[MUSIC].
>> Right. >>
[INAUDIBLE].
>> No that's right. That's right.
The answer is yes.
It is competitive otherwise nobody would be deploying this
stuff at the scale that they're deploying it at.
Now us as a company, we've only had a pilot line up until now.
About the first of the year here we're going to be able to turn
on about 50 megawatts of capacity and before that we just had a handful.
So, you know, this last year, we've been sold out.
And we've sold, whatever it is, a handful of megawatts.
And we're on Sun with a few of those right now.
And those are meeting
all specs, and producing power. And everybody's very happy.
They get whatever it is, 5 to 10 % more power
out of their modules by using our cell versus somebody else's.
So this is all positive.
you know, the, the 30 megawatts that, that MNX did.
And the 50 megawatts that just went in in China, and all this.
They're not using our cells yet.
So we think that, I mean, basically the math is like this.
If you take us, if we were to sell you
our cell at the same price that you're buying, right now.
But it, I'm just going to make round numbers here.
It's 10% more efficient
[COUGH],
you save 10% across everything, right.
The whole installation just started putting out 10% more power.
So your dollar per watt number went down by 10%, your
LCOE went down by 10%, everything just goes down by 10%.
So cell efficiency is a huge lever on reducing cost particularly in CPV systems.
Because of the concentration, you can afford
to put more technology into the cell,
right.
The, the, the, the, the broad area solar
technologies it has to be very cost driven, right.
But if you're going to concentrate a 1000x,
if I can get you another point of efficiency it's going to save you a
hell of a lot of money, so you can pay for a little extra technology.
So, you know, all of us can think about inventing new cool
little things to improve performance, and it'll actually make sense to do it.
>>
[INAUDIBLE].
>> Installation is always, I think, the most expensive part but installation.
The, the, the pieces, the pieces of technology
are, you know, you have to have a cell.
Some people package the cell onto a little coupon some don't.
you've got some kind of a, let's do a Fresnel lens, right.
Fresnel lens system. You've got a Fresnel lens.
Okay, starting from the sun,
you've got the sun shining down on a piece of plastic.
It's a stamped piece of plastic.
It's like this, it's pretty cheap. It's in a stamped aluminum box.
Human race is very good at pressing out aluminum boxes.
And you've got solar cells sitting at maybe 10 focal points, because it's a,
it's a, it's a 4 by 2, 8 focal points,4 by 2 Fresnel lens module, right.
That thing goes on a frame with a bunch of other modules
stacked up, those are just aluminum rods, maybe some steel,
depends on how they do it, but it's most likely aluminum.
so that module then sits on a tracker, which is a pole on the ground.
So you got to look at what does it cost to dig a hole and put a pole?
What does it cost to put a tracker on that?
What does it cost to put this panel array on top of that?
you know, a solar cell is only about 10% of the total installed system cost.
So, it's only about 10%.
So the solar cell itself is probably not the
largest cost driver in terms of the money that you
pay, but its performance is the largest cost driver
in the overall cost of the system, in the ground.
>>
[INAUDIBLE].
>> Yeah, so this is, this is a very
good question, and I'm actually glad that you answered it.
So, the way we look at CPV is, we are an
arms dealer to anybody who wants to buy our cell, okay.
I don't care how many companies go in or out of business.
Right now there's about 75 around the world, and the ones
who are putting in tens of megawatts today are doing just fine.
So, what we see is we see our customers base of
the leading CPV firms doing just fine.
And we're starting to see very
large multinational companies who don't really want
to have a large profile on what they're doing come online here, too.
And I've seen their five, five year road maps so on a, on a, on a handful of them.
And these players are here for the long haul and they've
done the calculation about what CPV can do in certain geographical regions.
and they've done the LCOE and the dollars per watt and all this.
And they said,
gee you mean all I gotta do is stamp out a piece of metal?
Stamp a piece of plastic and buy a self-in-solar junction?
I know how to put stuff on poles.
I'm already a solar project developer or whatever, you know.
This, this industry isn't going to go away.
