Syd's Senior Blog

Tuesday was my last day at Sencera, and it was yet again very slow. Mr. Weaver is still out of town.

I spent part of the day watching Katie take phone calls and such. Sencera is not currently hiring in case you were wondering.

I spent most of the rest of the day looking up the average number of peak sunlight hours per year in Clinton, Iowa. They are working out a deal there and need this number to figure out the exact calculation (again, the math can vary a lot from a very small change, and this can make or break a deal). I thought this would be an easy task, but it turned out to be very difficult and I left for the day with no solution still. I was able to locate maps with vague areas of hours of sun per day in different regions such as this one but it was complicated to find an exact number per year, or even an exact average per day which could then be multiplied to make a year. I thought that this number would be available through Weather.com, but it does not seem to be something widely recorded or distributed. I think that one of the problems that as seasons change, the amount of sunlight varies due to the tilt of the earth’s axis in proportion to the sun, making it difficult to calculate the number of peak sun hours as it is constantly changing from season to season.

I think the main lesson that I walked away with for the day was that many of the already complicated tribulations of dealing in solar power is that the availability of information in a clear and concise manner makes the work a lot easier. And this strategy can be transferred over to sales as well; I wondered why they always had what seemed like every number possible to calculate on their worksheet, but it turns out that it can make it a lot easier for the customer to understand.

I am really glad that I worked at Sencera: choosing a small, developing company allowed me to explore all aspects of it. People have been asking me if I would consider doing a job like theirs, but the question is: Which one? There is a lot of overlap, but at the same time, each person in the company plays a slightly different role. I would be majoring in completely different subjects to do what Mr. Weaver does at places like Discovery Place on Monday versus working in the clean room on Friday.

Mr. Weaver deserves a huge thanks for finding things for me to do the entire time that I was at Sencera. I sometimes felt like a was more of a burden than a help. Melinda also gets a huge thanks from me for helping drive me around and arrange my meetings with all the guys there. And all of the guys who work at Sencera are awesome for making me feel very welcome there and often times slowing down their work to explain different aspects of it to me. Wes gets an individual shout out for letting me sit in on many phone calls and always finding stray jobs for me to do, and Rusty gets one as well for always stopping to talk to me and for introducing me to Miguel’s Mexican restaurant–my stomach will never be the same.

Thanks to everyone at Sencera and at PDS.

Here are just some interesting pages I read today that can be great resources for people interested in investigating solar power:

NC Greenpower has some great, easy-to-understand explanations of using renewable energy in Charlotte. I really had fun playing around with the calculator that figures out how much Carbon you are keeping out of the environment by investing in renewable energy. It also has a nearly comprehensive list of all owners of green power in NC.

Duke Energy has a page explaining their stance on solar power. However, from what I have heard in the last week, Duke Energy is very difficult to work with and do not seem to create situations conducive to erecting solar panels.

Solar Power International is hosting a conference later this year about solar power in Los Angeles. I think that it is very important that events like this exist because it allows the best from all over the country to collaborate and combine ideas. Two heads are always better than one. Mr. Weaver is constantly traveling to other companies and countries to see the different ways that they interact and the way that they react to different policies.

While Mr. Weaver thinks that Solarbuzz is a good resource for news on solar power, I think that Alternative Energy News does a really good job as well. Sure, they do not exclusively report on solar power (they do have a link on the sidebar that directs you to a solar only page), but their layout is very user friendly and easy to navigate. Plus, they also offer information on jobs in renewable energy that are available–a tool that I am sure is useful to many.

I spent the morning of yesterday at Greenfield Power where I met Tom Kepper. Greenfield is a company that purchases solar panels and racking systems and puts them together for people. They recently purchased 20 panels from Sencera to put up on their site, so I got to check out what Sencera’s work looked like in action.

Noted, the panels used were not actually the ones made by Sencera–when Sencera is not able to meet their consumer’s needs, they sublet out to another company that they trust. But the panels looked very nice; there is a garden store next door to their business and apparently people walk over all the time to compliment them on the panels.

They have a ground mount system, mostly because their business is located in an older house in Charlotte so the panels would be blocked by trees most of the time if they were to put them in the back, but ground mounts are normally cheaper as well; they do not need to get an additional permit and they are easier to maintain because it is more difficult to get on the roof of a building. However, the cords for the panels have to be 2 feet underground and 3 feet underground if it is a location where cars are going to be driving over it, and this took a couple of tries for them, so they think that it ended up being about the same.

Another thing that I got to see was the two way meter. Most meters only flow one way, which means that if you hook up a solar panel but don’t get a special meter, you are actually being charged for the energy that is being produced. But this one flows two ways, depending on whether they are producing more or less energy than what they need. On that day in particular, they were just about breaking even, but they said they primarily are selling back energy unless the weather is as hot as it was on that day.

That afternoon, Wes showed me some of the racking systems that they were investigating to suggest to their customers.

Then, I got to help clean a bunch of the machinery with rubbing alcohol.

