of how you fabricate these modules.

Amorphous silicon is a technology that is probably – from a commercial point of view is probably most advanced.  There is starting to be equipment that is a lot more commercially available.  The modules typically are in the probably range of – when you buy them, about 6 to 8 percent.  The best module efficiencies – a little bit over 10 percent.  It has a bit of a problem in that there is some fundamental stability issues, but even these are stabilized – what they call stabilized performances. 

One of the nice things about amorphous silicon is that it is very – it’s fairly – relatively insensitive to operating temperatures.  If I go down to Arizona and I take a crystalline silicon module, and a take an amorphous silicon module, and the silicon – the amorphous silicon is rated at 7-percent efficiency, or let’s say 8-percent efficiency, and the silicon modules is rated at 12-percent efficiency, if I look at the annual power output, they are probably about the same, and that is because at the high temperatures, crystalline silicon technologies don’t perform as well in terms of annualized output.

You can make these flexible, like the shingles that you saw.  And they are done – they can be done a polymer or stainless steel as well as glass.  There is what is called multi-junction, which means you take one solar cell and stack it on top of the other so you can utilize more of the solar radiation.  And one of the big areas that this is – BIPV is building integrated PV, I think that the amorphous silicon – this is really where most of the technology is going to head in the future.

And this is an example of what they are doing at UNI-SOLAR right now, that they were the ones that made the shingles.  This is a roofing – this is a roofing technology that probably we need to cut it off here and here.  So you role this laminate up on somebody’s – on your roof, and, voila, you have a fairly sizeable PV array on your roof that is already all put together.

The next technology I’ll mention because I’m getting a little bit late here is cad-telluride based PV.  The best performance here in the laboratory is about 16.5 percent.  The module performances are pushing 11 percent now.  There was some issues with stability, but I think you’re making – that most of these have been defined.  It’s a technology that there is a variety of ways to make the material, but there is a lot of a prost-deposition processing and magic that goes on in making these.

There in one of the real questions is are there environmental issues.  I think from a technical point of view that is probably not true.  But First Solar in this country, which is the largest cad-telluride manufacturer, along with your module comes an insurance policy that says that they will reclaim it after 20 years or whatever when it reaches end of life.  That is they way they get – address the environmental issue.

And this is an example of – this is what the manufacturing facility looks like at First Solar.  This is a big unit where they make these modules.  And one of the things – cad-telluride is primarily directed at the power-generation level where most things are behind the fence, so they are easy to reclaim.

MR. SKLAR:  And they make big modules.

MR. BIRKMIRE:  And they make big modules as well, yeah.

Copper indium diselenide solar cells, these are probably the most interesting ones at this point in time because they – you probably have the most control over them.  You can make efficiencies or you can control the band gap to improve the performance.  There is a lot of engineering, but it’s actually fairly difficult to make in a manufacturing environment, so it’s probably the most difficult of the technologies to transfer from the laboratory to the manufacturing environment.

This is an example of a copper indium gallium diselenide array.  It was at Shell Solar in California.  This is the copper-indium-diselenide equivalent of Scott showed you.  This technology actually was developed by a DARPA program.  It started in 1995.  The institute was the only university group that was involved in it.  We provided a lot of the technology base for it.

MR. SKLAR:  Bob, is that you on the ground there?

MR. BIRKMIRE:  I don’t know whether – yeah – (chuckles).

MR. SKLAR:  You had hair then.

MR. BIRKMIRE:  Yeah, I had hair then.  (Chuckles.)

I’m going to go through these quickly.  This is III-V-based, which is gallium arsenide, indium phosphide.  These are basically high-performance PV.  They are multi-junction devices.  They are high-cost to make.  And they have some specialty applications, and primarily they are used in what is called a concentrating system.  I’ll talk a little bit more about that in a second.  This is a – there is actually even a higher device, but you can see that these are all single crystal materials.  This basically probably might be a couple of square centimeters, but this is the stack of these that are made.  And it’s makes – you can make a very high performance, but it also is – not from a cost point of view practical, except when you do what they call concentration, which I’ll mention next.

