Solar Still a Draw: Intersolar North America Attracts Double the Visitors

July 15th, 2009 by Jennifer Kho

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More than 17,000 solar industry insiders are gathering in San Francisco this week for the annual Intersolar North America conference.

Conference organizers say the event is bigger this year, attracting more than double the attendees as the inaugural event last year – when the industry saw the solar-technology market grow 80 percent, with 5.5 gigawatts of sales, according to Navigant Consulting analyst Paula Mints – as well as more than double the number of exhibitors and almost triple the floor space. The growth has been “faster than we ever imagined,” said Eicke Weber, chairman of the conference committee and director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems, in a press release.

The boost this year may seem surprising at first glance, because the solar industry is in a downturn. Slower demand – partly due to an incentive cap in Spain that significantly shrank what was the largest market in the world last year, as well as limited financing in the recession – have led to falling solar-panel prices around the world. Mints estimates the market this year will fall to 3.75 gigawatts. “That’s going to hurt,” she said, especially because the industry’s gotten used to high growth rates and has built some 11 gigawatts of run-rate capacity. “We’ve overbuilt.”

As she put it in an article in April: “If 2008 was a party for the industry, 2009 is the morning after.” Mints expects panel prices will fall to $2.25 to $2.30 per watt this year from $3.69 per watt last year. “When 42 percent of the market disappears and there’s nothing to make it up, that’s going to make a difference.”

Mints said she expects the solar market to begin growing again in 2011. Meanwhile, Weber said he believes the market will grow this year, but at a single-digit rate instead of the double digits it’s been seeing in the last few years. “I don’t think 2010 will be a big slump, but only flat growth,” he said, adding that he expects to see a real turnaround in 2011. In this economy, even the 2010 expectations for solar are better than for most other industries, he added.

Even though nobody expects the U.S. market to grow fast enough to take up the slack from the Spanish market this year, manufacturers worldwide see it as a beacon of hope for the near future, Weber said. “We expect — for the U.S. — very substantial growth,” he said, adding that many solar companies expect the market to grow quickly.

Photo courtesy of Mundilfari via a Flickr Creative Commons license.

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Tags: fraunhofer, intersolar, kho, mints, navigant, weber

About the Author

Jennifer Kho -- With more than nine years of reporting experience, Jennifer Kho has been covering green technology since 2004, when she started the cleantech beat at Red Herring magazine. She wrote for Red Herring until 2007, when she helped launch the Greentech Media site as its founding editor. She left Greentech Media in November. Her stories have appeared in such publications as The Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and TheStreet.com. She also regularly contributes to Earth2Tech.

Scott_T

If prices drop then maybe Joe Public can start to afford some of them for home use.
Scott_T

If prices drop then maybe Joe Public can start to afford some of them for home use.