By Charles Annis – Vice President, Manufacturing Research, DisplaySearch
Jos van der Hyden, First Solar’s Vice President of Business Development EMEA, gave one of the keynote speeches at PVSEC-19 in Jeju, Korea on November 9. The presentation was well delivered and interesting enough, but was similar to what can be found on the company’s website. Given the company’s success over the past few years, it is not surprising that the audience had lots of questions. A few of the areas covered are summarized here, and a more detailed summary will be published in the DisplaySearch Monitor.
- First Solar’s experience with running utility-scale PV power plants in the desert-In Germany, solar modules are essentially never cleaned-except by rain, which washes them fairly clean, leaving a layer of residue that does not significantly affect performance. In the desert, dry storms just blow the sand off the solar modules. However, wet storms in the desert, where the sand and dirt has absorbed some moisture, can be quite problematic. They can deposit a hard layer of clay on the modules, and this should be cleaned off manually as soon as possible. Of course there are costs associated with such cleaning, and these should be taken into account when calculating cost of ownership of systems.
- First Solar’s “Copy Smart Process”-This quickly replicates process and performance improvements made from the main fab in Ohio to fabs in Germany and Malaysia. Many of the enhancements made are software based. Once the software has been developed and tested, it can just be rolled out to other fabs and run automatically as all the systems are compatible.
- PV plant costs, module costs, and margins-He talked about an example of a 40MW utility scale plant in Germany that cost €130million (inclusive of all hardware, construction, legal fees, financing, etc.) when built a few years ago; on a capacity basis, this is €3.25/W. He also mentioned that in Q3’09, module costs fell to $0.85/W. The question was raised: Isn’t the margin really big? He said First Solar re-invests its margins into R&D, capacity expansion and other projects. He also noted that the 40MW plant example was 2-3 years ago and module costs are 20-30% lower now.
On October 28, First Solar announced Q3’09 revenues of $481 million and operating income of 33.8%. Revenues were down versus the previous quarter and operating income below the last year plus trend, but First Solar remains very profitable, soaring far above all of its peers. When you are making that much money, a lot of people will have a lot of questions for you. Mainly, everybody wants to ask, how can we be as successful as you?