In concentration, what you do – these are two concentrating systems and one of them has a much higher concentration level; that is this one.  What you do is you are using – in this one they are using mirrors to concentrate the light.  I think it was about 500 – so it takes the light over an area about 500 times the size of the cell, and then It concentrates it up to here because the cell was so – so what you’re doing is trading off what it costs to make the photovoltaic device for what it costs to make the concentrating array.

This turns out to be an electrolyzer.  So this was a system that – I think it’s the university of Nevada at Los Vegas where they were testing this out.  And this is another example of a lower – these are concentrating lenses here that concentrate the cells.

I’m going to go through a couple of more things, and then I’ll just wrap up here.  What is happening the U.S. right now?  If you remember in the State of the Union, there was a solar American initiative, which was established as a presidential initiative that did the – that is coming at – that is actually being implemented at this point in time through DOE.

Basically the idea is they want to accelerate the development of these technologies, and most of the activity is directed at trying to be in industrial-led partnerships between industry, universities, national labs, and some others.  And these are the kind of goals that they start out with.  They break it up into three different market sectors.  This is current – roughly what they range for electricity in this country.  These are the benchmarks for solar electric.  That is why I said it depends what you use as the numbers when you’re talking about what it costs for kilowatt hour.  These are the targeted goals for 2010 and 2015.  They also have goals for how much they would like to see installed capacity within the U.S.

There is also a DARPA called very high efficiency solar cells.  It’s an interesting program because it’s really driven by developing a power source for a flashlight that could be used probably by special-opt folks.  The prototype that they are looking at is only about a half-watt, about 10 square centimeters so that they can reduce the weight that the soldiers carry into the field.  And it’s actually a rather interesting, one of the designs is to use what they call optic – some of the optics right now – take the sunlight and you split it into different colors, if you want, and then there is a cell down below that works better at each of the colors or the wavelengths.

So this is an ongoing program.  The University of Delaware is actually the managing organization for the program.  I think it has, like, over 20 participating organizations.

MR.    :  (Off -mike) – giving us a bunch of flashlights?

MR. BIRKMIRE:  I was thinking about it, but, yeah.

The last thing that I consider that I am going to probably cover today is critical issue and PV.  I think that it’s kind of – that the U.S. has really lost its – the technology and manufacturing leadership role and crystalline silicon PV technology, and we are also on the verge of losing it in other areas.  And I think that that is not a good position for us to be in.  Instead of importing oil, maybe we’ll import PV all of the time.  Who knows? 

And I think what we are doing to try and offset that – we have a little bit of a start on that.  The Solar American Initiative – what I should talk about – I think is in the right direction, but may not offset the progress that has really been made in Japan and Europe because that is where the technology leadership is – their programs are bigger than ours.  They are also now taking a technology lead almost in every area.

The DARPA program, its great science and engineering will push the limits of performance for PV.  Probably from a wide range of use, it’s probably not going to happen for a long time, but I think it’s an important program anyway.  Basic energy science is really somewhere where other programs are supported.  This is really long term fundamental research where you are looking at – and I didn’t really cover any of the – some of the way-out technology’s potential, whether they are going to be successful or not next generation or stuff.

And I think I’m going to end there. This is a picture of – this is in Hawaii.  It’s at Pearl Harbor.  It’s a Navy facility where – I think it’s about 250 kilowatts, I’m not sure, array there, so I thought I would end with that picture.

MR.    :  It’s a good picture.

(Applause.)

MR. WEHRENBERG:  Oh, yeah.  Let me borrow that for just a minute.  Okay, we have got about another 20 minutes for questions before they throw us out.  It doesn’t mean you have to use 20 minutes for questions but certainly you can.  So any questions for our speakers, please?  I’ll see if we can get a microphone over your way.  Close by, and then we’ll get you a microphone in the back.

Q:  Yeah, you put a chart up there about the – I believe it was the energy returned on – energy payback.  Was that on a dollar-cost basis or on an actual energy basis?

MR. BIRKMIRE:  That was on an energy basis.

Q:  Okay, so it’s the –

MR. BIRKMIRE:  That one was the energy basis.