Now we're in a horrible economic situation.
and what's happened in the world solar panel market has not been a healthy thing
for anybody, other than the people who want to buy hardware at a really low cost.
So you as a consumer, it's a good day for you in solar.
You can get stuff on your roof cheaper than you have ever been able to.
The guy who is selling you
that panel may not be in business six months from now, right.
It's just that's the fact of the matter.
So the way, the way I think about it is those
players who've got something truly unique, and I believe we have that
who can survive the next couple of years in solar, are probably
going to be in a great position to reap the benefits of survival.
Today?
Yeah, it kind of sucks.
Now, another way of looking at it for us in a very myopic way
is, we don't need a lot of volume to hit all of our targets, okay.
There's, there's a whatever, there's almost 100 megawatts or whatever it
is that went in this year in CPV around the world.
I,
I mean, gee, I'd be just happy as a clam if we soaked up 50 of those.
You know, happy as a clam.
There's, there's plenty to go around here. >>
[INAUDIBLE].
>> It, it's going to come from solar.
Another good example is a lot of places in the developing world
>>
[INAUDIBLE].
>> India is a good example.
A lot of places in the developing world look at gee do I want to buy?
a really super high technology Siemans plant to produce flat plate module.
Hire a bunch of Germans to come into my country to operate the
thing, and service it, and, you know, buy the parts from somewhere else.
Just basically import all this stuff.
Or, hey, I know how to make Saudi Arabia. I know how to make plastic.
I pull all the oil out of the ground.
Oil's made out of, plastic's made out of oil.
I know how to stamp plastic. I know how to bend sheet metal.
I know how to do assembly, right.
Hey, all I have to do is buy a solar junction cell from the other side of
the world, at 10% of the cost of
the total system, and everything else can be homegrown.
That's a pretty good deal.
There are a lot of different ways of looking at
how solar's going to grow in different parts of the world.
And they're not all uniform.
So you've really, again, you've really gotta look
at everything as a kind of case by case,
geographic by geographic political area by political area.
Which is why CPV isn't going in anywhere, in part.
You know, we're at lower volume.
We're competing with players that produce
gigawatts of power, or gigawatts of modules.
And we're competing with them on a cost effective basis
at a 100 megawatt level as a, as an industry.
Right, I mean, that has always been one of the, the advantages of CPV.
We already know
how to bend sheet metal in super high volume.
We already, the, the semiconductor wafer fab
technology that makes this is from 1985.
I mean, other than the epitaxy.
But the epitaxy is the same stuff that we use
to run all the 3-5 chips in our cell phone.
So, we're not starting, in, in CPV we're not
starting from, gee you'd better make custom volume equipment and
figure out a custom manufacturing process that nobody's done before.
We as a human race have all the equipment.
And all the intelligence and know-how and whatever
to take this already on a, on a cost
structure paradigm that's far beyond what our number of
megawatts are and that's basically what's happening right now.
So I'd like to see the day when we're producing a
couple of gigawatts of CPV power as an industry around the world.
And to, to really understand where we fit relative to, you
know, pick your Chinese supplier that does a gigawatt a year, right.
Volume makes a big difference.
There's typically a 20% cost decrease for every doubling in, in volume.
I think I got that right.
In, in, in solar You can actually look at
this amazing chart over the last, like, 30 years.
And it's every time volume as an industry doubles,
the cost goes down by, by 20%. It's just, pffft.
When you look at where CPV is, it's just on a different line.
This was flat plate technology.
The CPV is just on a different line.
So, you know, if we can, if we can hang on
through the next couple of years, and we continue to see,
you know, companies doing deployments and gaining some market share, it
doesn't take a lot, our costs will continue to go down.
We're going to come out with higher efficiency
cells, we haven't touched four-junction for the
most part yet.
We've built initial stuff as proof of concept, it works fine
but, you know, there's a, there's a lot left to do.
>>
[INAUDIBLE].
>> It's growing.
You know, you, you, you, this is, this is the thing.
