Creating ‘Utility-Grade’ Solar Panels with Beefier Warranties

By Ucilia Wang

When Roger Efird, president of Suntech Power's (STP) North America sales, spoke last week at the Edison Electric Institute's convention in San Francisco, he mentioned that solar panel makers are going to start offering longer and different kinds of warranties for certain discerning customers.

"We'll start to see things that will be guaranteed that we've never seen before, such as efficiencies," Efird said. "For utility-grade application, you'll have to give more details than to say you'll get this much after 10 years and this much after 20 years. Maybe a year-over-year roadmap."

Efird, of course, wasn't just making a general prediction. He told me after his talk that Suntech plans to launch utility-grade solar panels. The company is working on what he called "an advanced leap" in solar cell manufacturing that would make it possible to promise better and longer output for its panels.

He declined to say when the company would start selling these new products with beefier warranties. He did say that Suntech plans to continue to work on the tech improvement for this initiative in the next six months.

Solar panels these days generally come with a 20 to 25-year warranty regardless of whether they are meant to go on the rooftop of a home or on the ground of a solar farm.

There are, of course, various power ratings that indicate the range of power output for each panel. There also are solar panels with cells that are made of different semiconductors, which could make a difference in how well they perform. So solar project developers already have many options to choose from.

I imagine utilities would like to have robust solar panels with warranties longer than 25 years though. After all, a coal-fired power plant can stay alive for much longer than that.

Comments

[Henry Buttal:]

I would imagine this is also a bet on two things:
1) In large deployments, you have enough panels to potentially make the theory of large numbers work for you, thus making such warrenties breakeven, if not actually profitable.
2) An expectation replacement costs will drop over the lifetime of installation.

The bump in the road for the PV firms is if the utilities actually make them supply the onsite manpower, which is always invariably the most overhead in this kind of transaction.

Jun 29 02:57 PM

[Road Runner:]

Very good move on Suntech's part. At first glance, this seems like a bad idea creating a large long-term liability, until you take Henry Buttal's 2 points above into account, then it seems like a very smart move. Go Suntech.

Jun 30 11:50 AM

[jerrydd:]

Better than panels in eff and life is solar thermal with it's 25%+ eff.

No coal plant lasts 25 yrs as it's rebuilt many times by then because coal is so nasty, corrosive.

With the price of a new coal plant at $4k/kw, the same as solar thermal and wind except coal needs ever increasing cost fuel where the others do not.

And with solar farms of PV like First Solar coming in at about $2.50/wt, $250/kw they are beating coal too.

Jun 30 05:01 PM