After that, I got to spend time in the company’s clean room, which they say is a ‘dirty clean room,’ because it really is quite messy. I was using a very small paintbrush to paint lines of silver paint (and I mean paint made of silver, not paint that is the colour, it is actually more of a bronze colour) on small segments of aluminum (I believe…). These segments will be used in testing. I was surprised that I got to do something that seemed to involve a lot of precision and was very important.

I ended the day recording temperatures on the geothermal system, apparently it hasn’t been working very well or efficiently lately.

I went to visit Innovative Solar this morning with Mr. Weaver. They arrange solar power for many businesses, so Mr. Weaver says it is always worth the trip to go visit them because they have a wide variety of panels.

We did get a look at the bifacial panels, which are the ones that the light can be absorbed from the bottom as well to make them more efficient, but Mr. Weaver was not very impressed with them–he said that they were very heavy, and looked very handmade.

Another panel we saw was sealed with a different type of laminate than normal, which is supposedly more water resistant and will be useful for people who want to place their panels on a boat. It had a weird feel to it.

We were also shown a very ill-done panel from some unknown company that we believe is in China. The sealant was leaking out between the two layers of glass, there were no labels on it declaring what company it was from or how much power it produces, and it was easy to tell on the edges that it was done by hand–there were lots of bumps and creases. Chinese companies have a tendency to use workers where most other companies desire robots because they can pay their employees so little. But the human error really shows.

One thing I have noticed is the apparel for many solar companies. Sencera is pretty casual because the even the boys who work in front are running out back, so jeans and tshirts are pretty common. I have taken to wearing jeans, a dress code shirt, and tennis shoes because it means that I can hang out in the back where closed toe shoes are required and it is just comfortable. I wasn’t sure if this was a Sencera only type of thing (the boss, Rusty, hates getting dressed up), but visiting Innovative Solar, most of the people there were dressed in the same way. I guess there is just a lot of crossover between doing manual work and working in the office so everyone just wants to be comfortable.

I spent most of the rest of the day editing the FAQs on their website and locating type-os. Then I spent some time looking up additional whitepapers to add to their site. In doing that, I did locate some cool websites:

DSire easily shows the incentives to buy renewable energy in almost all of the USA. It is interesting seeing how surprisingly advanced NC is while VA has limited incentives.

Scorecard.org is not as directly correlated with solar power, but if you enter your zipcode it tells you where your county ranks in terms of various pollutants. It seems that Mecklenburg’s largest problem are emissions from transportation.

Today at Sencera, a potential investor was visiting. This man is incredibly wealthy and has a history of investing millions in high-risk ‘green’ companies, so this was a great opportunity for them. Mr. Weaver and Rusty spent a lot of time behind doors talking with him, and I did spend a little time today running with Melinda to the convenience store and Subway to pick up bottled water and sandwiches for them–they met for a long time and did not break for lunch.

I hung out with Wes in sales a bit in the morning. He works with two other guys in sales and their job involves lots of math and phone calls. They figure out how long it will take for their customer to earn their money back, and each member of the team has a slightly different sales technique, so they switch between them for each consumer in order to ensure a sale. It is very important for the math to be correct though, so it seems that everyone double checks it. I also saw the drawbacks of working with a global market, which solar energy really is, and that is the language barrier. They received one email with the attachment all in Spanish, and they talked about how it was difficult to arrange phone calls with Chinese companies when they are 12 hours apart.

I also learned that they building itself is heated and cooled using a geothermal system–the heat is pumped out of the earth in the winter to heat the building, and the heat in the building is pumped into the earth to cool it in the summer.

My afternoon was spent with Don, who is the director of manufacturing. This means that he has to figure out who they are going to buy their equipment from and at what cost. He also showed me how drastically an increase in efficiency or a decrease in manufacturing error can reduce costs. Also, it is very easy for the Chinese to produce cheap solar panels because their manufactures get paid 1/20th of what they do here. Don also clarified the purpose of a layer that is put on top of the glass of the panels: it directs the light into the panel at an angle so that it hits the panel in more places (sort of like how the diagonal of a square is longer than one side of it).

I was told today that I seem to be getting pretty good at picking up all this information and retaining it, which was a huge compliment because I feel like so much of it goes over my head.

I think the most important thing that I learned today was how much every aspect of the company works with the others. Guys like Wes in sales have to know how to work some of the machines in back in case they need an extra hand and to explain to customers. And everyone checks all the math for errors because they are really easy to make and can make a very large difference. I was shown how one mistake could take the payback time from 4.8 years to 153 years, and the second one does not sound like a viable product for a consumer.

I began my day at Sencera looking up additional white papers for them to put on their updated website. I believe I may have found a couple, but they still need to get looked at by Mr. Weaver.

Then, I got a more intense tour of the factory area. The company has an already established line to make 30 cm by 30 cm panels as well as one that they are beginning to work on for larger panels. It is hard to transfer the success with the smaller panels to the larger ones.

