We just updated the Careers section of website with three new positions, and will be posting more very soon. We are currently looking for:

• Electrical Engineer - Entry level position - Some experience required - Download Job Description.
• Optical Designer - Experience required - Download Job Description.
• Senior Manufacturing Manager - Executive/Director level position - Download Job Description.

We haven’t been able to update this blog very often as we’ve been working on getting together funding and moving to demonstration level systems, but we will have more to say very soon.  Thanks for your interest.

Jon Worren just posted this summary about the Ontario FIT Rates over on the MaRS DD blogs. Jon’s a smart guy and his analysis is usually spot on. Short, to the point and worth the read. Also, Green Jobs talk went ok, and I’ll be at Green Drinks tonight, so see you there if you’re there.

The OPA and Ontario Government have released their new Feed-in Tariff (FIT) rate proposals! If these go through and get finalized (which seems likely), this is excellent news for two reasons - there was quite a bit of uncertainty and several businesses were holding their breath until the new rules were released, and the FIT rates are really good. There’s stuff in there for wind, bio-gas and other renewables, but this is a solar blog, so let’s look at the solar details.

First off, a few terms and a little back ground for people who need it.

Feed-in Tariff (FIT) - A FIT is the price that the government buys power for the grid for special cases. In this case, it means that if you generate power from renewables - solar, wind etc - the OPA will buy the power from you at a higher rate than the cost of electricity. The reason for FITs is that electricity from renewables still costs more than from coal or natural gas. With a FIT, it creates an incentive to generate power using solar energy, and it creates an incentive to sell that power onto the grid. (So you get energy efficiency AND renewable energy, because people want to max out the power they put onto the gird.) Germany and Spain have both implemented FIT programs for solar, which is the main reason those two companies dominate the solar energy industry.

kilowatt (kW) - 1000 watts. This is amount of power that electricity pricing is usually based on.

megawatt (MW) - 1,000 kilowatts or 1,000,000 watts.

kilowatt hour (kWh) - A measure of electrical generation or use. If a clothes dryer used 1000 watts, it would use 1 kWh per hour. (So a 100 watt light bulb uses 0.1 kWh per hour.)

kilowatt hours per kilowatt (kWh/kW) - This is the one that gives me a head ache. Assume you have 1 kW of solar panels, the kWh/kW is the amount of power that you can expect them to generate in a given amount of time - so you can talk about kWh/kW/year or /month or /day etc. In Ontario over the course of a year, you can expect to get between 1100 and 1200 kWh/kW. So, if you went out and bought a 200 watt solar panel, you would need 5 to generate 1 kW of power. If you installed them in Toronto, they would generate roughly 1100-1300 kW, depending on where in Ontario you were. Natural Resources Canada has some cool interactive maps that give you more details, and he’s a zoomed in map of the kWh/kW/year for Ontario. (The small dark patches around Ottawa and Toronto are glitches, but there’s excellent sun in Southern Ontario, especially down near Windsor, and East of Brighton.)

So, FIT Rates. The old rates were 42 ¢/kWh, the new Solar FIT rates for Ontario:

Rooftop

• Less than 10 kW - 80.2 ¢/kWh
• 10 - 100 kW - 71.2 ¢/kWh
• 100-500 kW - 63.5 ¢/kWh
• Greater than 500 kW - 53.9 ¢/kWh

Ground Systems

• Less than 10 MW - 44.2 ¢/kWh

The best part is that you’re guaranteed those rates for 20 years.

So what this mean for the average person in Ontario? Well, the OPA gives a good example in their “Backgrounder” document (link to pdf).

For example, a homeowner in Ontario would be looking at a residential scale Solar PV project of about 3 kilowatts, which costs around $30,000. This would provide enough electricity to meet one third of their consumption and would generate about $7 per day. This payment would result in approximately $2,500 in revenue per year for the homeowner, resulting in about a 12year payback. In addition, the government is expected to introduce plans to provide low cost financing for residential renewable projects, including solar thermal, solar PV and ground source heat pumps.

The prices of solar panels are falling and new lower cost technologies - such as our Sun Stream Windows - are coming onto the market. Right now, with this new system, you’re looking at roughly 12 years to pay back the costs, but that’s going to fall, and fall faster because of this program.

