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Todd Woody, Forbes Staff
The solar industry may be in turmoil, what with the U.S.-China photovoltaic trade war and a growing roster of companies tipping into bankruptcy, but business continues to boom, according to a report released Wednesday.
The U.S. installed 506 megawatts of photovoltaic panels in the first quarter of the year – the second-most number of quarterly installations ever and an 85% spike from the first quarter of 2011, said the report prepared by GTM Research and the Solar Energy Industries Association. The nation is on track to install a total of 3,300 megawatts of solar panels by year’s end. If that prediction holds up, the U.S.’s share of the global photovoltaic market will jump from 7% last year to 11% in 2012.
“The U.S. maintained its status as a consistently growing, albeit complex, demand center for PV,” the report’s authors wrote. “Despite uncertainty surrounding the availability of project finance, import tariffs, and state-level demand … the residential and non-residential markets in aggregate grew 35% quarter-over-quarter.”
Investors’ appetite certainly doesn’t seem to have been dampened by such upheaval. On Wednesday Silicon Valley installer SolarCity announced that U.S. Bancorp would finance $250 million in residential and commercial photovoltaic installations. It’s the largest of the six funds the bank has raised to finance SolarCity installations over the past three years.
And on Tuesday Abengoa Solar said it would build a 200-megawatt photovoltaic power plant in California’s Imperial County. The company declined to identify the operator of the project but in April the Imperial County Board of Supervisors approved a 200-megawatt photovoltaic power station to be operated by solar developer 8minutenergy Renewables.
Despite the imposition of tariffs on Chinese solar panels, prices for residential solar systems fell 4.8% between the fourth quarter of 2011 and the first quarter of 2012 while installed costs droppNike x Fragment Women