Yesterday we reported that Q-Cells, Germany's — and once the globe's — largest solar manufacturer, was on the brink of bankruptcy. The once-dominant solar company lost hundreds of millions of dollars in the last year.

Last week we reported the bankruptcy of thin-film manufacturer Odersun. That follows the failure of CSP developer Solar Millennium and crystalline silicon module supplier Solon in December of last year.

Phoenix Solar, a Bavaria-based solar project integrator and developer, has become the latest casualty in the German solar industry. It's rarely a positive sign when a firm must delay its annual report.

Here's the English translation of the bad news from the Phoenix Solar website.

Owing to considerable cuts in the feed-in tariffs for solar power in several key markets of Phoenix Solar AG, the restructuring plan submitted to the financing parties in December 2011, which also included the business development envisaged for the coming years, has had to be adjusted in recent weeks. As a result, the financing negotiations of Phoenix Solar AG (ISIN DE000A0BVU93, Prime Standard of the Frankfurt Stock Exchange) have been delayed. The moratorium agreed with the syndicate banks and other bilateral lenders and guarantors, as well as trade credit insurers, was extended at the end of March to allow financing negotiations to continue on the basis of the adjusted restructuring plan. In view of these circumstances, the release of the financial report and annual report 2011 has been postponed, most likely for a few weeks. Similarly, the publication of the quarterly reports on the first quarter of 2012, scheduled for 10 May 2012, is also likely to take place at a later date.

Phoenix prospered during Germany's high-feed-in-tariff era, installing more than a gigawatt of PV in Germany and elsewhere. The company sold turnkey PV power plants, modules, and mounting systems. The company also designed and developed solar plants.

Here's the sad stock price tale of Phoenix Solar:

GTM Research Solar Analyst Shyam Mehta has long foretold the difficulties awaiting higher-cost European c-Si cell and module makers. 

Today's casualty is Phoenix Solar.  Which of the remaining German solar suppliers will be the next to give up the ghost? Will Germany be home to any crystalline silicon solar manufacturing by year's end?

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Semprius just added another $ 7.5 million in venture capital to its war chest for its high-concentration PV systems. The funding came from existing investors Siemens Venture Capital, ARCH Venture Partners and Intersouth Partners. That follows a $ 3M financing earlier this year. The company has received more than $ 30 million in VC funding since its inception plus some DOE funding as well.

Other investors in Semprius include Morgan Creek Capital Management, Illinois Emerging Technologies Fund, Applied Ventures, and In-Q-Tel.

Semprius has been working on building a 5-megawatt pilot plant that is expandable to 35 megawatts. Semprius claims to have set the world-record CPV solar module efficiency using Solar Junction's III-V multi-junction solar cells based on lattice-matched dilute nitrides. The firm recorded a module efficiency of 33.9 percent.

Semprius has a core semiconductor technology the firm believes can make CPV more competitive. In December of last year, NREL validated a 41 percent efficiency at 1,000 suns for a Semprius cell, close to the world record.

Semprius — like the larger CPV industry — has its work cut out for it. The flat plate photovoltaics (PV) industry has grown at a compound annual rate of about 41 percent per year for the last decade to reach its current 2011 shipment pace of 20 gigawatts. And the price of c-Si solar continues to fall every calendar quarter. GTM Research has published a detailed analysis and forecast on the CPV market.

The leaders in the CPV systems markets are Amonix, Soitec, and SolFocus but things have been realtively quiet in CPV of late. The largest operating CPV power plant in the U.S. is the Hatch site in New Mexico, at least until the 30-megawatt Alamosa project comes online.

Spun out of the University of Illinois and founded in 2005, Semprius raised a $ 4.7 million round A in 2007 and won an additional $ 7.9 million round in 2009.

The firm aspires to be a vertically integrated manufacturer of high-concentration PV panels using its own gallium arsenide (GaAs) micro-transfer printing-based chips while selling the panels to system integrators for mounting on 2-axis trackers.

