Thursday, April 21, 2011

GE GOES SOLAR

GE GOES SOLAR.
by Bruce Mulliken, Green Energy News

General Electric is particularly good at NOT paying corporate income taxes. They got considerable flak in the mainstream media for that.

General Electric relies heavily on its financial dealings to make money. Yet it has been particularly good about financing renewable energy projects.

Think what you want about the company, but they’ve been a star in green energy.

They grabbed the wind turbine division of Enron Wind out of a bankruptcy courtroom and turned it into a global wind turbine powerhouse.

They’ve supported the commercialization of electrically-driven cars by a commitment to purchase 25,000 of them for fleet use.

Now they’ve positioned themselves to go big time with solar energy.

The giant global conglomerate has announced it will build a 400 megawatt annual production capacity thin-film solar manufacturing plant in the U.S. This largest solar manufacturing plant in the U.S. will employ 400. GE will announce the plant site, or sites shortly. Multiple locations are possible, sharing the wealth among communities as it were.

Victor Abate, vice president of GE’s renewable energy business said in a press release,” “Our plan to open a U.S. solar manufacturing facility further demonstrates our confidence in this technology and is just the first phase in a global, multi-gigawatt roadmap. We’re not only excited by the efficiency milestone, but also by the speed at which our team was able to achieve it and the innovation runway for future improvements in this technology.”


The thin-film solar technology to be manufactured will be PrimeStar Solar’s cadmium-telluride (CdTe) non-silicon variety similar to that produced by First Solar. GE has held a major equity stake in PrimeStar since 2008.

CdTe is considered one of the most affordable solar technologies on the market and is expect to get even more so with greater commercialization.

GE also announced that it’s CdTe technology has also reached new heights for efficiency. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) has certified a panel built at PrimeStar’s 30-megawatt manufacturing line in Arvada, Colorado as reaching 12.8 percent aperture efficiency. This panel surpasses all previously published records for CdTe thin film.

GE says that a 1 percent increase in efficiency is equal to an approximate 10 percent decrease in system cost.

Already the company has racked up more than 100 megawatts in thin film solar orders. Major purchasers are NextEra Energy that will buy 60 MW’s worth and Invenergy which will buy 20 MW’s worth for a project in the company’s home state of Illinois