Nanosolar Snares a Gigawatt in Orders for its Thin-Film Solar Panels

Is thin really back in?

Thin-film solar, that is. Nanosolar announced Thursday that it had signed contracts to supply up to one gigawatt of its thin-film photovoltaic panels to European solar power plant builders over the next three to six years.

Nanosolar is one of several Silicon Valley startups that have attracted billions of dollars in venture capital to develop a thin-film technology called copper indium gallium selenide, or CIGS. Such solar cells use little expensive silicon, the main ingredient of conventional photovoltaic cells.

Thin-film cells can be printed on glass or flexible materials and though they’re less efficient at converting sunlight into electricity, the big pitch was that they can be manufactured at a lower cost. But then came a 50 percent fall in the price of conventional crystalline silicon photovoltaic modules as Chinese manufacturers rapidly ramped up production and many CIGS companies backed off their earlier optimistic projections.

And so those impressive 10-figure orders from customers need to be taken with a grain of salt as they don’t always materialize. For instance, in September 2009, Nanosolar announced a whopping $4.1 billion in orders and a manufacturing capacity of 640 megawatts at its German plant.

A year later when I met with a Nanosolar executive at the Solar Power International confab in Los Angeles, he acknowledged that not all those orders would be fulfilled, given the state of the economy and falling solar cell prices. The company had also ratcheted back its estimated manufacturing capacity. (On Thursday, Nanosolar said it would have an annual capacity of 115 megawatts by this fall.)

The latest orders are with two German companies, Belectric and Plain Energy, and with EDF Energies Nouvelles, a unit of the French energy giant. The developers will deploy the Nanosolar Utility Panel in photovoltaic power plants.

“Through this partnership with Nanosolar, we look forward to achieving a very competitive levelized cost of energy for our solar installations,” David Corchia, EDF Energies Nouvelles, said in a statement.