Q:  So the energy return on energy invested is recouped in three years.  Okay.

Q:  (Off mike.)

MR. SKLAR:  Based on the whole system.

Q:  Okay, thank you.

MR. WEHRENBERG:  Jeff (?).

Q:  Just sort of a basic question.  How often do you have to wash them and get the dust off just to keep the efficiency up?

MR. SKLAR:  Well, I mean, it really depends on the area.  Most residential homes in the mid-Atlantic, you don’t have to at all.  And it really depends if you get any rain whatsoever or wind.  And so I would say half of the systems – you should have pressure hose to do it quickly, but for most cases in moderate climates you don’t need to.

Q:  The – (inaudible) – coating, the snow will slide off around here.

MR. SKLAR:  Absolutely.  Yeah, and then on snow – snow slides off.  I still – my home gets power even with snow on it, so it’s not a critical issue. 

Yes.

Q:  Two questions.  The first one is –

MS. WERTHEIM:  Can you state your names when you ask questions?

Q:  Yes, my name is Qun Wang (?).  I am from CNA.

So the first question is that you mentioned a lot about photovoltaic cell, but you didn’t mention a lot about the battery that used to store the energy, say, like, overnight.  That is I think one of the critical question also.  And the other question that I have is, if you look at the trend in the DOD for the last 10, 15 years, that the hydrocarbon fuel, consistently about 85 percent of that, and with the introduction of sort of the LCS and different kind of ships and aircraft, the hydrocarbon is here to stay.  So how much percent that – a photovoltaic cell can contribute to save the costs within, like, 30 years.

MR. SKLAR:  Well, let’s start on the first question.  The industry has been transformed by the development of seal gel-cell batteries.  And these batteries are sealed by your car, and you don’t have to worry about how the electrolytes are mixed, and therefore they are very low maintenance – the 10-year warranties, and so that has really transformed the industry.  Obviously the hybrid vehicle industry is also changing this industry a lot, and we are also picking up nickel-metal hydrides and lithium ion batteries.  And for some of the spookier stuff we’re doing the most advanced batteries in the world. 

There are some great companies that are coming out with thin-film batteries, and I do believe that in the next decade, you will see thin-film batteries on back of the module, so about the same solar panel will store and produce its energy.  So that answers your first question.

The second question I think is really – you can have a lot of different guestimates on it, but I’ll give you the Cliff-Notes version.  In electric devices, you have about 15 to 20 percent of parasitic losses depending on where you’re doing – and on basically all of that what I call low draw power, whether it’s on ships or at homes, it will probably be just eaten by photovoltaics or small wind devices.  And, again, I have always seen this as a portfolio of technology, not just one blended together, very much like the PDA you carry around now is a computer or cell phone, a camera, an MP3 player, and your web-enabled device, and that is really what is going to happen.  So I’ll be – it looks small at the moment, but as it gets integrated, you won’t even think about it.

Q:  Okay, two questions.  The first one has to do with the photovoltaic solar cells I guess.  Any byproducts, whether they are material byproducts in the manufacturing of them that are an issue, and any other environmental issues that you might now of in getting the ingots, and that sort of thing.  And the second question is – you mentioned batteries.  Lithium polymer, is that one of the possibilities as opposed to lithium ion.

MR. SKLAR:  Yes.

MR. BIRKMAN:  It depends.  It’s probably a little bit technology dependent.  I mentioned if you’re talking about cad-telluride in films – cadmium in heavy metals is a problem.  In the case of crystalline silicon, one of the big pushes that is happening right now is the grid structure, to get the power out from the top service – has a fair amount of led in it.  And I think that that will be offset either by some of the more advanced crystalline silicon technology where they will use different type of inks to get that out. 

You know, there is not a real outstanding feature.  There is some question that people will raise about the availability of materials for some of the polycrystalline, indium being one.  It is a byproduct of mining of zinc.  Some people think that if you go out and mine for indium, that might actually solve the problem.  It’s also a problem for the flat-panel display industry because they use the indium tin oxide as a transparent conductive oxide.  But I think overall it’s a pretty – they are pretty benign and friendly from a toxicity point of view.

