NEW YORK — General Electric is trying to persuade developers that have bought its wind turbines to double down on clean energy by purchasing its solar panels as well, said Vic Abate, who runs the company’s renewables unit.
Invenergy is planning to install 23 megawatts of GE’s thin-film solar panels at a site adjacent to a 210-megawatt wind farm it operates in Illinois with GE turbines.
It’s GE’s first solar order from a wind customer, and Abate said he’s pushing the hybrid concept to other turbine buyers. Offering solar panels may offset an anticipated decline in turbine sales, he said. U.S. developers have curtailed orders for 2013 on concern that a federal tax credit for wind energy will expire at the end of this year.
“It wasn’t until of late that costs came down enough for solar to make sense,” Abate said.
“Plugging them in to wind farm locations, you already know the community, how to get the permits and secure interconnections to the grid.”
Because winds are strongest at night and solar panels produce power only during the day, installing both at one project location will lower costs for both and make forecasting output more predictable, he said.
GE, which purchased PrimeStar last year, is building a $300 million solar-panel factory in Aurora that’s expected to be completed by the end of this year, with the first shipments expected in 2013.
For Invenergy’s project, Fairfield, Conn.- based GE is providing panels made from copper-indium-gallium-selenide produced by Showa Shell Sekiyu’s Solar Frontier unit, which has a partnership with GE.
GE’s factory will eventually be able to produce as much as 400 megawatts of thin-film solar panels using cadmium telluride, a technology similar to First Solar Inc., the largest maker of the lighter, thinner panels that compete with silicon-based photovoltaic gear made mostly in China.
