SPI2008 Day 2 to 4

Ok, it was way more hectic than I could have imagined.  People were in the booth non-stop, and there were meetings after meetings after meetings.  I never got a second to walk the trade show floor, I didn’t attend a single conference session and that’s not too far from the other Morgan Solar people’s experience either.  Insane.

I’ll go into a little more concrete detal tomorrow – there were dozens and dozens of interested enquiries, hundreds of people who just happened by and enough of those “I was hoping to have this conversation” moments to have us feeling fairly happy about how it went.

Details to follow, thanks to everyone who came by or reads this blog.

Five Days to Solar Power International 2008

Five days.  Doesn’t seem like much.  We’re pretty busy around here getting ready for that, and getting ready for the conference was part of the reason we launched this blog.  It’ll be nice to have a day or two afterwards to just relax.

If you’re there, come by and say hi at Booth #1749.

Useful Links

Very busy as we get ready for Solar Power International 2008 next week, but a couple of things caught my eye that were worth passing on.

Possibly the most useful link I’ve stumbled across lately, How Electric Power is Measured in Watts.  I’ve seen this explained before, but this explanation is simple and easy to understand, without sacrificing accuracy.

Second, if you’re as obsessed with the US election as I am, and reading this blog, you might be interested in this: Obama And McCain’s Energy Plans Compared In Detail to Help Voters in the Fall.  I’m resisting the urge to editorialize.

Current Economic Situation and Solar

I’ve been asked a few times what the current economic situation mean to the solar industry.  (It’s amusing that people would think would I know.)  My stock answer was that it’ll probably hurt the more marginal propositions, and slow down uptake in areas where there aren’t programs to support solar.  The article linked above provides a decent analysis and some of the broad strokes.  There will be more pressure from investors to have your ducks in a row and really demonstrate profitability, and home owners might delay upgrades because getting loans becomes harder.

But demand and prices for electricity are going up, resistance to nuclear, coal and natural gas plants are holding, the consequences of carbon are becoming more apparent, consumer demand for clean energy is growing and there is an ongoing boom in innovation in the industry supported by a continuing flow of investment.  So…  I think the solar industry will weather the current economic crisis.

A couple of points to consider.  A summary of some recent deals and funding in solar by Cleantech.com, a good summary of the impact of the ITC passing, even without the US, solar is booming elsewhere, Spain for example.

Put another way, we’ve recieved dozens of meeting requests from people attending the Solar Power International 2008 conference, and we’re a start up still in the prototype phase of product development.  We have allot of interesting things to talk about, but I can’t even imagine what it must be like for people with a product already available on the market.  I said that 2009 will be remembered as the year of solar, and I stand by it.  Good time to be entering the industry.

Back from hiatus

Hi everyone, sorry for the posting hiatus, but things have been insane around here.  For the next couple of weeks there will be semi-regular posts here, but for now it’s just a brief note hello and a couple of updates.

Updates

The Earth Rangers Centre Demo Site

Everything is on track for this, and right now it looks like the first panels will be installed in the third week of September, with the remainder of the panels in place by second or third week of October.  We’ve already received the tracker and had it delivered to the site, and we’re waiting on the delivery of the first batch of prototype optics from our provider and we’re all set for the assembly process.  The installed has been booked and we’ll be mounting the tracker in a few weeks.  Exciting stuff for us.  We’ll be putting pictures here as soon as they’re available.

Solar Power International 2008

We’ve finalized our booth plan and we’re going be to showing a prototype of our Sun Block solar wall system (more details on that later) and a small version of the Sun Simba HCPV.  Should be pretty cool.

Sun Simba HCPV Details

We’re waiting on the go ahead from the lawyers regarding our patents, but in a week or two we’ll be publishing details on the Sun Simba HCPV system.  We’ve shown it to a couple of people in confidence, and people are pretty impressed.

That’s it for now.