Q:  Dave Shutes (sp) from Army.  I’ve been hearing a lot about quantum dots being used as potential – you didn’t mention the nano side of this.  I don’t know if you’re seeing any of that on application side or if that is still pretty much in the lab?

MR. BIRKMIRE:  It’s pretty much out in the lab.  In fact, I think the presentation actually has some slides at the end that didn’t use that address – these are the sort of, if we are successful 20 years, for 30 years out – it’s not clear to me that these nanotechnologies that – you know, closest to a nanotechnology that is working is this dye-sensitized cell that was passed around by Konarka, where they basically use a titanium dioxide, and then they put really nanostructure of a light-absorbing dial in there, which are pretty in the nano-scale range.

But to my knowledge, there is not really anything out there that is functioning very well that uses these nanotechnologies.  There is a lot of good ideas and a lot of good work that is going on, and you never know what is going to come out, but I think it’s pretty early.

MR. SKLAR:  Well, it is early, but I guess I have a different view on that, is that what I see coming out with the new technology, because it’s so much more flexible material, and able to do in colors is that you can mesh it in easier.  You can glue it on casings for sensors.  It’s hard to do with PV panels.  You can fundamentally print window shades with it, or awnings so you can get power on buildings.

So I think down the line, it’s going to be one of the ways where you really integrate it in to both military filed, as well as the building operations, as well as the decks on boats, and extensions on bridges, and things that need power that you can have.  So it’s a while off yet.

Yes, sir.

Q: Ted Hilgeman (ph).  I have often thought that the photovoltaic ought to be backed up with solar thermal to carry the residual heat off or residential use, and yet you don’t see much of any of that.  Any comments on that?

MR. SKLAR:  That is a great – you know, I do want to point out, we are only talking about one type of solar here tonight, which is photovoltaic.  So you have concentrated solar panels.  We have nine plants producing 350 megawatts of the – of electricity in California.  We are building a 64-megawatt concentrated solar plant right now in Boulder City, Nevada, with just 2 percent natural gas backup.

But that is doing exactly what all of these other technologies – actually they create steam and electricity using sunlight.  And then you have a million buildings in the United States with solar water heating, and by the way, which is a six-cents levelized cost, very cost effective, basically a half-a-kilowatt system on your roof.  And while a million sounds big in the United States, there is a million buildings in Tokyo alone with solar water heating.  So we are not the lead in that either.

There has been some attempt to layer solar material actually on top of or around solar thermal panels.  And I haven’t seen anything elegant yet.  Enrel had one.  I don’t think we saw that.  It was sort of interesting.  And I believe as the thin films develop, or, frankly, again the nanotechnologies develop, which can give you a little – make you a little more creative in how you use the material, that it would make – it would add to that possibility and probably improve the economics a lot, so it’s an issue.

Yes.  Those on buttons – those technology, I tell you –

Q:  Can you hear me?  There it is.  Now it’s on.

Lieutenant Colonel Waiben (ph) from the Air Force Civil Engineers Office.  And I guess this one would fall under the category of connect.  You had mentioned you were involved in some studies.  You mentioned homeland security and critical infrastructure protections.  Who is working some of these things like the micro-grid deals where you can get – instead of refueling all of your generators, you connect some of these various systems together, some mix of technologies, and identify some critical circuits and get some basic power needs met if your entire Western states go down, for example?

MR. SKLAR:  Well, there are a couple of places where that is doing – actually, electric power research institute has a micro-grid program.  The Department of Energy is pushing one with the New England pool.  Your Air Force technology system office at Warner Robins Air Force base is doing – they are doing – I was down there – they are actually pretty good guys too that are doing some – different technology controls on how to play out that kind of power.

Actually, that is where I think the real sweet spot of this stuff.  And if you want a lot – the forward look in electric grid are looking at the Internet to mimic this issue of a self-healing grid, and if you want a self-healing grid, what you do is a very sophisticated set of electronic lines with communications through it, and a very sophisticated network of distributed generation along those lines, and they all talk to each other simultaneously, and can react in nanoseconds.

