Burn Some Daylight

Photon International magazine estimates that one in four pv modules sold in Europe this year will be manufactured in China.  The question for pv power developers is how good are these modules?  Chinese manufacturers are predicting they will produce 1.15GW of solar modules this year--over 25% of the total 4GW of global production.

When I was at Intersolar in June, I met with over 30 Chinese module manufacturers, many who did not have their UL 1703 listing yet.  The focus is on Europe--Germany and Spain, to be exact--California is a distant third, but one that everyone is watching.  And they are getting their UL listing--there will be a lot of these modules when I go to Solar Power 2007 in Long Beach.

My major concerns are performance based--I design and provision 25 year systems.  The key factor is not initial $/W, but the module's electrical production over its lifetime.

The IEC 61215 certification seems to be the minimum standard, with the UL 1703 necessary for our California market.  I need to get my head around this, because it is a potentially useful component to the systems I design.

I recently realized I was a ways away from knowing everything I needed to know about designing commercial solar systems in California.  With this revelation in mind, I took Jack and Christina's workshop on designing solar systems.

I cannot recommend this course highly enough.  There is tremendous demand for great solar system design--and not very many pv system designers available--so design standards are not as rigorous as I would like. 

As a developer [and designer if need be] of commercial pv system design--I need good design.  PV systems push close to 600V DC, a voltage that not many electrical engineers and contractors have a ton of experience working with.  The fact that pv is current limited requires you to think differently--and this course helped me do that.

Jack and Christina were a pleasure to learn from, and the class was an ecumenical mix of contractors, engineers, and solar industry professionals.  If you need to know more about designing commercially scaled pv, I recommend this as a very good way to spend three days in San Francisco this December.