For Morgan Solar, our solar windows are going to do extremely well under this program - I’m assuming that their rooftop prices count for wall mounting too, usually rooftop and “Building Integrated” are taken to mean the same thing, but a south facing wall is almost as good for most solar, and better for the Sun Stream. Also, the Sun Simba HCPV system is designed for huge solar farms and raising the rates (and ending the uncertainty) helps us there too. The increase of 2.2 ¢/kWh means a 10 MW solar farm will generate well over $300,000 per year in additional revenue. Basically, this is good news for everyone.

Tyler Hamilton has blogged about the new FIT program, and he’s got an article in the Toronto Star today too. Here’s the OPA’s press release, and here is the OPA FIT Home page. If you really want to go into the nitty-gritty background on this, start here.

So, all in all, excellent news. This will definitely lead to a boom for renewable energy in Ontario and definitely create renewable energy jobs in Ontario. These are the first FIT rates proposed anywhere in North America that are on par with the rates in Germany and Spain. Those countries dominate the solar industry and the FIT rates there are a huge reason why. From what it looks like, Ontario is going to follow suit, and the best part is, these new FIT Rates are only part of what the government has planned. There’s a good article about this on Cleantech.com, “Ontario casts green shadow on U.S.“, which was written before these proposed rates were released.

We hadn’t updated the site in a while, and there were some changes that were overdue.  We’ve updated the product photos, descriptions and a few small details about the LSO.  Most of these changes were to account for the transition from the triangle LSO design to the square LSO design.

This change allowed us to reduce dead space on the panels (the edges of the optic have a small moulding flange, but it added up) and makes assembly and manufacture easier. It also allowed us to use less aluminum per panel, so in general, it was a big improvement over the previous design. We had always planned to transition to this design, but there were some technical challenges we needed to solve first. When a supplier delay in September forced us to wait a couple of months, we used the time to tackle the challenges and migrated to the current design ahead of schedule.

The new Sun Simba HCPV based on the square LSO design looks like this:

And the product section has been updated to reflect the design changes.

We’re getting very close to having working prototypes of our other products, and we already have working prototypes of the Simba, so things are fairly exciting around here.  There are some more photos on our Flickr page.

If you’re coming over from the Technology Review, we’re going to be putting up some updates later today.  Some updated images, photos of prototypes and slightly more detailed descriptions.

I just wanted to make sure people knew, we’re going to be exhibiting at the CanSIA Solar Conference 2008 in Toronto, at the Westin Harbour Castle, on December 8th and 9th. I’ll be in the booth for most of both days, and I’d love it if people came by and said hello.

More info on CanSIA’s website.

It’s been busy around here, but we’ll see you there!

I got stuck in traffic on the way to work this morning and didn’t get here until 8:55AM this morning.  By the time I arrived, I’d received 9 emails following up or congratulating us on our coverage in the Toronto Star: A ray of sunshine for solar energy.  (Front page of the Business section!)

I’d been reading Clean Break, Tyler Hamilton’s blog, for a while, and I’d caught his articles in the Star so when he emailed me to talk about an article I was pretty excited.  He came down to our office for a couple of hours, we laid our cards on the table and wondered what someone on the outside looking in would think.  We really couldn’t be happier with the article - the photos, the images… really everything.  If you get the chance, read the paper version, there are two images that aren’t on the website, and it’s just damn cool to be on the front page of the business section.

Edit: He just posted a follow up to his article on his blog.

One note - I told Tyler Hamilton that John Paul broke the JDS Uniphase record for most inventions in his first year.  That was based on a half remembered conversation JP and I had years ago, and I’d never double checked the facts.  Turns out… not so much.  (I’ve told that to a few other people too, so sorry folks, big brother pride got the better of me.)  He was a rock-star engineer at JDS and he did invent something that went to market on his second day, but he doesn’t even know if they keep records of “Most inventions”.  His words:

I am so pleased that Tyler Hamilton decided to write this article.  It’s a bit humbling to see what you are trying to do through the eyes of a journalist, especially a Clean Tech enthusiast and expert like him.  However, there was one compliment that I need to decline: while I did invent something on my second day working at JDS, I didn’t set any records that I know of.  My time at JDS was excellent, the Exploratory Research Group is a great team, and I got to work with really smart people like Paul Colbourne, Oleg Bouevitch and Barry Keyworth, and I would like to say that I am honoured to have known them.

