All About Solar | Green Energy News

July 23, 2006 – Vol.11 No.18

ALL ABOUT SOLAR.

This week’s news.

Semiconductor company Emcore says it’s a leading supplier of multi-junction Gallium Arsenide (GaAs) solar cells for the satellite industry. The company also says it has supplied more than 400,000 cells to that industry with many of those cells still in orbit around the planet.

Emcore is planning to bring its products down to earth. In 2005 the company began consolidating its solar operations to one facility in Albuquerque, New Mexico. In its next step, to grab some of the growing terrestrial solar market, the company has signed an agreement with Sandia National Laboratories for the development of large scale concentrator photovoltaic power systems.

In its statement Emcore says little about the specific concentrating technology to be developed with Sandia, but more is known about Emcore’s triple junction cells: they have a 27.5 percent average efficiency rating. Triple junction cells are usually expensive. However by adding more power output per cell by concentrating sunlight on it, fewer cells would be needed for the same amount of output, thus bringing down cost. Visit Emcore at http://www.emcore.com/

In the booming solar energy market solar product manufacturers need to insure that materials keep flowing to production lines. The best they can do is write long term contracts with suppliers to lock up materials for future production.

Suntech Power Holdings of Wuxi, China has announced that it has signed a 10-year, $5 - 6 billion solar wafer supply agreement with MEMC which supplies silicon wafers to both the electronic semiconductor and solar industries. In the agreement MEMC will also get a 4.9 percent equity stake in Suntech.

Since it began operations in 2002 Suntech has expanded production operations 12 times becoming one of the top ten in the world solar product suppliers, according to the company. Visit Suntech at http://www.suntech-power.com/