Wednesday, August 15, 2007

Solar Energy in Spain

Continued from Page 4

Photovoltaic
The growth of solar in Spain is hardly limited to solar thermal. PV is still the primary source of solar power, and PV has been the central part of the solar power repertoire since the 1970s, when researcher Antonio Luque was sent to the US to share information about microelectronics. He became inspired by American work on PV and returned to Spain, founded the Institute for Solar Research (IES in Spanish) in 1975, and eventually spun off the company Isofotón in 1981. By 1982 the company was already marketing the first Spanish solar cells.

Luque’s first contribution to the solar field was the development of bifacial cells, which take advantage of sunlight from both sides. These cells provided Isofotón’s start, but higher development and maintenance costs prevented their early adoption, and Isofotón reverted to conventional solar cells.

Today, the 60 researchers at IES – one of the oldest solar centers in the world – continue to push ahead with advances in PV technology. The institutes research includes multi-junction cells that utilize a wider bandwidth of solar energy; intermediate band cells that can use photons whose energy is smaller than traditional bands; and concentrated power whereby the cell itself is tiny, and lenses multiply the sun’s energy to reach up to 1000 suns before directing it at the dot-sized material. The last is being developed in partnership with Isofotón.

To further develop this new technology, a new institute called the Institute for Photovoltaic Systems of Concentration is being built in Puertollano, south of Madrid. Companies from Spain, including IES partner Guascor Fotón, will have demonstration sites on the facility, along with companies from the US, Germany and others. The goal is to improve the technology’s efficiency and decrease its cost in an effort to speed commercialization.

Luque believes advances in PV technology will eventually lead to drastically cheaper solar cells, but acknowledges that technological breakthroughs need to occur before the cost drops precipitously. He believes these breakthroughs might be occurring already and that the technological advances in store for PV will allow it to easily overtake solar thermal, even on a power-plant scale.

In a huge, airy, light-filled building near Málaga on Spain’s southern coast, Luque’s spin-off company, Isofotón, hums with the excitement of the exploding PV scene. This factory was completed in 2006, and ground has already been broken next door for an expansion.
The company’s production and sales have shot up in the past few years, despite rough patches since its inception in 1981. Isofotón nearly went bankrupt twice in the company’s history, as the international solar power scene languished. But in the late 1990s, Germany decided to invest heavily in solar power. Isofotón was able to take advantage of this, supplying 15 percent of the German market. Isofotón grew to become the seventh largest producer of solar cells in the world – but the global market has grown so rapidly, and a handful of new companies have jumped in to fill the need, that Isofotón’s status has dropped slightly even as its business has dramatically expanded.

Spain has been one of the top world producers of solar cells for the past decade; the two main companies producing those cells are Isofotón and BP Solar, which has been present in Spain for more than 20 years and is now planning a major production expansion. In addition, the Spanish company Atersa builds solar panels and provides full solar power installations. At their new Valencia factory, the company has grown to 14 MW of annual capacity and will soon expand to 30 MW of capacity.