I really liked the mention in the article about our table made out of a door we found in the back alley and the improvised whiteboard made out of shower liner. Here’s a shot of our father, our main investor and our strategic leader - Eric Morgan, sitting at a $20 Craigslist desk, with a chalk board painted on the wall behind him.

Eric Morgan at the Morgan Solar Offices

One potential investor commented on entering our office, “Well, at least I know you wouldn’t be wasting my money on rent.”  For some strange reason, we’re proud of that comment.

On another note, we were also mentioned in an article titled Shedding light on solar cell technology on the website EETimes.com. The article wasn’t about us, but rather about companies coming up with innovative ways to reduce the cost of solar energy.  Still, cool to see us mentioned in that context.

There was just a short article about us in Corporate Knights “Clean Tech 10″ issue. Corporate Knights is a magazine that focuses on responsible business, and is included once a month in the Globe and Mail (one of Canada’s main national newspapers). It’s quite an honour and we were pretty excited to hear that it came out. We didn’t know the release date in advance, so we missed the paper copy, so if anyone has one, please, give me a call and let me know. I’d love to have a copy here in the office.

For those interested, you can download their Clean Tech 10 report as a pdf, our little blurb is on page six.

Unfortunately, I spoke with the journalist for only a few minutes, and I may have confused him with two minor details. We spoke about the Sun Simba HCPV, and some future projects that we’ve developed prototypes for but are not focused on right now. What may have led to some confusion is that perhaps I didn’t properly communicate that there were three separate products.

So, just for clarification, the Sun Simba HCPV DOES require tracking, and the Sun Block Panel and Sun Stream Window don’t. Also, they quote me in the article as follows:

“[The panels] are designed to accept light at angles—so you don’t need lifts or you don’t need to put them on a flat roof,” says Nicolas Morgan, Director of Business Development. “That flexibility lets [builders and architects] put them in place in more places, where they otherwise maybe wouldn’t consider a solar panel.”

We didn’t have time to come back to that, so it’s easy to understand why she understood me to mean that the panels themselves were flexible. What I meant was that they were flexible in where they could be installed. (I’ll use the word versatile next time.)

Still, despite that small misunderstanding, it was exciting to be included in their coverage and we’re looking forward to talking to them in the future as our projects advance. And I’ll say it again, if anyone has a paper copy they can send me, please, let me know.

So, we’ve been busy applying for different programs and getting some documentation ready for a few people and we realized that we didn’t have a photo of one of the really cool looking prototypes. JP and I got out into the sun yesterday and snapped a few, and they came out really well.

The LSO in these photos was cut on a diamond turning machine, and in this configuration is a disc, concentrating to the centre. The LSOs in the Simba panels are triangular, but they’re basically just pie slices out of the disc version of the optic.

JP wasn’t posing or anything, I just got him in the shot and it came out looking really cool. Here are some good images of the LSO itself.

Two things to note here. First, at the viewing angle of the photo you can sort of see JP’s hand through the optic, but the LSO’s shadow is just as dark as JP’s hand’s shadow - it’s completely blocking the direct light. Second, that bright spot in the centre is concentrated light reflecting off glitter (like from a craft store) suspended in silicone gel. You need something in the centre to scatter the light, or it would just shine right through to the other side and out the far edges. In the photos it’s saturated, but standing there, it was too bright to look at directly.

The concentration where it strikes the silicone is around 50 suns, although if you popped it out (and you could, easily) and put a point target in the very centre, you could go up to 1000 suns or beyond with this prototype.

Here’s the view edge on - looking through the LSO at the bright spot in the centre.

Pretty cool eh?

The Renewable Energy Investment Tax Credit (ITC for short) has passed, and better, it’s been renewed until 2016, and they increased the caps on how much you can claim for the credit. This is great news, but especially for solar energy as dozens of very large products were waiting to see if that went through or not. It also looks like some of the wish list items got through including raising claimable amounts for individuals, making the extension 8 years instead of 8 one year extensions, and allowing for some retroactive credits for facilities already already producing power. We’ll have to wait and see for all the details, but this is good no matter how you slice it, and this will drive up demand for solar energy drastically.

Mark my words, 2009 will be remembered as the Renewable Energy Year in the US. If you weren’t sure if you were going to just into the market before, now is definitely the time.

Green Wombat has a good short summary, and there’s a little more detail in this article.

I’d be celebrating if I weren’t so busy.