As a company that routinely sells solar panels for use on satellites, Emcore is used to being out of this world. Yet they have to be a little bit excited by the prospect of their solar panels going to Mars. According to this just published press release;

"Emcore has just won a $2m contract from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) Center for the design, manufacturing, testing and delivery of fully integrated solar panels for the Mars Cruise Stage spacecraft. This spacecraft is designed to carry the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) rover and communicate with the entry vehicle that will carry the rover to the surface of the planet. The launch of the spacecraft is planned for fall of 2009."

This news comes after last week's preliminary Q1 results which showed the solar division to be the fastest growing part of the business. Photovoltaics revenues for the first quarter of fiscal 2007 were $13.2 million - a revenue increase of 23% over the same period last year.

Space is a terrific market for solar power - there are of course no clouds, no air or actually anything to get in the way of the light particles. This translates into massively increased solar efficiency - in Emcore's case, a full 28.5% compared to a more typical 15% back on earth.

Having said that, once you get on to the surface of Mars, this declines rapidly, and way below that of Earth. That's because it is further away from the Sun, there is the occasional dust storm and one can reckon with an average of 590 watts per square metre of solar radiation compared to 1000 watts on Earth.

Centrosolar AG, an otherwise unremarkable German solar company, rose 0.7% today - the company has just received a repeated buy recommendation from Goldman Sachs.

The firm is not short of admirers - like Sven Krupp of AC Research, who gave it an "accumulate" rating at the end of March 2007. And unlike some German alternative energy companies, it is clearly interested in expanding sales beyond its borders. In the last financial year, 29% of consolidated revenue was from outside of Germany. This matters a lot if - as some believe - the political risk of Germany's solar subsidies being cut off is real and on the horizon.

There is at least a risk of it, according to this article by Herb Greenberg, originally published in the Wall Street Journal over the weekend.

As you might expect, Greenberg's arguments are sensible enough;

i) just as in previous technology booms (hard drives, chip stocks etc.), at some point supply will exceed demand and prices will fall

ii) A large chunk of the solar market is in Germany and subsidy dependent - it is possible that one day these subsidies could be reduced or scrapped altogether

iii) either one or both of these could lead to a big fall out in the sector

Actually, I don't doubt that either of the first two will happen. The critical question is when and over what period of time?

There is actually no sign of Chancellor Angela Merkel's government scrapping solar subsidies at the moment and certainly won't be this side of a General Election, not due in Germany for another few years. As for supply exceeding demand and forcing prices down, we seem to be a long way from that too. If ever you want to keep a close tab on solar prices, then look at the solarbuzz indices - not much sign of downward price movement there.

As I've mentioned here before, the irony is that German subsidies help demand to exceed supply and keep prices up. If you were a solar manufacturer, why would you lower prices if you have a captive market in Germany, prepared through the help of subsidies to pay top dollar?

So I'm going to stick my neck out and say that barring a catastrophe (e.g. war between America and China over Taiwan), there will be no major fall in prices and no change in subsidies for the next 5 years. And my gut instinct is that Chinese solar companies will be a lot more competitive than their Western counterparts in the long-run too.

About 10-15 years ago, I used to visit to East Germany quite regularly. It was a better place to learn German because back then, most Easterners or "Ossis" as they called themselves, didn't speak English. There was also a lot of infrastructure investment going on, although plenty of people weren't going anywhere fast careerwise. Above all, living wasn't expensive there. Since then and particularly with other Central European states joining the EU, East Germany has been emptying of people and private investment has been scarce.

So I was intrigued to read this piece about how Germany's solar boom was leading to a lot of solar company investment in the East. Companies that are mentioned here are Solarworld AG and Conergy AG. One of the interviewees says that according to an article he read, by 2015, there will be more people working in renewable energy in Germany than in the car industry. I find that quite hard to imagine. Right now, directly and indirectly, a quarter of the German workforce is dependent on the car industry. And unlike renewables in Germany, automakers are successful in spite of government regulation rather than because of it.

Let's be honest; solar photovolataics are inefficient, highly prone to local weather conditions and above all, very expensive. However there is a school of thought that believes that in new buildings, i.e. where the cost of scaffolding, and erecting a roof are already unavoidable factors in the total cost of a new home, this is where solar pv can make start to make commercial sense.

So news that a subsidiary of Sunpower is building homes with ready-integrated solar power merits closer examination. Is this a trend we are likely to see expand?

If you are spending $400,000 on a new house, with $20,000 included in the price for 2 kilowatts of solar power, this will probably not strike the housebuyer as a big deal. So the consumer will be indifferent to positive. But why as a developer would you do it?

Some solar lobbyists believe that building regulations should be passed to demand solar power on all new homes. I disagree. Solar power must make it on economic and environmental merit, not on government regulation. The danger is with these regulations is that the solar industry will not be forced to find technologies that drastically lower solar costs as they will have a free supply of capital from the deployment of existing technology. Arguably, this has already happened and is together with high silicon prices, why solar costs have not fallen the last few years.

Evergreen Solar is on a big sales roll. They have just increased their sales agreement with Sun Edison by more than 2 and a half times to $510m - and this boosts the total value of Evergreen sales agreements announced in the past 16 months to more than $1 billion.

Since my last post on their disappointing Q4 results, the stock has picked up quite a bit. But the longer term trend since 2003 as I wrote in an earlier post is clearly in the right direction.

What I think is particularly smart about Evergreen is not so much their string ribbon technology, but their partnerships with 2 of the largest silicon producers in the world, Q-Cells and REC - said Evergreen's President, Richard M. Feldt on the relationship;

"The ongoing expansion of EverQ - our partnership with Q-Cells and Renewable Energy Corporation - and a secure, long-term supply of refined silicon enable us to forge long-term customer agreements with solar industry leaders."

Amen to that !

You have to wonder about Spire - when the rest of the solar industry is booming, they have just reported a widening Q4 loss.

So news that they are going to work together with Germany's KUKA Schweissanlagen GmbH to combine their machine technologies to meet growing demand for fully automated large-scale photovoltaic (PV) manufacturing lines is 2 steps in the right direction;

i) the economies of scale in solar manufacturing have been self-evident for a long time
ii) it gets them additional exposure to the German marketplace - approximately 80% of world demand

Since my last post on Spire back in September when I saw similarities in their role to those who sold the shovels in the Gold Rush, the stock has clearly done well. But it must be disappointing to the managers as well as the stockholders, that for a company that prides itself on being part of the solar business since 1980, that they are not much bigger and at least profitable.