aquaculture

Wall Street Breakfast: Must-Know News

Premarket (h)rumor!!!!!!!
Read all about it in the XTRA
Solarworld to bid for GM!!!!!!!!!!
youtube.com/watch?v=uR...

Solar Grade: A Silicon Revolution

Tell:
Fully endorsed, dipstick and all.

truman:
Without getting into tech talk here Moore's law has performed very well over the past 40 years ( and made stock holders a great fortune) because it is based on a fundamental law of nature: the learning curve.
It expresses a constant % improvement in some performance metric each time the cumulative number of trials or practice attempts is doubled.
This is a no brainer: we learn by doing.
Economic drivers explain why Moore's law exists.
Learning curve theory explains how.

'The cost per unit decreases by a fixed percentage every time the total cumulative output volume doubles when measured in CONSTANT currency'

Taking measurements of more than 35 years the learning rate for solar PV has been an exceptionally stable number: 20 %, right in line with...computers.

Solar Grade: A Silicon Revolution

diatribune.com/breakth...

Solar Grade: A Silicon Revolution

typo: compution=computation

Solar Grade: A Silicon Revolution

aquaculture=Edgar

Solar Grade: A Silicon Revolution

Again thx for intelligent comments.

alb1309: You noticed I skipped the issue of LDK. On the one hand existing silicon PV shareholders will benefit from LDK's additional supply. On the other hand LDK shareholders carry the burden of an electr. grade silicon production facility with all the risks of possible delays, cost overruns. Then there are risks of production disruptions, fires and the like a-la WFR. I am not invested in LDK. An investment in LDK has become complex. I am considering an option strangle on LDK, but haven't done the research yet.

asd: which scam? what companies?

sloemoe, nmcotwpv: Fundamentally it is now generally recognized that information could be thought of as interchangeable with energy and we can measure its contents. But fundamentals aside, i did not state that solar PV= Moore's law, but is subject to it. Moore's law itself is indeed about squeezing twice as many transistors onto an Integrated Circuit every two years. This is an inverse to the solar PV surface area which doubles in same period. Beside the fact both technologies operate DC and presently use (mainly) silicon, given that the electrons would consequently have less distance to travel in order to do usefull work, there is exponential growth in the price performance of compution as well as the solar PV sector. That is how they are related and how these laws can be derived from each other.
Another way of looking at it is the fact that solar panels reduce the entropy of a system and we can measure that.
That there will be juice from the grid out of your sockets tomorrow is a hypothesis and this means: you don't know. The issue here is going to be finding secure means of making electronic information available. This is a fundamental economic concern. Google does not see the solar PV sector as separate from information technology. In fact they are integrating both technologies and there is enormous potential added value in doing so.

The paradigm shift described here is a production method of solar grade silicon allowing continued exponential growth of the solar sector. Each time a paradigm has run out of steam another has picked up speed.
My mean point is indeed silicon PV's ability to remain competitive.

Solar Grade: A Silicon Revolution

Aquaculture=Edgar
thx again for comments.

Solar Grade: A Silicon Revolution

Thx all for kind comments.

JohnM: Concentrator PV will probably be cost effective in larger applications. My purpose is to compare the various solutions as they come up in a series of articles, as data come out.

Vpratt: The ETF issue will come up again in an analysis of First Solar inc.

Tellavision: Yes the news is old. This post had been ready long before the Rohm and Haas thing. Usually when I do a research and something like this comes up I have to act fast, as I have noticed I'm not far ahead of Mr. Market. Now that I'm set up with an authors page, I will publish more immediately, then we'll see what happens. But Rohm and Haas might have been the last best opportunity to profit from the silicon supply crunch, and I think now is a good time to get into the silicon PV solars.

Sopot: thx for pointing out Arise's efforts: I will look into it. Of course, tough small by comparison this only adds to my thesis.

Jim: If you read my post carefully it states a doubling every TWO years. This means ten doublings in 20 years, roughly a thousand times today's market share. By implication, if the street values these companies correctly, a mere $1000 investment would be worth one million $ in 20 years.

Jack: Silicon PV has great efficiencies especially when compared to thin film. The maximum is around 29 %, still a great price performance. The wafer thickness is limited by solar cell size. The market average is about 9 grams/watt. This leaves room to downsize. Then Evergreen (ESLR) has an innovative technology of 5.5 grams/watt. They expect 4.8 by 2009 and 2.5 grams/watt by 2012.
Of course all off this adds to my main thesis.
But which individual stocks to pick depends (increasingly) on future SoG-silicon prices. RSI will start producing at the 5000 mt Pennsylvania plant @ start of Q3 2008. This production is sold out so won't affect the market. On the other hand a 24000 mt plant such as this could be build in China in a few months.

User 226214: The term UMG is somewhat misleading. The Siemens process upgrades Metallurgical Grade silicon by gasification. Timminco (CSIQ's supplier) upgrades MG by remelting the 'dirty' silicon in a furnace and cleaning it up, with less capital upfront. Timminco can deliver 4N, 5N and 6N. It is CSIQ's luck to have been involved from the start. The amounts are still relatively small.
But by 2015 half of all silicon used in solar panels will probably be produced by such methods.