For solar power, the future looks bright

[OKIsItJustMe]

http://money.cnn.com/2007/10/03/news/companies/sunpower_solar.fortune/?postversion=2007100403

For solar power, the future looks bright

Solar energy is now very real. And at hot companies like SunPower, the 'green' that matters is money - by the billions, writes Fortune's Marc Gunther.

FORTUNE Magazine
By Marc Gunther, Fortune
October 4 2007: 3:33 AM EDT

...

Today, like the rest of the solar energy industry, SunPower is heating up. With electricity prices rising, worries about global warming mounting, and the cost of solar energy falling, the business of making electricity from the sun is about to go mainstream in a big way.

The Holy Grail of solar is a concept called "grid parity" - meaning that it costs no more to generate your own solar energy than it does to buy electricity retail, off the grid - and there's smart money betting that solar will get there soon. In the case of SunPower, that money comes from a legendary Silicon Valley character named T.J. Rodgers, whom we'll meet shortly.

...

Since going public two years ago, SunPower's stock price has grown by about 450%, from $18 a share to $82 when Fortune went to press, giving the company a market capitalization of nearly $7 billion. That's a little bigger than Whole Foods Market.

While the solar industry as a whole remains small - less than 1% of the electricity in the U.S. - it's exploding. The market for solar photovoltaic (PV) panels, which use cells made of crystalline silicon to turn sunlight into electricity, has grown by an average of 42% annually since 2002. Industry leaders, most based in Japan and Germany, are ramping up production, as are Chinese manufacturers like Suntech, whose founder and CEO, Dr. Zhengrong Shi, is one of China's richest men.

Big companies, including BP (Charts), General Electric (Charts, Fortune 500), Mitsubishi, Sanyo, Sharp, and Shell (Charts), all want to grow their solar businesses. In Silicon Valley, meanwhile, venture capital investors like John Doerr and Vinod Khosla, entrepreneur Bill Gross, and Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin are backing startups that claim they will revolutionize the industry.

...

[The2ndWheel]

1. "Solar energy is now very real"

We need Jim Carrey from "Dumb and Dumber" for comments on that headline.

[Kolesar]

2. Odd quotes by Rodgers

"I am interested in green," T.J. Rodgers declares. "I have shareholders." The unlikely savior of SunPower, Rodgers is the pugnacious 59-year-old CEO of a Silicon Valley chipmaker called Cypress Semiconductor (Charts). He is also a staunch opponent of government subsidies and skeptical about global warming.

"The group that is most vehement about global warming represent to me some of the worst people in the world," Rodgers tells me when we meet at Cypress's headquarters in San Jose. "I dislike them so much, it's difficult to listen to what they say objectively." What about Al Gore? "I wouldn't trust Al Gore as far as I can throw him, which isn't very far - he's gotten a little hefty since he left office."

And CEOs like GE's Jeff Immelt, Wal-Mart's Lee Scott, and Peter Darbee of PG&E, who worry about climate change? "Every one of the names you just mentioned would flunk his ass in the most rudimentary test about global warming." Rodgers notes that he and Immelt both went to Dartmouth. (Rodgers is a trustee, currently battling the college administration over who elects the board.) "Jeff Immelt played football," he says. "I graduated No. 1 in physics."

But if the challenge is to find a company in the PV market, you have to pick something. This one is publically held and you can buy shares of it.