And, again, we have – I would say about 30 different examples of it ongoing right now in the United States.  And my e-mail is on that.  If you want some contacts, just e-mail and happy to do that.

Q:  Hello.  Hi.  My name is Tristan Becker (ph).  I am with the Sapient Corporation.

And I actually have two questions.  You mentioned photovoltaics as size and different materials as playing a big part as to how much energy they can actually create.  Well, I’m under the impression that they are also very location specific.  You showed the graph of the Midwest and especially Arizona being very high.  Well, what about Seattle, and how that would work up in the Northwest?  How would photovoltaics be different?

And Scott, you seem to have a little bit – or actually a lot of experience with marketing, so I was curious as to how that might be different with a little bit longer payback period versus – I mean what would your cell pitch – how would it change between the two areas?

MR. SKLAR:  Generally how you – first of all, you are absolutely right.  Solar systems depend on how much sunlight you have.  And the issue is that most of – when we’re sizing systems for buildings compensate – and generally the rule of thumb – rule of thumb here is that from the sunniest area to the Seattlist area is about 7 percent difference.  So it means 7 percent more area of modules that you need.  So we have small roofs.  If it’s a constrained area, it’s a problem; if not, you’re just adding to the cost of that, or you’re integrating it with other technologies.

I actually put in – you know, taking in that rule of thumb – about 15 percent more in oversized batteries.  So when you get more ground cover – cloud cover – remember, when you’re cloud cover, most of these photovoltaic panels actually react to the higher spectrum of the sunlight, which is the stuff that filters through the panels, the cloud.  So even on the cloudiest day here, I’m still getting 30 percent of what I need coming through my solar system into my batteries.  But there, I compensate by creating more area and more storage.

What also happens – and it’s sort of unique, is that if you track utility rates, they tend to be crappier – or higher, I guess would be a better term – (cross talk) – I’m from New York, you can tell – in those areas, and also, in a lot of those areas where you have more clouds or rain, you have more outages.  So generally how you would do it is you take a look at what their outage rates are, what are their electric spikes, what their roof areas are, and make the value-added case.

I did want to also add one thing, and, again, it gets to the cents-per-kilowatt hour.  You know, five cents to a 11 cents a kilowatt hour, which is what we can claim most people pay is for base-load power.  Almost all of the power that solar competes against is mid-day peak power, and that ranges between 15 and 35 cents.  So it’s much more competitive in the range because that is what it’s competing against.

And actually, the state of Washington is one of the few states that have actual time-of-day rates in most parts of the states for residential.  That is one of the few areas in the country that do.  And in this energy bill passed by Congress, EPAC (ph), they actually mandated that the states start moving over to time-of-day rates for everybody, which means bringing in electric meters, so that you can have more real-time pricing, which is what the market needs, particularly for technologies like solar and wind.  Long answer. 

Yes, sir.  All the way back there.  You can scream out.

Q:  What is the effect of latitude?  Does this work in Europe, the panel, in Seattle?

MR. BIRKMIRE:  There is a lot of good – there is huge databases on how much power that you can get from any region.  If you go to the NREL website, there is a fair amount – the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, there is a fair amount of information there.  I’m not sure – but the Europe, there is also for Europe as well.  There is a large number of publications that address this issue.

In fact, some of it is that if you look at – as you get up into the northern latitudes, you may want to use a flat panel – or a crystalline silicon flat panels and actually track a little bit because the increase power that you get out because you track the sun, as opposed to having it at some fixed angle, will offset the cost that it does for the tracking.  If you do it down in the southwest, you want the thing – you don’t have – it doesn’t make sense to track because you don’t pick up that much power, but also the temperature there, you have got to play a role, so it might change the technology that you chose – that you’re going to put in there.

There is a huge amount of information out there that –

MR. SKALR:  Yeah, Germany is the biggest market for solar today in the world.  So it obviously works.

Q:  At the higher latitudes, do you get big seasonal variations?

MR. SKLAR:  Indeed.  Yes, sir.

Q:  Gene Porter (sp) at IDA.

