Solar integrated Technologies announced yesterday that the Company has achieved International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 9001:2000 certification for its quality management system.  The certification is for the design, manufacture and marketing of proprietary BIPV systems for commercial roofing and portable solar applications worldwide.

According to CEO Jon W. Slangerup ,"This ISO certification gives Solar Integrated another competitive differentiator and provides our customers with added confidence in their decision to partner with us."

I don't know how important this bureaucratic qualification is but no doubt some of you may have noticed a major movement in the stock today.

At the time of posting, the last trade was at 210p - up over 12% on the day and an all-time high. This matters because SIT has missed out on the spectacular boom in solar stocks that so many other solar companies have enjoyed.

So maybe SIT is just arriving late at the party?

SunPower made a spectacular market début yesterday on the Nasdaq, making a 41 percent jump from its opening share price of $18 to $25.45 a share at the market close.

SunPower Corporation designs, manufactures and sells high efficiency solar cells and solar panels that generate electricity from sunlight for residential, commercial and remote power applications. What makes them different is their proprietary all back contact silicon solar cell technology, which they claim produces up to 50% more power per square foot compared to conventional solar cells.

For this you can read 20% efficiency.

Small by solar standards, the company has capacity for 25 MW per year and the plant is based in the Philippines but could expand to 100 MW.

Looks like a nice little earner for Cypress Semiconductor.

According to this article from Reuters, China's SunTech Power is planning to raise $350 m in an IPO in New York.

The company is already big by solar standards, in the top 10 of manufacturers, with a capacity of 120 MW per year. It would appear to be very well placed to profit from China's greater appetite for alternative energy - just boosting the renewables target for 2020 from 10% to 15%. China's new renewable energy law comes into force at the beginning of next year.

Evergreen Solar , a developer and manufacturer of PV modules, has come a long way since 2003 when losses peaked at just under USD 15 million. Today it capitalises at $675m and in its just announced Q3 results achieved positive product gross margin of 10.4 percent. This compares with negative 29.0 percent for the third quarter of 2004 and positive 6.2 percent in the second quarter of 2005. The turn-around came in Q4 2004, when the company achieved its first positive gross margins. Then came their joint venture with Q-Cells (also a listed solar stock) in Germany to build a 30 -megawatt solar wafer, cell and module manufacturing plant in Germany.

Evergreen has been fantastically well positioned in the solar boom because their proprietary string ribbon manufacturing technology, means that they can significantly reduce the need for silicon - a very high cost input - and achieve similar effects. This gives them an edge over many other solar firms, because the cost of silicon has risen from $9 a kilo in 2000 to $60 today.

Today, they have also announced their biggest sales contract to date - a minimum of $70 million of photovoltaic (PV) modules to PowerLight over the next four years. 

Xantrex Technology Inc has just announced a sales deal with recently London aim-listed Clipper Wind Power for $12 million of wind power converters.

Xantrex sees itself as a world leader in advanced power electronics. With the major renewables such as solar and wind providing power not in your precisely chosen quantity or even exactly when you want it, power electronics are vital to smooth out the power supply.

As renewables make ever greater inroads, it will still have to be on the back of better electronics managing the power. That's why Xantrex is important.

Outside of India - where power supplies are extraodinarily unreliable - there aren't many companies doing this. Xantrex though, is one of them.