My feet hurt. With the conference winding up yesterday, the focus of Intersolar Europe 2015 in Munich shifted to the three-day trade fair, with over seven exhibition halls and one thousand companies showing their wares.
The five hundred or so conference attendees have been joined by a reported 20,000 visitors to the trade fair on Day 1. I think I bumped into around 19,000 of them. ‘Entschuldigung’ is my favourite German word now … after ‘Bier’, of course.
The utility engineer in me didn’t know whether to fall in love or run and hide. On one hand, the technical and engineering excellence on show was almost overwhelming. The range of products from silver straps and sub-millimetre precision racking, through 500 kilowatt-hour mobile storage systems and the BMW i8 e-mobility electric sports car; the standard of the research, manufacturing, presentation and marketing was almost overwhelming.
On the other hand, the sheer weight of investment and development in the renewable energy industry, and in particular the consumer-end PV energy area, is immense. Surely this suggests that the worldwide tensions between the new energy world and the owners and operators of the traditional power systems, will soon crack – and not in a way that will favour anyone, especially customers. This is a worldwide industry with momentum on its side.
Hall one, the PV panel hall, demonstrated refinement almost beyond belief. Much of this market is for high reliability, super-efficient panels to be installed by the thousands in open – field, utility scale generators. Turkey, with its aim for greater energy self-sufficiency, the MENA nations (Morocco, Egypt and Northern Africa), or South America, reeling from drought and loss of access to critical hydropower resources. Similarly, is the clearly the preferred resource as a replacement for base load diesel on so many island nations around the world. In step, most of Hall 2 was dedicated to the massive mounting and tracking systems for these large installations.
It is interesting to note that, other than perhaps Great Britain, this utility-scale market is waning in Europe, as over-water wind generation takes the spotlight to fulfil German renewable energy quotas. It will be interesting to see where the US market sits in the future of utility-scale plant. Intersolar America in July should help clarify that position.
With the shift in focus to consumer-level PV generation, a significant part of the Panel Hall was devoted to new and refined small-scale applications. Gone are the clunky aluminium-framed roof-mount panels; to be replaced by low-profile black building-integrated units that sit flush with the roof line. Flexible PV film for shade-sale use (storm rated !) is available in a number of colours, and translucent panels have been constructed for applications like greenhouses and agriculture, where thermal energy and electricity is managed hand-in-hand.
A number of manufacturers are presenting PV/T – or PV and thermal panels – where water pipes are embedded in the panel under the PV surface. In Europe, the target market is multi-resident housing, where every bit of roof space counts for both water heating and power. To me, they looked like the obvious choice for anyone with a swimming pool – integrated heating and power for the pump !
There were floating PV panels designed for regions where land area is at a premium, such as Japan, were cool. I can’t see them on my swimming pool, though.
Halls two and three were all about the hardware that goes into and supports PV, from the screws and substrate films to tractor-mounted car washes. Apparently cleaning thousands of panels in your hundred-megawatt farm is a chore, so these crawlers and tractors and things are just the ticket to keep efficiency up. There were a number of manufacturing robots that kept the crowds amused with dances and stacking batteries and cells from one place to another. Apparently they are used to make solar PV panels, too. The precision and speed of these things are clearly so much a part of the falling price and increased efficiency of the PV components.
Another section of the hall was dedicated to the environmental science that moves solar into a true grid generator. Services for short and medium term weather forecasting for energy scheduling, centralised multi-site and multi-fuel generator control and dispatch, and elegant network stability monitoring were represented by some big players – the Deutscher Wetterdienst (German Weather Service) plays a big role in PV energy dispatch, and the ABBs and Alstoms of the world have made big investments into network control and stability. The commercial aspects of large solar, including project management, financing, insurance and site security all showed up.
By the way, I asked around as to why Australia did not appear to be on the world radar. The impression seems to be that it is a ‘saturated market’ – that is rooftop solar is well catered for, and open-field or utility scale development is not seen as occurring anytime soon. I think the answer for small-scale storage will be very different in the next few years, though.
Whilst I was asking questions, the distinct absence of micro-inverters was obvious. The answer there was that the US market ties up most of the world’s (or in that Enphase’s ?) production of micro-inverters. Another response is that the European technical standards and export-limiting requirements suit centralised string inverters better.
There are three more halls to go, all dedicated to inverter technology, energy storage, batteries and e-mobility. From a quick walk through, I saw the electric-blue BMW 8i, the Silver Mercedes, the black Tesla S and every colour of powerwall and inverter in every direction.
It’s going to be a big day. I had better wear comfortable shoes.
