www.solardave.com This is my 1st video interview with John Shaw Project Engineer Bella Energy of out of Louisville Colorado. Anderson Hoke Project Engineer is also interviewed in this clip. SolarDave: Installing solar panels on a tile roof can be tricky, what is your approach ? John Shaw: The easiest way to do PV on a tile roof weather that is curved Spanish tile or flat concrete tiles is to use building integrated PV product. Sharp has a product, Open Energy has a product, both of them basically hang on the battens. They are silicon cells so they are not the thin film amorphous that simply means that they are as efficient as a standard panel from Sharp or Evergreen or what not. They get screwed in to the roof decking just like the concrete tiles. They intergrate with the concrete tile with a lip, this perticular one made by Open Energy is a 35 watt tile, it replaces 3 concrete tiles and it is basically the same height as a concrete tile and the width of them is the same and it is really the easiest way to do solar on a curved spanish tile or flat concrete tile roof. If one wants to do standard tiles, there is a couple of ways to do it – the most laborious way would be to remove all the tile and and fasten to the beam. But the way Sharp suggests that we do it is basically retrofiting so we back out just the tiles necessary where we need to make our attachments. Anderson Hoke: You can pull one or two or 4 tiles right where you need to make the connection. You can pull out …
www.solardave.com This is my 2nd video interview with John Shaw Project Engineer Bella Energy of out of Louisville Colorado. SolarDave: Are Solar Panels Going To 300 Watts Soon? John Shaw: Absolutely, any manufacturer can do that right now. You shouldn’t really look at how many watts a panel has – rather how many watts per square foot can be attained. Behind you is a Sanyo 200, if you increase the foot print of that panel by 50% it is a 300 watt panel. The reality is what you need to be looking at to measure the level of progress of the technology is how many watts per square foot. Instead of thinking will there ever be a 300 watt panel – surely there will be even next year. To get at the point of your question is do you ever think we will be ever to achieve a 300 watt panel in 15 square feet? And yes, I do. Right now standard efficiency panels are in the ballpark of about 12 watts per square foot, it ranges from 10 to 13. Standard efficiency panels Evergreens, Sharps, Kyocera, Shot (?), Suntech etc. Keep in mind this is the residential affordable panels, NASA works with panels that are about 30 watts per square foot but you are talking a million bucks a panel. Then there are high efficiency panels of the ones we know of are SunPower and Sanyo. And Sunpower and Sanyo are approximately 15 watts per square foot. Both are very good products. Sanyo I believe has a little bit of an edge because they has an amorphous or thin film rap around the silicon cell which allows them to …
www.solardave.com SolarDave: What manufacturer do you like to use for solar panels and why? Tony Boniface: We prefer SunPower because for a couple of reasons, one is their efficiency – they are the most efficient panel, also they are all black with also lends for a nice aesthetic attribute. Black seems to blend in to the houses the best, we found they kind of disappear. Those are the two main reason, but SunPower has made a big effort to counter where the industry has been fits and starts they force dealers to traditionally forced to inventory panels, SunPower is all about just-in-time delivery. So it makes a difference from a cash flow point. For a small business that can be critical. They are (SunPower) are very interested in growing their market share and they realize the one way to do that is to make our market share grow – they understand and cater to the small business both from an inventory stand point and a marketing materials stand point and sales department and training. So they do a really good job of assisting there dealers where ever possible. SolarDave: What other panels do you like to use? Tony Boniface: By request of on occasion if we can’t get what we need from SunPower we for a particular project we may fall to EverGreen or Kyocera for instance – both good makers, EverGreen has the advantage of they are an American company. Kyocera in my opinion has been in the industry the longest and has stayed the course. They are also a materials company they make …
www.solardave.com SolarDave: Does Akeena Solar Get Their Solar Panels at a Discount price for buying them in volume? Eric Bowman: There are a lot of things that solar panel costs, volume, quality, there are a lot of components to it, we are the only solar intergrator that has developed our own propiritory panel so we outsource the manufacturing of that to SunTech which at the end of this year will be the largest manufacturer in the world. They only make the Andalay solar panel for Akeena and Akeena only. It is our patent and our panel noboby can source the panel or install in the panel in the United States. Because we are a very large solar intergator, one of the largest and we are publicly held and we are on the NASDAQ:AKNS because we only sell that one type of panel for that residentail application our volume is not like a Sharp or a BP that might sell to multiple brokers across the United States. But we are extremely competitive when it comes to cost and value proposition, realiablity, aestecis and cost. Our clients get a win all the time. Here is a small mock up of the Andalay panel the biggest difference you are going to see between the Andalay panel and any other panel in the past 30 years including everything that is being installed today, a traditional panel has aluminum racking and a non structural panel that sits on top of that, the wires are connected together and there is a perimeter ground system around that has to go around. So what we have done for our …
www.solardave.com This is my 8th video interview with Erik Bowman Regional Sales Manager of Akeena Solar out of Denver Colorado. solardave: Will The Price of Solar Panels Come Down Anytime Soon? Erik Bowman: That is an interesting question and I don’t want to create and false expectations of clients, because yes over time as manufacturing ramps up there are companies all over the world making panels. As manufacturing ramps up, as demand increases the prices for panels should drop and it has dropped over time and we predict it will drop in the future. At this time though the subsides in Colorado cover 50% to 60% of the cost of the system and even at that at cutting the cost at half is now that is even viable verses standard electricity. Even as the cost of the panel drops and what happens historically looking at German New York and California as the models the most mature solar economies in the world rebates drop over time as the cost to install goes down the rebates are there to make it make sense as the technology catches up. So it will probably be 10 years, that is a total guess you would have to ask people that know more than me before the cost of a solar power system on its own without any subsides make equivalent and viable economic sense. Nobody can predict the future don’t know what is going to happen. Right now with the rebates in place and you are installing a system that will produce electricity for 30 years at 7.5 cents a kilo watt hour it costs you 11.5 …
