El Phoenix Sun

Hyundai solar power plant, Spain

In April, some people were (happily) surprised when the South Korean company, Hyundai, announced it had taken the initial steps to join an international partnership and build the world’s largest solar photovoltaic (PV) power plant in southeastern Arizona.

At 150 MW, the solar plant outside of Dragoon, AZ, will be 2.5 times larger than the largest PV plant existing today (a sprawling 60 MW facility in Olmedilla, Spain).

Just 10 miles down the road in Cochise, AZ, HHI will also build a much smaller PV solar plant — just 25 MW. (Small by today’s standards, but the Cochise plant will still be larger than the total U.S. industrial scale PV capacity in 2005.)

No one should have been too surprised, however. The South Korean industrial powerhouse never does things in a small way. The company owns the world’s largest shipyard, where it produces super-tankers, container ships and other large vessels including  LNG carriers the length of three football fields.

In 2008, HHI announced it was expanding its then-small solar power unit by investing $253 million to enlarge a solar cell factory in Eumseong, South Korea. This was just a start, said HHI’s CEO, Min Keh-sik.

“Our goal,” he stated, “is to make Hyundai Heavy Industries the center of the international photovoltaic industry.”

Hyundai 1.65 MW Wind Turbine

HHI also expanded into wind power. This March the company finished building the largest (of course) wind turbine factory in Korea, and has since announced joint deals in China and Pakistan.

(Hyundai Motor Company — the branch of Hyundai that most Americans know and that separated from the Hyundai group in 2000 — recently announced its own plans to green up. GreenBiz reported last week that Hyundai Motor America had set a target of 50 mpg for its entire car and light truck fleet by 2025.)

South Korea’s move into these renewable technologies, and nuclear power, is an outgrowth of a larger fact of Korean life. The country produces no oil, has little coal and only limited natural gas reserves. Combustion means imports (and global warming). The Korean government decided that the country’s future depended on renewables and nuclear power.

This quest for energy independence has led to a manufacturing boom and increased exports. In the first half of 2010, South Korea exported just over $2 billion in solar and wind energy-related products — twice the amount sent abroad in the first six months of 2009.

The country had redefined what it means to be an “energy powerhouse” said a government official in July. The term was previously reserved for countries with an abundance of oil and coal. Now, the official told the Korea Times, the key was next-generation energy sources.

“Under the new definition,” said Yoo Jae-ho, “I think Korea fits into the category of an energy powerhouse in consideration of its technological edge in renewable or nuclear power.”

The Arizona solar plants are an integral part of HHI’s strategy. The solar modules will be imported from Hyundai’s newly expanded plant in Eumseong, making Arizona a demonstration project of sorts.

“The deal will establish Hyundai as an international supplier of large-scale solar energy plants,” Kim Kweon-tae, COO of HHI’s electrical division, told a South Korean newspaper. “We will do our best to win additional orders of large plants in the United States, as well as in Europe and Asia.”

Partners in the venture are Nevada-based Matinee Energy and Korea-based LG Electronics.

Dream technology for energy storage?

The Department of Energy has announced a $43 million loan guarantee for an advanced energy storage system that works like a dream — if the dreamer is Leonardo DiCaprio’s character, Cobb, from the movie Inception. The system approximates (as best it can in the phenomenological world) the forever-spinning top that was Cobb’s test to tell if he were dreaming or awake.

Inside Beacon Power's 'SuperFly'

The advanced energy storage system in this case is a flywheel, which converts electrical energy into kinetic (spinning) energy, which it then releases, converted back to electricity, as needed. A 20 MW collection of super-efficient flywheels made by the Massachusetts-based Beacon Power Company, will absorb power when there’s excess production on the grid and release it when demand rises again.

The project is under construction in Stephentown, New York, and will provide approximately 10 percent of  that state’s regulation capacity, by reducing the need to increase production at existing power plants when demand spikes — without releasing additional CO2 or soot.

Unlike the top in Inception, the Smart Energy 25 flywheel system, would eventually stop spinning without periodic, if small, jolts of electricity. In the physical world, there’s no such thing as a free energy lunch.

