Frost & Sullivan is reporting that polysilicon shortages that have slowed the solar PV industry will end in 2008. The expectation is the 4 top polysilicon producers will add 17,000 tons of capacity this year, a jump of almost 50% in production. Compare that with the total demand of 26,000 tons in 2004. Shows how much this industry is booming….in fact, the expectation is solar will eat up almost 50% of the output of high purity silicon by 2009.
That’s an important step for the solar industry gaining more political …

The Presentation (Flash is required)
To move to the next slide, click on the right side of the current slide. Click on the left side to go back.

Videos from the Solar Power event are up on the website. As always, you can watch snippets of the video on YouTube as well.
In addition, check out Sunpower’s Solar savings calculator to see how much you could potentially save with a solar installation. Only takes about 5 minutes.

A question came up at the solar talk on Tuesday…there is confusion on standard power conversions. What does it mean when a power plant is 15 MW? How about my PG&E bill that rates everything in kw h?
In science class, energy is generally labeled in Joules (sometime kilojoules – KJ or megajoules – MJ). Energy is time independent…it’s just energy.
But we never hear about Joules in normal life. We always hear about Watts (sometimes kW – kilowatt, MW – megawatt).
1 Watts = 1 Joule/second.
So when you hear …