The energy was obvious and the connections were working on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day at the Tech Museum in San Jose, CA … both as 40 students worked in teams to build “We Share Solar Suitcases” and when the switch was flipped on their creations to generate electricity to power a 100-watt light bulb.  Best yet, the students knew that the suitcase they engineered would power the first lights for schools and orphanages in Africa.

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Solar installations are rocketing worldwide as solar electricity becomes cheaper than electricity from fossil fuels – it’s already happened in 105 countries. This is the tipping point where economics takes over from altruism and solar PV becomes a serious part of the global energy mix.

The steady drop in cost-per-watt is great news for the end user and is enabled by simultaneous increases in cell efficiency and lower manufacturing costs.

If you’re a cell manufacturer, though, dropping prices are a double-edged sword: strong demand is good, but you must continuously lower costs by improving your manufacturing processes in order to be profitable.

So, in a fiercely competitive industry, how is this done?

After the jump, we’ll look at a great example of how cell manufacturers can boost profitability using an emerging technique called “double printing”.

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600 million people without power – and those were the ones expecting to have power. I’m not going to join the chorus of critical voices reacting to two of the world’s largest power black-outs this week in India. While surely there is ample blame to go around, it’s not really clear what happened. It could have been the lack of infrastructure investment, the light monsoon weather causing farmers to use more electricity for pumping irrigation water or states taking more than their allotted share of electricity from the grid. But one thing is clear, this power outage ground India’s economy to a halt, left 10% of the world’s population without power and rolled through 22 of India’s 28 states. And that’s not counting the 300 million people there who have no regular access to electricity.

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I want to invite you to a special Applied Materials blog event on Twitter featuring the senior director for Energy Policy and Market Development at Applied Materials, Cathy Boone. Topics she will discuss include solar energy policy, jobs and myths. The Twitter chat is on Wednesday, June 20, 2012 at 10:00 a.m. Pacific; 1:00 p.m. Eastern and will last for one hour.

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India’s solar industry is finally taking off, but before it can make a meaningful contribution to the country’s growing power demands, many hurdles must still be overcome say experts and business leaders in the field.

In order to remain competitive in the global solar market and compete with countries like China and others, Indian manufactures will need to scale up and quickly. The market is there and booming, but manufacturers need capacities of 300-1,000 MW to remain competitive.

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