PROJECT EASY GREEN

General Motors Ventures has invested $7.5 million into Sunlogics, which makes solar-powered garage stalls with amorphous silicon solar panels.

GM said it will also install solar arrays at dealerships and GM facilities around the country. GM has 30 megawatts of solar right now and they want to double the total to 60 megawatts by 2016.

The company also just said it would boost the number of Chevy Volts to 5,000 a month to surpass Nissan and its Leaf in sales.

The deal certainly will help Sunlogics. Amorphous silicon has in some ways become the forgotten material in solar. The vast majority of solar panels shipped today are crystalline silicon panels and the price is dropping toward $1.30 a watt. Meanwhile, companies like First Solar and Solyndra continue to drive up the efficiency and drive down the cost in, respectively, cadmium telluride and copper indium gallium selenide (CIGS) solar panels. First Solar produces panels at 11.7 percent efficiency for less than 75 cents a watt and CIGS vendors all talk about 12-percent-plus efficiencies. A lot of the amorphous industry is stuck in the 7 percent to 9 percent range.

Amorphous silicon makes some sense in parking canopies. The panels are light, which is great for roofs not designed to bear heavy loads, and the packaging and framing can be designed in such a way as to reduce installation costs. But CIGS panels are light, too. Many of the big parking garage arrays, like those at Google and Applied Materials, rely on crystalline silicon. Still, amorphous has its place. Constellation Energy will install a 5.4-megawatt amorphous array at a Toys 'R' Us shipping facility that will consume nearly all of the 1.3 million square feet of roof space.

Locals will cheer the investment. Sunlogics says that GM's cooperation will create 200 jobs in Michigan and 110 more at its Canadian facility.

GM Ventures has made a number of investments in the automotive space. It put money in Coskata (fuel from trash), Bright Automotive (lightweight delivery vehicles), Sakti3 (solid state batteries) and Mascoma (superbugs churning out fuel.)

Is it a temporary headache, or are bad times ahead for the solar industry?

SunPower today announced that its second-quarter losses would be greater than anticipated. Non-GAAP losses should come to around 19 to 20 cents per share, more severe than the five cent loss to ten cent non-GAAP profit expected earlier. Gross margin will come to 12 percent to 13 percent instead of 15 percent to 17 percent.

Margins in the first quarter came to 19.6 percent and the first quarter margins represented a disappointing slide from earlier times. So in all, this is a curve that goes down to the right.

"While we met our revenue goals for the second quarter, our gross margin and bottom line performance was impacted by market conditions in Germany and Italy," said Tom Werner, SunPower president and CEO. The quarter also includes one-time charges of $75 million. Including all expenses, losses should come to $1.50 to $1.55 per share.

As a highlight, Werner said that SunPower continues to cut costs and that it reduced inventory. Revenue will come in at $590 million to $595 million, in line with earlier estimates of revenue at $550 million to $600 million.

It is a refrain that has been heard before. In the first quarter, SunPower's revenue came to $451 million, well above the $347 million of the first quarter of 2010 but below expectations. European conditions were to blame.

One can imagine the new corporate masters at Total are thrilled. The French oil giant bought 60 percent of SunPower in April for around $1.4 billion.

Although SunPower makes some of the more expensive (and efficient) panels in the industry, these problems will send chills through the solar world and prompt debate over whether the industry is going through an interim lull or is on the verge of extended dismal times. Simply put, the world has a lot of manufacturing capacity and governments are clinching up on rebates and incentives. Italy and Germany both revised their incentive programs earlier in the year.

Demand for solar, however, continues to climb, and some of the inventory overhang from April that depressed prices earlier in the year has been reduced. The SunPower results could thus be a reflection of the past as much as the future.

Still, the outlook for the third and fourth quarter remains murky.

Solar execs have also told me they've been worried about consolidation in the industry since the beginning of the year. Go to a show like Intersolar. You'll see rows and rows of nearly identical crystalline panels. Solar panels in some ways have become the energy world's equivalent of flash memory chips: technically challenging products to manufacture that get sold like commodities. Staying in the market means spending billions just to break even; at some point, it's no longer a business for some manufacturers. It's more like a bad gambling habit. (The picture shows Prometheus, who brought fire to man, getting his liver eaten out by a sacred bird as punishment. Amazing how the ancients predicted this one.)

The economics surrounding panels helps explain why balance-of-system costs will soon account for more of the cost of a solar system than the panels themselves.

REC last week said that its second quarter revenue declined 17 percent from the first quarter — not the second quarter of 2010 but the previous quarter — because of module and cell price declines.

Wafer prices are also sharply in decline, sources have told us recently.

DuPont has purchased Innovalight, a startup that found success after switching business models.

Innovalight makes a silicon ink. When added to crystalline silicon solar panels, it can boost efficiency by 1 percent to 2 percent at a relatively low cost. Three percent is on the horizon. Back in 2008, the company planned to make solar modules, but it could not raise the $50 million to build a small production facility. As a result, it switched to being an intellectual property company.

Since then, the firm has signed deals with JA Solar, Yingli, Motech and others. Most of its customers are in Asia, with the majority in China.

Innovalight also tweaked the conventional intellectual property business model. The company technically sells silicon ink powders to its customers as well as collecting royalties under an intellectual property license. The unusual structure solves two problems. First, customers feel they are getting something for their money. They aren't just paying for an abstract right; they are obtaining powder. Conversely, having a sales contract and an IP license gives Innovalight more legal leverage, the company's general counsel told me earlier this year at a conference. (Editor's note: We suspected something was up at Intersolar two weeks ago when Innovalight execs canceled all speaking appearances, but our gut feeling was that they might file for an IPO.)

