I spent most of last week at the Intersolar in San Francisco. It was much better attended than last year, which is surprising in light of the oversupply and shortage of project finance issues that plague the solar industry. Most developers I spoke with mentioned that they had been pleasantly surprised by the turn out. In fact, some even ran out of business cards. The other thing that caught my eye was the large number of Spanish project integrators that were at the show exploring the American market. I suppose that makes sense, given how the collapse of the Spanish solar market in September of last year almost single handedly (with a little help from unwilling lenders) caused the module oversupply that the industry has been steeped in for over three quarters now. It seems to me that a lot of hope is being pinned on the US market. The grant-in-lieu and the loan guarantee programs seem to have infused the industry with a rush of optimism. PGR experts are cautious, though. There are still a lot of issues, risks and procedures that need to be worked out by the DOE, the utilities and the financial institutions that choose to get involved with the process.

I think it’s going to be an interesting 2010.

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Tags: Intersolar, Semicon West

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 21st, 2009 at 10:53 am and is filed under Author, Energy, Ishita Manjrekar, Solar. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.