In the area to make the smaller panels, there are different chambers, each of which adds a different ‘flavor’ of gas. The first chamber, “N,” has a negative charge, the second has no charge, “I” for intrinsic, and the third is positive, “P.” Then the process repeats. The glass that is being put into these chambers is being sprayed with SiH4. The gas is then ionized, making it a plasma, and the hydrogen shake off, and the Si is left on the glass. Silicon is the main component of solar panels. They do this twice because each layer absorbs a slightly different wavelength of light, giving the panel a higher efficiency.

After the silicon has been placed on, the panel is led over to a spatter gun. The glass is placed in a vacuum container (it is very important that it stays a vacuum–N2, H2O, and O2 are all contaminants for this process) and it is sprayed with aluminum on the back, which I believe helps reflect light back up into the panel, improving efficiency once again. Here, I got to press the on and off button, so technically I can say that I helped create a solar panel.

Then, the panel is carried over and scribed with a laser, which helps divide the panel into many different portions and makes it easier for the energy to flow in the direction that we need it to.

This is all very oversimplified, and while I am starting to grasp the terminology, it is still very complicated.

Glass broke in one of the larger chambers today, so the line was out of business as they cleaned up glass and then chose to do additional maintenance on it. Broken glass is apparently the biggest cause of delay in creating these panels. Also, it is very important not to touch the machinery or panels without gloves as they are easily contaminated.

And just to clarify:

Thin film PV cells are an advantage because they do not use as much silicon as multi-crystalline cells. This means that they are less expensive to produce, and therefore sell.

The Sencera advantage is that they do not use CdTe, which is what is used by many other thin film companies and is toxic. While the use of it in the cells is not yet regulated, there is a good chance that it may be some day, and the large companies like First Solar are searching for alternative ways to make their product without CdTe. Also, Sencera has developed and created almost their entire process and equipment. This means that they do not need to pay another company for their manufacturing equipment.

Later this week, Mr. Weaver may try to find some of the experiments that the interns here last summer began to put together for Discovery Place to see if I can put them back together and if they make sense for that sort of setting.

I started off my first day working with Mr. Weaver by meeting him at Discovery Place in downtown Charlotte. There, we met as a team with Eric Blomendale from Southern Energy Management and Craig Merrigan from Spotlight Solar to present an idea to some Discovery Place coordinators.

About a year ago, Discovery Place approached Mr. Weaver and asked him if he would consider working with them to make an exhibit explaining solar power for kids. After they worked on it for a bit, they realized that by the time it was finished, it would actually be a bit dated and would not be very exciting for kids. Instead, they began working on a project that would be more visual and revolutionary.

Spotlight Solar has created a new design for using solar panels that would be much more interesting. Rather than being invisible or an eyesore, they are more like giant flowers of solar panels that can be rearranged. Southern Energy Management is one of the best groups of solar technicians in the state. These flowers would be be visual and attract traffic, but they would also perform as they originally would as sources of power.

Sencera is not actually involved in this project, as they produce a different type of solar panel than they would be using–they have chosen a panel that light can shine through because it is prettier when seen from below–but because they have done so much coordination with it, Sencera’s name would still be on it and it would be good PR for the company.

The meeting seems to have gone well–they are having another meeting in a couple weeks with the big guy at Discovery Place.

Probably the most important thing I realized in this meeting is that environmental costs not being included in market prices really effects the way that we consume energy. I had heard it repeated many times during AP Environmental Science, but it really shows with this. We subsidize so much of our non-renewable energy, and it is impossible for the renewable energy companies to keep up without even larger subsidies.

After the meeting with Discovery Place, we headed to the office  and manufacturing facility (near the airport). I received my first tour of the premises and learned a bit about how they produce their solar panels and how it is different from the ones the public normally sees.

Sencera produces thin film photovoltaic solar modules, which are much thinner and use much less silicon than the traditional crystalline solar cells (See SolarBuzz.com for more details). The largest producer of thin PV cells right now is First Solar, which uses Cadmium Telluride in their manufacturing, which is toxic. Sencera is working on creating a cell that does not use CdTe, but rather plasma to create their cells.

It is all a bit complicated, but I am beginning to figure out the process behind it all.

Tags: discovery place, southern energy management, spotlight solar

This is a bit late, but i met with Mr. Weaver, the man who I am working with for my Senior Project, a couple weeks ago. Mr. Weaver works for Sencera, a solar energy company here in Charlotte. I chose to work with Sencera because there are many aspects of their company–from development and manufacturing, to advertising and sales–and I am not exactly sure what I am interested in yet, so it will be interesting for me to see how each aspect of the company works with the other portions. However, Mr. Weaver says that sometimes the more interesting thing to watch is how the branches do not come together.

Also, over the time that I am working there, I am to help revise the FAQ portion of their website to direct to a more sales oriented approach from a history of solar panels.

I am working for my first time tomorrow and we are going to Discovery Place in downtown Charlotte to discuss selling them solar panels for their parking structure.

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