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Since diving into the deep end when it comes to energy issues, almost every day sees new fascinating concepts, approaches, and technologies. Fascinating … exciting … even hope inspiring at times. And, as well, as the passion builds, so many of these are truly Energy COOL.

In true EcoGeek fashion, meandering among the booths at trade shows and conferences often provide moments of excitement and thoughts as to possibilities looking out into the future. Yesterday, the Environmental and Energy Study Institute held 12th Annual Congressional Congressional Renewable Energy & Energy Efficiency EXPO + Forum, combination of conference and ‘trade show’ (“EXPO”) with some 20 or so booths from organizations and coalitions (such as the AWEA, Gridwise Alliance, Demand Response and Smart Grid Coalition, SEIA, Business Council for Sustainable Energy, Ocean Renewable Energy Coalition — remember, this was a Hill event), businesses (Qteros (biofuels (cellulosic ethanol)), Solana Solar, ORPC, Konarka, Skystream, etc) and government agencies (such as the National Renewable Energy Laboratory). As with getting some good VIBEs from talking with the NREL staff, there were several “Energy COOL” moments in the EXPO that made the trip to the EESI session worth the time.

After the fold, a discussion of one of these: Solyndra solar.

Back in March, Secretary of Energy Steven Chu announced a $535 million loan guarantee for Solyndra, to build a plant for large-scale manufacturing of its cylindrical solar photovoltaiic panels. Okay, heard of it. Seemed a little bizaare and didn’t quite understand the value of their approach. From the announcement

Solyndra’s photovoltaic systems are designed to provide the lowest installed cost and the highest solar electricity output on commercial, industrial and institutional roof tops, which are a vast, underutilized resource for the distributed generation of clean electricity. Solyndra’s proprietary design transforms glass tubes into high performance photovoltaic panels which are simple and inexpensive to install. By replacing power generated from fossil fuel sources, the electricity produced from the solar panels will reduce emissions of greenhouse gases.

For two months, thus, Solyndra has been on the ‘need to look at it’ and their presence at yesterday’s EXPO provided the opportunity.

In short, Solyndra uses thin-film technology, rolls the solar electrical film in on a tube, encases that tub in a glass tube, and mounts these tubes on a frame for installation on rooftops. This approach offers several very interesting (unique?) attributes that could revolutionize the deployment of solar on rooftops:

• Water leakage is a risk to PV systems. The tubular structure is well known industrial processes and nearly eliminates the risk of leaks impacting the solar electricity production.
• The tubular structure enables better performance, without a solar tracking system, through the full day.
• And, the structure enables producing electricity from reflected light. With a high-albedo (read white) roof, roughly 20 percent of generated electricity comes from that reflected light.
• Since it is tubes, the wind blows through it … tested, I was told, to hurricane safe levels (130 mph winds).
• The frame structure can be installed simply placing it on rooftops — there is no need for bolting or any other structural support.

The last becomes quite interesting.  All too often, when PV costs are discussed, people focus on the cost of the panels, themselves, while ignoring the full system costs such as inverters, wiring, and, voila, installation costs.

The Solyndra system is lightweight and the panels allow wind to blow through them. These factors enable the installation of PV on a broader range of rooftops without anchoring or ballast, which are inherently problematic. The horizontal mounting and unique “air-flow” properties of Solyndra’s solar panel design substantially simplify the installation process for Solyndra’s PV systems. The ease of installation and simpler mounting hardware of the Solyndra system enables its customers to realize significant savings on installation costs.

Right now, Solyndra has its production fully sold out and is limited sales to commercial clients with reflective flat roofs (such as the recently completed 132 kw system on a cinema’s rooftop in Livermore, CA).  With the construction of the new plant, they might have a need to move beyond this market space to something that is more suitable for the retail (residential) market.  In another ‘exciting’ perspective, the Solyndra system might require only the slightest of modifications to become appropriate for residential rooftops:  simply some boltholes on the frame’s base to enable minimal penetration to hold the system onto an inclined roof.   With more extensive (but seemingly straightforward) modifications, this could become the sort of ‘warehouse hardware store’ solar system. Buy a frame that might be able to hold 20 tubes but, if you’re cash limited, buy 10 tubes today with the ability to buy more tubes to plug into the frame sometime into the future. This system, at least for rooftop installation, would look to be a relatively easy DIY option.

UPDATE: Courtesy of Rei in comments, Nanosolar CEO blog post analyzing and dismissing Solyndra’s response. As Rei comments:

they’re a competitor, so you should take what they have to say with a grain of salt, but I think they did a masterful takedown of Solyndra’s entire business model here. Basically, it sums up: “Solyndra did such an awful job with their patents that we could make pretty much the exact same product, except that they made a number of design flaws so we could make them even better, and here’s our prototype, but we have no plans to sell them, because they’re a dumb idea for all of the following reasons….”

Question, of course: That was posted back in December. DOE does the loan guarantee in March. What did Chu know that Nanosolar didn’t? What did Nanosolar know that Chu didn’t know of? Have to hope that DOE due diligence picked up that blog post and queried Nanosolar before starting a process for putting $535 million of public loan guarantees into place.