Semprius does its own cell design and outsources the epi. The firm's micro-transfer printing technology makes it possible to reuse the GaAs substrate rather than shipping the expensive substrate out the door with every cell. Semprius claims that by reusing the substrate, it can reduce costs by 50 percent.  The cell structure is grown on top of a release layer so that the cells can be epitaxially lifted off as part of the micro-transfer printing process.

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The funding from Morgan Creek Capital Management, Illinois Emerging Technologies Fund, and In-Q-Tel adds to the $ 20 million Semprius closed in June of last year from Siemens Venture Capital along with existing investors Arch Venture Partners, Applied Ventures, Intersouth Partners, and GVC Investment. 

Gregory Wolf, the president of Duke Energy Renewables, joined Semprius’ board of directors, according to a press release.

The funding will go to establish a 5-megawatt pilot plant that is expandable to 35 megawatts. 

Semprius has a core semiconductor technology the firm believes can make CPV more competitive. In December of last year, NREL validated a 41 percent efficiency at 1,000 suns for a Semprius cell, close to the world record.

Semprius — like the larger CPV industry — has its work cut out for it. The flat plate photovoltaics (PV) industry has grown at a compound annual rate of about 41 percent per year for the last decade to reach its current 2011 shipment pace of 20 gigawatts. And the price of c-Si solar continues to fall every calendar quarter. GTM Research has published a detailed analysis and forecast on the CPV market.

Still, CPV has shown some life of late, led by Amonix, Soitec, and SolFocus winning utility-scale contracts in high-DNI regions.

Spun out of the University of Illinois and founded in 2005, Semprius raised a $ 4.7 million round A in 2007 and won an additional $ 7.9 million round in 2009.

The firm aspires to be a vertically integrated manufacturer of high-concentration PV panels using its own gallium arsenide (GaAs) micro-transfer printing-based chips while selling the panels to system integrators for mounting on 2-axis trackers.

Semprius does its own cell design and outsources the epi. The firm's micro-transfer printing technology makes it possible to reuse the GaAs substrate rather than shipping the expensive substrate out the door with every cell. Semprius claims that by reusing the substrate, it can reduce costs by 50 percent.  The cell structure is grown on top of a release layer so that the cells can be epitaxially lifted off as part of the micro-transfer printing process.

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REhnu (pronounced “renew”) is a relatively new name in the concentrated photovoltaic (CPV) world. They're early stage and have a slightly different twist on the architecture of a CPV system.

But let's start with the name. The 'RE' in REhnu stands for Renewable Energy. The "hnu" is from the formula E=hν or E=hnu, which relates the energy ('E') of a photon to the photon’s frequency, given by the Greek letter ν, or “nu,” and Planck’s constant 'h.'

Which, in case you haven't been keeping track, places us deep in central Nerdistan.

Dr. Roger Angel, the designer of the CPV product and, presumably, the company's name, has a background in astronomy at the University of Arizona. Angel leads the UA solar high concentration photovoltaics research group and has co-authored three patents covering the technology licensed by REhnu. His technological innovations are used to make the world’s largest and most aspheric telescope mirrors.

Building the world's biggest telescopes has, in Angel's view, given him the ability to think through the CPV design as a system. It's allowed Angel to approach the problem without any previously held conceptions about CPV — and not to feel compelled to make CPV look like flat-panel PV.

Angel is looking to drive costs down to a dollar per watt installed by scrubbing cost out of a few areas — primarily by using the least amount of glass and steel possible.

REhnu's design uses what Angel calls "the native form of manufactured glass" — the 3-meter sizes from a glass factory — as the reflectors. The design allows a window-glass factory to be modified to produce the glass reflectors, which are then arranged on a steel space frame. The space frame has rigid nodes and the "mechanics of the 2-axis tracker respects the nodes," according to Angel.