The deal underscores the ongoing shopping spree among multinational conglomerates in greentech. Simply put, conglomerates have worldwide reach and established relationships with customers. Startups have novel technologies. Hence, companies that are more than 100 years old are busy buying companies founded less than  seven years ago. Getting bought by a so-called Green Giant is the quickest path to liquidity and big accounts these days.

Electricity equipment makers ABB and Schneider Electric have collectively purchased more than 10 companies in recent months for billions of dollars. Last year, DuPont purchased industrial enzyme maker Danisco for $6.3 billion. Danisco not only already makes a green rubber for tires, it also produces a large number of additives for food. The chemical giant is also a large provider of sealants, backsheets, encapsulants and other materials to the solar industry. DuPont says it garnered $1 billion in revenue from solar in 2010 and wants to double that figure by 2014.

The company additionally is a general partner with BP in Butamax Advanced Biofuels, which is currently embroiled in a lawsuit with Gevo. (DuPont also has a French heritage and French outfits like Schneider, Total, Areva, Veolia and Saint-Gobain have been at the forefront of the shopping spree. However, DuPont was founded in the U.S. in 1802.)

This acquisition also highlights one of the more unusual trends taking place, namely, the interest among Asian manufacturers for American intellectual property. Although companies often complain about intellectual property protection in China and other parts of Asia, Asian conglomerates have seemingly been more actively interested in U.S. know-how than their Western counterparts. Innovalight does not have U.S. customers, for instance. Pinnacle Engines, which has created an energy-efficient gas engine that it will license, landed its first deal with an Asian manufacturer. EcoMotors, another engine maker that hopes to license its technology, is seeking its first customers in Asia. 

Michael Ahearn, who stepped down as the First Solar CEO in 2009, has re-emerged.

Ahearn is behind True North Venture Partners, which will invest in early-stage energy, waste, water and food startups. While energy has garnered billions from VCs, those other sectors have lagged somewhat. The picture, however, has begun to change, and recycling is shaping up to be a growth market. The world, meanwhile, is expected to endure rising food prices and chronic droughts in the future.

The firm will put $100,000 to $25 million into companies.

Ahearn was a co-founder of First Solar and served as CEO for years. The company's history stretches back almost 20 years. In the late '90s, however, First Solar had a breakthrough in coming up with a way to produce cadmium telluride solar cells. It began to manufacture them in 2002. The rest is history. It now makes the cheapest solar modules (under 75 cents a watt) and jousts with Suntech for the number-one spot in the industry. (Savor the irony: neither Suntech or First Solar, two of the biggest IPOs in greentech history, received money from Sand Hill Road VCs.)

When Ahearn announced he was stepping down in 2009, he said he planned to work on behalf of the solar industry by lobbying and raising the profile of solar in Washington and state capitols.

"The manufacturing incentives will be useful sweeteners, but that won't substitute for creating a robust market," Ahearn said then. "You ought to get the policy and program right, and you can't leave it all to the states. Otherwise it'd be fragmented and underfunded."

Solar, arguably, needs more lobbying help than money. Either way, it's good to see him back.

Side note: rumors swirl that Nicholas Parker of the Cleantech Group is trying to raise a fund.

General Electric today said it would invest in eSolar, which specializes in solar thermal technology, and use the firm's technology to build solar thermal farms or hybrid power plants, which combine natural gas and solar thermal.

Think of a hybrid power plant as a form of risk mitigation. When the sun shines, steam for the plant can be made from the heat collected by the mirrors of a solar power plant. When it's night or raining, the gas plant can do the most work. The combination of the two technologies also allows power providers to provide fairly firm power and will potentially expand the geographic region for thermal technology. Most solar thermal plants are built, or are proposed, for incredibly arid regions like Arizona, California's Inland Empire, or North Africa. Increasing the gas component — potentially — lets power plant builders erect plants in areas where the sun doesn't have to be as strong or dependable. Florida Power & Light built one of the first such facilities in that state.

Solar thermal plants mostly provide baseline-quality power. The biggest problem that the solar thermal power plants in California's Mojave Desert have experienced in decades of operation came after volcanic explosions in the Philippines carried dust over the Pacific.

GE will integrate eSolar's technology with its FlexEfficiency 50 gas turbine, an extremely efficient (61 percent) turbine that can ramp up fairly quickly (more than 50 megawatts a minute). Adding on eSolar's thermal technology will boost the efficiency to over 70 percent.

The deal also marks something of a comeback for eSolar. The company, founded by IdeaLab's Bill Gross, has championed capturing heat from the sun with heliostats, which are freestanding mirrors, and then targeting those mirrors onto a tower filled with water. It's similar to the technology behind BrightSource Energy. However, although eSolar has nabbed funds from Google and others, it hasn't been as successful as BrightSource or SolarReserve at signing large-scale power purchase deals with utilities or landing loans from the Department of Energy. During the credit crisis, eSolar shifted toward licensing its technology to China and India. Some projects have been scuttled or downsized.

Factors such as required site size, land-use risks and multimillion-dollar costs have made it difficult for solar thermal developers to compete against wind and PV developers. Thus, hybrid power plants could become a substantial portion of the industry's future.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

This year, GE also announced that it would start to make high-efficiency cadmium telluride solar panels, putting GE in direct competition with First Solar. GE, however, said it won't open its main manufacturing facility, a 400-megawatt factory, until 2013.