A question about cost estimating – I think we all understand how you get the cost of base power from coal.  You have go buy the coal and you pay people to shovel it and haul away the ashes and operate the plants, and you get 10 cents per kilowatt-hour.  Where do you get the cost, the running cost for PV power?  Once you have bought it and installed it, you don’t have to wash it down, doesn’t it go on for years with essentially no operating cost?

MR. SKLAR:  It fundamentally does go on for years –

Q:  So is it just the financial costs or –

MR. SKLAR:  You have an ONM cost.  Again, I keep on saying photovoltaics is generally, like, 40 percent of the system.  I say the biggest problem with PV systems today, mark my word, is squirrels.  And they will get up there and chew those wires.  (Laughter.)  And I believe that squirrels have more outages than any other terrorist-kind of entity at the moment.

Q:  When the costs are five times as high for – (off mike) – power as it is for coal power?

MR. SKLAR:  I think squirrels on roof do it.  But seriously, you do have inverter, you know, that takes the DC current to AC.  You have connecter issues.  But, you know, fundamentally you don’t have moving parts, so it’s – you know, you’re OM costs are very low.  I mean, I have had a system for 20 years, you know, a 1984 on my house.  So it’s 20 – more than 20 years.  I have not replaced anything.

Q:  Where do you get the 30 cents per kilowatt hours?

MR. SKLAR:  Well, I don’t believe in his numbers, but the systems I am quoting are 18 to 20 cents that are install cost today.  Now, beyond that you have a 30 percent tax credit with five-year accelerated depreciation.  So now that is down to 10 to 15 cents, which is quite comparable in many of the areas of country where we are competing.  So there are a lot of assumptions on these numbers in the cost of money.  I guess that is what I will say.  But I did not interrupt Bob when he put those numbers out.  I want you to know.

MR. BIRKMIRE:  You can defend yourself.

MR. SKLAR:  I am not going to defend myself.

MR. BIRKMIRE:  Basically what you do is you a lifetime, and then you know the average annual power output, so that gives you the total power that you’re going to get out, and then you do the cost average that way.  I think that that is – is what you’re asking?

Q:  I’m asking the difference between install costs and operating costs.

MR. WEHRENBERG:  You are advertising the upfront costs across the –

MR. BIRKMIRE: Really, the major maintenance thing is probably replacing the inverters because you probably replaced yours, I’ll bet you.

MR. SKLAR:  Yeah, I replace them a lot. 

MR. BIRKMIRE:  The inverter is probably the weakest link in the –

MR. SKLAR:  And that is the item that turns the DC current coming out of PV or the batteries – and some folks use 20-year lifetime, some folks use 30 year.  I think most of the PV modules now are heading towards 30-year warranties.  Yes, sir.

Q:  You say it has a similar lifetime to the solar voltaic system.  What is the actual lifetime?  How long do these panels last until they go – output falls to the point where you need to replace it?

MR. BIRKMIRE:  It’s usually the encapsulation system that fails, rather than the photovoltaic device.  And the encapsulation system fails, and you get – whether you get water –

Q:  Do the voltaic systems ever stop producing, or they just keep going on?

MR. BIRKMIRE:  I don’t know.  Look at the moon rovers.  (Chuckles.)

MR. SKLAR:  We have the GPL systems that have been in the ’60s that are still operating.  So if the encapsulation, which is the glue, basically, that keeps the glass on top of the panels, keeps sticking, water doesn’t get underneath it, I assume it will go on forever.

MR. BIRKMIRE:  Yeah, one of the issues that you have when you go to these more flexible technologies is that most of the plastics only – will degrade under UV radiation in about a 10- to 15-year timeframe, so that they are working on trying to get materials that will encapsulate part of it.  Glass works out very well because of the UV decay.

MR. SKLAR: Anybody else?  Yes, sir.  Back there.