The system operates at 1000X concentration, and with a cost of $ 5.00 per square centimeter for the triple-junction solar cells, Angel says that gets the cell cost down to 15 cents per watt. The system doesn't place a lens on every solar cell, as is the case in almost every CPV architecture. A ball lens at the focus of each large dish sends the same amount of light power to each of 36 cells, so that all of them produce the same amount of electrical current. Active cooling is used rather than massive aluminum heat sinks to scrub off heat.

Prototype of REhnu's 20-kilowatt CPV system

Angel estimates the mass of steel as 100 kilograms per kilowatt of output and expects to have one complete 2+kilowatt dish/receiver working by the end of May and eight of them in a full 20-kilowatt system early next year.  

Land usage is estimated at 4 acres per megawatt, while the ground-clearance and open design of the space frame are designed to be gentle to the environment at the installation site. 

UA has raised $ 4 million in R&D funding, mostly from the DOE and Science Foundation Arizona. REhnu has raised about $ 2 million, so far. Once the full tracker unit is populated and generating 20 kilowatts, Angel looks to raise a $ 25 million Round A to build manufacturing facilities and get to two megawatts of production.   

CPV vendors remain in a ruthless cost race with the crystalline silicon solar behemoths while holding a potential advantage in high-temperature environments. Perhaps a telescope scientist can crack this nut.

3.1 meter-square reflector prototype made from a single sheet of glass at the University of Arizona
 

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Germany installed more than 2 gigawatts of solar in the month of December alone.

That's good news and bad news. Good news because there is still demand for solar and Germany is amazingly efficient at deploying solar panels; bad news because it reveals the market distortions provoked by subsidies and fading subsidies.

December traditions in Germany involve Christmas, stollen, and a rush to install solar panels before the feed-in tariff subsidy drops. Installations for the full year will be nearly 7 gigawatts according to a press release from the BSW (Bundesverband Solarwirtschaft, the German Solar Industry Association). Germany installed 7.4 gigawatts of solar panels in 2010.

The feed-in tariff was subjected to a 15 percent reduction on January 1, 2012 and will likely be cut another 15 percent on July 1.

According to the BSW, solar power contributes approximately three percent of the German electricity supply, with a goal of 10 percent by 2020. 

Note the drop in pricing for solar installations in Germany: Q3 2011 pricing was $ 2.80 per watt. These are "average end-customer prices" for PV systems under 100 kilowatts. Compare that to the $ 5.20 per watt average price in the U.S.

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Resch spoke of how the solar industry must be even more organized with the increase of people and organizations like the New York Times or the oil industry pushing back against the greater use of solar . The head of SEIA informed the crowd of solar executives that:

• The U.S. will be a 10 gigawatt solar market in 2015
• Not all smart meters are enabled for net-metering. (Resch observed this on his own not-so-smart meter.)
• SolarWorld is filing a trade claim in the EU as well as the U.S.
• SEIA believes that there is a good chance of getting the 1603 cash grant program extended. He said that "1603 is a big deal and we need to let our voice be known." He noted that it went throught last year and if it goes through this year — it will happen in classic Washinton D.C. fashion as part of a tax-extender bill. Resch noted that the Super Committee is going to support a tax extenders bill that applies across 100 different taxes supported by Republicans and Democrats.  "We'll see an extenders bill created in December and possibly passed early next year," with a retroactive grant, according to Resch.

Resch commented that in addition to the potential loss of the tax grant, lack of tax equity, and the stink of Solyndra, one of the threats to the U.S. solar industry was "a suite of market access issues" including caps on wholesale DG, net metering caps, as well as a shift on how utilities will work with solar from interconnection delays to charging for grid-connected solar.  "What if homeowners have to pay $ 60 per month to generate their own power?" asked Resch.

Resch said that Congressman Cliff Stearns, one of Solyndra's inquisitors sees solar as "interesting."