There's not a demand problem in solar.
If you've got a technology that you
can field competitively, there's a market for it.
You got to go out and win the projects and get the financing.
>> Almost like Saudi Arabia?
>> Yeah, there, there's a, there are some regions of great D&I in China
and one of the funny things is, I don't know if it's funny or not.
>> Especially now on the coast where most people.
>> But, there's even, there are even
programs where they're going to put in all this
solar and energy and stuff, and then
they're just going to move a bunch of people
to go live there. >> Yeah.
[LAUGH].
>>
>> You emphasize is that something that you want to continue to
offer, or do you feel like you want to kind of streamline your
[INAUDIBLE]?
>> Oh yeah, it's, it's all streamlined.
When you really look at what, what customers are doing, there's
really only two real flavors of cell that people are going to want.
You'll have different cell sizes, so maybe it's 1 millimeter
for this guy, and maybe it's 8 millimeters for that guy.
But as far as the, the EPI flow, and the wafer processing flow
and all that, it's exactly the same, it's just a different mask set.
So, when you,
when you, when you look at all of the the different, I said,
if you can think of a way of concentrating light, people are doing it.
This is true but if you were to just imagine
yourself as the solar cell and look up at this thing.
and look up at the light coming down on you.
There, there's really not a lot of difference.
So we're not going to have to carry
ten different kinds of totally different devices.
It'll all go through
exactly the same processes.
Well be able to grow like a big stack of EPI, and then say, oh, these wafers
are going to that customer, and those wafers are
going to that customer, and it will all work.
But it's a great question. >>
[INAUDIBLE].
>> Yeah.
You can and, and some, some customers, you
know, have, have engaged us to develop more
custom products for them, and we're very happy to do that for anybody who wants it.
But you, you know that is probably the next layer of real optimization.
Right now it makes more sense to have streamlined products and
it, you know, if, if you're going to do two gigawatts next year,
maybe you want to go after that half a percent.
because that's a few tens of millions of dollars, right.
Today, two products makes pretty good sense.
>>
[INAUDIBLE].
[LAUGH].
>> Man, you sound like one of our investors.
Here, let me, let me give you the pocket lint out of my pocket, here.
>>
[LAUGH].
>> Now, can you do something with that in the next two hours?
It's like, you know, there, there, there's a lot of work that goes.
>>
[INAUDIBLE].
>> That, that's what I'm saying.
You sound like one of our, literally, we've gotten
that question from numerous of our investors, at numerous times.
It, look, look, our, our competitors, our two main
competitors have been working on this technology, technology set for
10 or 20 years, and they were able to
get this thing up to 38.5% efficient triple-junction solar cells.
or just below it, it was more like 38 when we started the company.
And their product when
we came out with our 43 and a half record cell, their product was
about 39% efficient, and they'd been at
it for, you know, literally, almost two decades.
So, the level of effort that it has taken us to get up, up that curve and
get ourselves to a core level of understanding and
a, and a platform, a demonstration of a platform.
You know, it's taken a lot. now that we have that,
let me give you a good example.
How do you measure these things accurately?
[INAUDIBLE].
>> Yeah well that, that, that, that's not my graph.
We, we think we can measure more, more accurately than that.
We think we, we understand how to get that, that error bar down.
But it is, it is a beast.
It's a beast to measure that stuff accurately.
If you can't measure it accurately you can't engineer it.
You know, all of these things have to be done.
You've gotta train people, you've gotta do the simulations,
you've gotta develop the materials, you've gotta install the equipment.
You know all the equipment, you just can't walk into S&F like you can around and
be like, hey look at that, here is an evaporator.
No.
You gotta go out and you gotta raise $3 million to go
buy a $200,000 evaporator and you gotta hire an engineer who knows
how install it and you gotta have another guy who knows how
to maintain it and another guy who can run it for you.
It just takes time. >>
[INAUDIBLE].
>> Yeah. It, it, it takes time.
All right?
So don't worry, though. >>
[LAUGH].
>> We will get to it.
[LAUGH].