Q:  I just wanted to ask to ask the – this is a – (off mike) – question.  There is a PV house in North Carolina State University that was established.  The system was put together in 1979 and is making about 82 percent of its power still with the 1979 technology just put together.  So the TVA and all of that was that old.  But what you are referring to is more correct with regard to these thin film materials that lose efficiency, and also –

MR. BIRKMIRE:  The thin film materials are probably just a stable, but if you go – what I was referring to, that if you encapsulate them so they are flexible and, like, you can mold them around things, it’s hard to get the UV protection that you get from glass by some sort of encapsulating – there is just not flexible – transparent flexible materials out there that will –

(Cross talk.)

Q:  But I do have one question for you regarding the indium – copper indium

MR. BIRKMIRE:  Gallium –

(Cross talk.)

Q:  How real is it?  What is a real efficiency right now, and why did Shell get out of it?

(Laughter, cross talk.)

Q:  Let me tell you who I am –

MR. BIRKMIRE:  It’s a fair question.  I don’t know why Shell got out of it.  They still have a joint venture in Germany with – do you remember the company.  They are still a joint venture.  Oil companies are funny groups.  You know, if you look historically, a lot of oil companies have come in and gone out.  The only one that has probably consistency stayed in PV is BP, so I –

Q:  BP.  And BP got out of all of their thin film.

MR. BIRKMIRE:  They got out of all of their thin film.  If you look at Japan right now, the two – the crystalline silicon, they are really making a lot.  But the other growth area is amorphous silicon, and the other growth area is copper indium gallium dycelonide – both Honda, Showa Shell, and I think there is one other company –

MR.    :  Right, there is a third –

MR. BIRKMIRE:  There is a third company, and these, they are talking about establishing 20 megawatt facilities probably within the next year or so.  So who knows?

Q: But what is the – what is the real efficiency in mass production?

MR. BIRKMIRE:  In mass production, my guess is at a module level, like, say, a one-by-four-foot module.  You’re probably talking average about 10 percent.  So it’s slightly – it’s a little bit less than you would get for a standard crystalline silicon module, but can you make it cost effective and compete even at the lower performance, and I think that is where – the real problem with thin films is the following, and particularly copper indium dycelonide or cad-telluride – becoming a little less so with amorphous silicon is all of the equipment to make these semi-conductor materials is custom.  The only way you get the cost down is you have got to have a big factory, which means a big investment.  You have got to have – who wants to invest in something that is sort of an unproven technology at that level.  So it’s ramping up I think.  And I think it’s going to happen.

MR. SKLAR:  But the other thin films are ramping up very big.  I mean, we have 100-megawatt plants being built in Tennessee and – (inaudible) – 100-megawatt-per-year plant just across the border in Mexico.

Q:  In thin film?

MR. SKLAR:  Thin film.

Q:  What technology?

MR. SKLAR:  (Off mike.)

MR.    :  That is crystalline – (cross talk).

Q:  That is crystalline.

MR. BIRKMIRE:  If you’re looking at the thin film –

MR. SKLAR:  Oh, the thin film, I’m sorry.

MR. BIRKMIRE:  The thin film area, you’re talking about First Solar who makes cad-telluride.  They are going to be probably – they are claiming to be – are going to be at a 70-megawatt level.  If you’re looking at CIS, you’re talking in Germany you have Worth (sp) Solar that is going to be at about a 15-megawatt level at the end of this year.  There is the big splash from nanosolar in this country that says that they are going to make – what is it – 400 –

MR. SKLAR:  Five.

MR. BIRKMIRE:  I don’t believe it.

MR. SKLAR:  Let’s answer more questions.  Any other questions?  Yes, sir.

Q:  Jason Holstein from the Amicus Building Center.  If I could just make a comment on costs. 

From our point of view, it’s not a question of simple payback; it’s a question of dynamic net present value, especially – to keep it short, it’s against the baseline, where in Maryland, we are running on average 30 percent annual inflation on electricity.  In June, in Baltimore, there was a 79-percent increase, and with the globalization of our energy supplies, you could expect that it’s not the last time that we are going to have these things.  So whereas solar will stabilize or go down, the baseline just increases your payback, your dynamic payback over time.

MR. SKLAR:  Anybody else?

MR. WEHRENBERG:  Thank you very much.

(Applause.)

(END)

File Attachment: 

101606 Transcript.pdf