Solar

Applied Materials drives innovation in a variety of ways, including investing in internal R&D to continue to offer new products and technologies and collaborating with the world’s leading universities, research institutions, industry associations and consortia as well as government entities.We’ve also developed internal programs to advance technology breakthroughs by encouraging and funding disruptive ideas that can accelerate product development.

Applied Materials invited me to write a blog post about SEMI’s recently released the 4th edition of the ITRPV, the International Technology Roadmap for Photovoltaics to highlight the importance of establishing an industry direction for R&D and planning. The ITRPV outlines expected technology developments and helps set a basis for dialog about required improvements and standards. The ITRPV effort began in 2008 in Europe and was the first SEMI effort to bring the photovoltaic (PV) industry together around shared challenges and a consensus outlook on where Crystalline-silicon (c-Si) is going.

The end market for solar power is booming, thanks to tremendous cost decreases over the last few years. However, it’s a crowded market for the companies that actually make the solar cells. Last week, Applied’s Giorgio Cellere blogged about how new manufacturing technology can help solar cell makers gain a competitive edge.Recently, Dan Hutcheson, CEO of VLSIresearch, explored this same subject in more depth with Jim Mullin, vice president of Solar Marketing at Applied Materials, in a video interview titled “Innovating out of the Solar Winter with Technology”.

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”.

Applied Materials is pleased to be recognized once again for our commitment to green energy. In the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s recent Green Power Partnership report, Applied ranked no. 15 on the list of the Top 20 Tech and Telecom companies and no. 35 on the Fortune 500 list.As I’m caught up in Olympic fever at the moment, this feels like winning a medal!

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.

Summer solstice is a great time to celebrate the sun and all the benefits we receive from it–light, resources for life and warmth for the Earth. It’s also a great time to talk about solar energy and its adoption around the world. For the past four years, Applied has used this day to highlight the benefits of solar technology, as well as dispel common misperceptions about this renewable energy source. Today, we released the results of our annual solar energy survey which measures consumer understanding and awareness of solar in China, India, Japan and the United States. We chose these countries because the anticipated growth of photovoltaic (PV) installations is greatest in these markets.

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.

Click images to view larger.