We will get to it very, very soon.
>>
[INAUDIBLE]
>> If you gave me, if, my, my
honest, honest-to-goodness answer to all of the investors
when they ask that question is, if you give me more money, I will go faster.
>>
[LAUGH].
[INAUDIBLE]
[LAUGH]
>> That's literally all it is. If I can hire more people to maintain
the equipment and keep things going and run 24/7 and all that, we can go faster.
You want to be at 46% by, you know, the end of the next year?
Hey, great, we can do that.
47, what do you want? Let me just figure out how much it costs.
There's no fundamental reason here.
We have a technology platform that's capable of all this.
We've just got to go through the engineering
cycles to get it up to that efficiency curve.
This, this the whole concentrator stuff, it started in like 1970.
Actually, if you go to Saudi Arabia, you can
go see the oldest concentrator system in the world.
It was installed in 1981.
I've got pictures on my cell phone. It's this giant field.
All these Fersnel lens concentrators down on the
silicon solar cells, it was in 1981, right.
It's still in operation today believe it or not.
It still works which is absolutely amazing, right.
but what happened was in the, in the 90s when we were putting
up more satellites, we transitioned off of silicon and onto 3-5 satellite cells.
And those satellite cells went from single junction galley marsenite
to double junction InGaP gas and the efficiency starting going up.
Those were optimized
for the space environment. They were optimized for AN0 not AM.15D.
But that technology was quickly realized that, gee if
you just put this kind of stuff under a concentrator
you can get much higher efficiency and it doesn't have
a terrible temperature coefficient and, you know, all this stuff.
So then people kind of dusted off the old 1970s and early 80s concentrator
work and said hey, what if we took these really high efficiency cells and
put them in these systems, what could we do?
All right.
So that, that, that, that's kind of the history.
So the 3-5 multi-junction cells that we've got here, the
history really is these were developed for running space satellites.
Does that make sense?
In fact, this is a CPV cell and these are two space cells.
Alright, so they tile these guys together in giant panels and off you go.
So no concentration on this guy, and a lot of concentration on this guy.
This is just, I don't even know where I got this.
This is like a kid's play toy, this in not
what people actually use, but it gives you the idea, right?
You know, maybe you designed yourself to be
corresponding to one of these at 1,000 X.
That's going to be a really small cell.
Maybe your Fresnel lens is bigger, that's going to be a bigger cell.
Maybe you designed it smaller so that, you
know, the heat sinking is, is better, right?
Smaller cells, it's easier to get heat away than a
big cell.
all of these design trade offs, people are
exploring, so to speak, at the system level.
so, you know, I can't tell my customers what size cell to use.
Now there are a couple of standards that seem to be kind of emerging.
Five and a half millimeters is one, this is
a five and a half millimeter on an edge chip.
a lot of people are using this size cell.
but some people use cells that are a few hundred microns on an edge.
Some people use cells that are ten millimeters on an edge.
If you want to buy them, I'll sell them to you.
If you want to do things at a PhD engineer level where you go in and you
hack something together and say wow, look at that,
it's a multi-terminal cell, yeah, we can do that.
But when you really want to do things in a bullet
proof way, in a very detailed way, in a productized way that
has demonstrably better performance than another product
and the cost benefit all works out You've
really got to go about things in a very hard-core engineering team kind of way.
It, it takes a lot of effort to do this.
>>
[INAUDIBLE]
>> And it should last for 25 years.
And, and, and, you know, there's no reason to do it right now.
There's, there's just no reason to, with a three junction cell you don't need to.
When you get up to a five junction cell, maybe you do.
You know, spectral variations as, as you increase the number
of junctions, the spectral variations that you can see will maybe
impact some, the third cell or something or the fourth
cell, really hard one at some certain time of the year.
And so that lens limits the current and limits the efficiency.
And then suddenly go gosh, you know, I should break off these two cells
from these two cells to decouple this
problem to get my overall energy harvest up.
but we're not there yet so we don't need to deal with that yet.
[MUSIC]