But Beacon’s flywheels come tantalizingly close.

The heart of the system is a lightweight rotating rim made from a carbon-fiber composite. The “top” is levitated on magnetic ball bearings in a vacuum, so that friction is nearly eliminated (it’s that qualifier, “nearly,” that separates the flywheel from Cobb’s totem top). Spinning at a rate of 16,000 rpm, the flywheel can supply peak electrical capacity back to the grid nearly instantaneously — with a ramp-up time measured in nanoseconds, unlike traditional power sources.

Early simple flywheel

In addition to smoothing out the larger power grid and increasing usable energy, Beacon’s flywheels could be a boon for renewable energy sources such as wind and solar. Wind-produced energy is at a maximum at night, solar, during the day. The flywheels could efficiently store this intermittent energy and release it when the wind dies down or, in the case of solar, at night, or when clouds lower electrical production.

Engineers at Beacon continue to look for new ways to lower friction and increase efficiency. Someday, they may reduce drag to zero and produce electricity forever without needing anything more than the initial spin that sets the wheel in motion.

In your dreams.

In announcing his new appointments to the U.S. Manufacturing Council yesterday, Secretary of Commerce Gary Locke singled out the Council’s new leader, Bruce Sohn.

First Solar's Bruce Sohn

“With Bruce as chair,” said Locke, “we’re sending a message that President Obama and this Administration are committed to making renewable energy and efficiency technologies a cornerstone of a revitalized American manufacturing sector.”

Sohn is president of First Solar, the world’s largest manufacturer of thin-film solar PV, with headquarters in Tempe, Arizona.  According to a Commerce Department spokesperson, Sohn is the first representative from the solar power industry to head the council, which advises the administration on competitiveness and other manufacturing issues facing U.S.-based companies.

Solar advocates, not surprisingly, enthusiastically endorsed the choice.

President and CEO of the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA), Rhone Resch,  issued a statement saying that Sohn’s appointment “has told the world that the solar industry is becoming a backbone for our economy and offers a bright future for U.S. manufacturing.” (First Solar sits on SEIA’s board of directors.)

It’s not just the solar industry, however, that’s applauding the new leadership at the Manufacturing Council.

Jenny Powers, a spokesperson for that Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), said that by including Sohn the administration is acknowledging the fact that solar has a new relevancy in our energy future. “They [solar] are scaling up and playing with the big boys,” said Powers in a phone interview.

Sean Garren agrees. A clean energy advocate with the group Environment America, Garren said his organization is “looking forward to working with Mr. Sohn to reap all the manufacturing benefits we will see from the solar revolution in America.”

The U.S. has a lot of ground to make up.

A decade ago, 40 percent of all PV panels were made in the United States. That figure has dropped to less than 10 percent of the global supply today — a trend SEIA’s Resch thinks can be reversed in part by adopting smart manufacturing policies. One such example cited by Resch is the Advanced Energy Manufacturing Tax Credit program that provided  $2.3 billion in credits to support U.S. manufacturers of clean energy equipment. The House has voted to refund the popular program; backers are still trying to get a similar bill through the Senate.

Other high tech manufacturers represented on the council include Freescale Semiconductor, Inc., GenMet, Ace Clearwater Enterprises, and Sacred Power Corporation, a Native American-owned business that deals in renewable and distributive energy.

Courtesy of First Solar

First Solar has its corporate headquarters in Arizona, where, in 2009, the legislature passed its own groundbreaking legislation, providing tax credits to manufacturers of renewable energy equipment (SB 1403). When a Chinese-owned maker of PV panels announced it had decided that Arizona would be the home of the first Chinese PV assembly plant in the U.S., the incentives found in SB1403 were given as a primary factor in the choice.

First Solar manufactures thin-film PV at  plants in Germany (approximately 700 workers), Malaysia (2,000 workers) and Perrysburg, Ohio (1,000 workers). The company plans on opening a new plant in France in the second half of 2011. Manufacturing jobs have followed demand and until recently, most orders for solar panels have come from Asia and Europe. But as demand for PV in the U.S. has jumped, First Solar has increased the size and production of its Ohio plant.