Resch said that Presidential candidates will yell about an aggressive stand with China while an actual statesman like President Obama has to be more measured and consider the U.S.- China relationship. Resch said that there was room in the trade case for the two countries to negotiate. 

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The name of the group is Coalition for American Solar Manufacturing (CASM) and it looks to be the opening salvo in a U.S.-China WTO trade war. It was no coincidence that the announcement occurred during the biggest U.S. solar trade show, Solar Power International, being held this week in Dallas, Texas.

It's a difficult time for solar manufacturers — see the second quarter financial wrap-up we did here. Notice that Chinese firms such as Suntech also appear to suffering.

But contrary to what may seem to be indicated by SolarWorld's action or Solyndra's demise, solar is one of the bright spots in the U.S economy — the U.S solar industry employs more than 100,000 people. That hardly jibes with the "elimination of thousands of jobs" claimed by the SolarWorld consortium.

As per a study co-authored by GTM Research and SEIA, the U.S. is a significant net exporter of solar products. That doesn't seem to be compatible with the claim made by Gordon Brinser, the president of SolarWorld Americas, that "China has a plan for our market: to gut it and own it." His consortium asked the U.S. government to place duties of more than 100 percent on Chinese-made solar cells and modules. The other members of the consortium have not been named, but we welcome your suggestions as to who they might be — and why they haven't chosen to reveal themselves. 

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We hear about importance of drinking enough water constantly. On the flip side, there has been a growing trend in the media lately that the commonly recommended eight cups of water daily is a myth, which is technically accurate, but not the whole story. Whether you need eight cups of water daily, or four or ten, most people are not getting the message that whatever their particular water needs are, they aren’t meeting them.

And even dietitians, nutritionists, and medical professionals are contributing to the problem by informing people that they get enough water in their diet in the form of fruits and vegetables. That might be true for some people, but after assessing the diets of countless people, I assure you that isn’t the case for most people.

Plus, have you ever noticed that when you throw vegetables in a pan and turn on the heat you’ll see liquid in the pan soon afterward, and then shortly after that you’ll see steam rising from them? That’s because you’re literally cooking the water out of the vegetables.

Researchers estimate that half of the world’s population is chronically dehydrated. And in America, that level is even higher at 75 percent of the population.

The DOE just finalized a $ 337 million loan guarantee to Mesquite Solar 1, part of a 700 megawatt photovoltaic project as well as for the Crescent Dunes solar thermal project which includes thermal storage for $ 737 million.

That's two down but the there are seven more outstanding conditional commitments for solar projects. And two of them (SolarStrong and Topaz), as we've covered, are not going to make it.

Here's the list of projects that are likely leading to some long days and nights at these firms and at the DOE loan guarantee office — In the free time they have that's not occupied by the Solyndra affair.

• First Solar's Antelope Valley 230-megawatt project with a loan guarantee of $ 680 million remains in the pipeline.
• First Solar's 550-megawatt Desert Sunlight project with a partial guarantee of $ 1.88 billion remains in the pipeline.
• First Solar's Topaz project with a partial guarantee of $ 1.93 billion will not meet the deadline.
• Prologis Project Amp partial guarantee of $ 1.4 billion could close in the next two days.
• SolarCity's SolarStrong with a partial guarantee of $ 344 million will not meet the deadline.
• SunPower California Valley Solar Ranch loan guarantee of $ 1.187 billion for the 250 megawatt project is still in play.
• Fotowatio's partial guarantee of $ 45.6 million for the 20 megawatt Apex plant in Nevada is still in play.
• The is also a wind (Nordic Windpower) project and a biofuels project (Abengoa) in the queue.

Note that this deadline is just for the 1705 program and that projects using newer technologies like CPV or new inverters can take advantage of the 1703 program. This interview with Jonathan Silver of the DOE by the folks at GigaOm does a good job of explaining some of the intricacies of the loan guarantee program.

The two solar projects that have just reached the finish line:

Sempra Generation's massive 700-megawatt Mesquite Solar project, located near Phoenix, Arizona with Zachry Holdings as the EPC and Suntech as the panel supplier for the initial 200-megawatt (DC) phase of the build. The project is located near the Hassayampa 500-kV switchyard, a major transmission hub with access to southwestern U.S. markets. Transmission upgrades and site grading for the entire project have been completed in advance on the flat, privately held land. A 20-year power purchase agreements has been signed with Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) for the first phase of the project. When completed in 2013, Mesquite Solar I will be one of the largest photovoltaic solar installations in North America. The project will use "a non-trivial" number of Pluto panels, Suntech's high-efficiency PV panels. Mesquite will use transformer-less and liquid cooled inverter technology from Advanced Energy.

SolarReserve of Santa Monica, California closed a $ 140 million venture round in 2008 and just closed a $ 737 million loan guarantee from the DOE for a 110-megawatt molten salt storage power tower with more than 10 hours of thermal energy storage. This will be the tallest molten salt tower in the world, according to the DOE website. The firm licenses the molten salt power tower solar technology from Rocketdyne, a division of Hamilton Sundstrand, a subsidiary of UTC. SolarReserve has a power purchase agreement (PPA) with NV Energy for this project.

According to this chart from the Las Vegas Review Journal the PPA price for the Crescent Dunes project is $ 0.135 per kilowatt-hour

Will the DOE be able to close the other five projects?

Will Solyndra take a further toll on these lower-risk solar projects?

And will solar thermal projects be financeable in the future absent a loan guarantee?

We'll be able to answer at least two of those questions in the next 48 hours.

***

Here are some detailed stats on the Crescent Dunes project courtesy of Brett Prior at GTM Research:
Project Name: Crescent Dunes
Developer: SolarReserve
Technology: Power Tower
Capacity: 110 megawatts
Location: Tonopah, Nevada
Total Capital Cost: $ 983 million
Capital Cost: $ 8.93 per watt
Capacity Factor: 55 percent
Solar Resource: 2685 kWh/m^2/yr
Electricity generation: 480 GWh/yr
Solar-to-Electricity Efficiency: 17%
Acres: 1600 = 15 acres per megawatt
Cooling Method: Hybrid
EPC: UTC Pratt & Whitney
Operator: SolarReserve
Electricity Purchaser: NV Energy
Construction jobs: 600
O&M jobs: 45
# of heliostats/mirrors: 17170
Tower Height: 165 meters
Heat transfer fluid:Molten salt
Inlet Temperature (°C)     288 °C
Outlet Temperature (°C)     566 °C
Temp Difference     278 °C
Storage (hrs)    10
Break ground    Oct-11
On line    Jul-2013
PPA Date    Dec-09
PPA Rate ($ /kWh)     $ 0.135/kWh
PPA/Tariff Period (yrs)    25
PPA approved by PUC    Y
Land Type    Public
Fast-tracked    Y
Draft EIS    9/3/10
Record of Decision    12/21/10
Notes    Thermal storage efficiency 99%
 

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This year a number of biofuels firms have made it through the IPO window including Codexis (Nasdaq: CDXS), Amyris (Nasdaq:AMRS), Gevo (Nasdaq:GEVO), Kior (Nasdaq:KIOR)), and Solazyme (Nasdaq:SZYM).

Like every greentech IPO that's priced in recent history, Mascoma has low revenues, large losses, and in Mascoma's case — an unhealthy amount of revenue from government grants. The company has raised about $ 135 million in venture capital and debt.

So while we're looking at Mascoma I took the opportunity to compile a list of those 11 greentech firms with S-1s currently filed. Three of the firms have investment from Kleiner Perkins.

Here's the list:

It will be revealing to see the solar and smart grid entries price their offering — that will provide a real indication of investor appetities in these sectors and serve to encourage or discourage the next startups in line to file.

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