On Wednesday at Solar Power International, RenewableEnergyWorld.com’s Stephen Lacey sat down with Jonathan Pickering, Vice President of Marketing at Applied Materials; Ron Kenedi, Vice President of the Solar Energy Solutions Group at Sharp; and Aaron Hall, CEO of Borrego Solar to discuss issues that face their companies and the solar industry as a whole.

Solar Power International may be over but we’re still posting video coverage from the show, including our final day wrap-up.

I looked at inverter providers. He spoke with representatives from Outback, Enphase and SMA America. Xantrex, another inverter provider, introduced its new 500-kW GT500, designed for large-scale applications.

Stephen Lacey talked with Stefan Dietrich from Q-Cells about the company’s thin-film plans and our host Jennifer Runyon met with two other companies that are playing in the web space. CH2M Hill, in fact, talked about the innovation award it received from the Interstate Renewable Energy Council for its solar mapping system of the city of San Francisco.

The Solar Map displays all known solar electric installations in the city — rooftop by rooftop — and gives residents and businesses a detailed estimate of their building’s solar potential. She also met with start-up Wattbot, a company that introduced its new online community for consumers and businesses. Users of its web-based system receive free energy recommendations after answering any number of detailed questions. Product, service and financial providers can then access these residential customer leads. And we took a brief look at Evergreen Solar’s new A-Series solar panels.

Jennifer Runyon ended the day by walking through the empty tradeshow floor with Julia Hamm, chair of Solar Power International to hear her overall reactions to the show and find our what’s in store for next year.

Check out our blog to see all of our coverage from Solar Power International including the conference’s keynotes and interviews done one the floor by RenewableEnergyWorld.com’s staff.

There has been an almost embarrassing wealth of riches on display at the Solar Power International 08 show in San Diego this week, and many of the booths have drawn large crowds out of the 22.5 thousand attendees for hands-on, multimedia, and other captivating solar presentations. But my vote for the star of the show in terms of drawing crowd numbers was Adept Technologies’ Quattro 650, which failed to tire during its three-day task of shifting solar cells back and forth at a rate of less than one move per second. Looking like a Martian spider, the four-armed, over-the-belt mounted robot used its Bernoulli hands to pick up and distribute cells like an over-caffeinated Vegas card dealer. A feature of the robot in great demand is its vision capability, with 5 megapixel resolution, which scans for defects during its deft moves. That capability may eventually be bumped up to match Adept’s new three-dimensional scanner, the Eclipse 3000, which is still in a testing phase, but scheduled for release next year. The close-to-the-belt Eclipse unit has a resolution of 20 megs, which can reveal minute defects for operations like identifying defects in film prior to vapor-deposition or printing.

It was Wednesday afternoon at the Solar Power International conference’s press work room, and every reporter in the room had the same question: Why was it so cold?

Even our well-established ability to blow a lot of hot air didn’t help. Throughout the conference, the room has seen journalists shivering, rubbing their arms and — in one case — jumping up and down for warmth.

Could we get the thermostat turned down? The answer was no. Apparently, all the rooms are automatically controlled. And with at least one other conference room uncomfortably hot, the convention center probably was controlling for that temperature, Gunther Portfolio author Ed Gunther suggested.

Temperature control is difficult at any large building — and my formerly high-heeled feet will testify to the fact that the San Diego convention center qualifies as large — and cold and hot complaints are a favorite conference pastime. But considering why we’re here, the obvious question is: Is this efficient? And the second is: Opportunity, anyone?

By Jennifer Kho, Greentech Media

Aaron Thurlow, who was until recently the regional sales manager of SunPower Corp., told me today that he has left the company to join National Semiconductor Corp.

The large and established power-management semiconductor company in July said it is entering the market with a new chip-based technology — called SolarMagic — that could increase the amount of electricity that solar panels can produce by up to 50 percent (see National Semi Casts Solar Magic)

Thurlow is one of three new hires the company has made for SolarMagic recently. He said that Sjuli Beekhuis, who was the director of business development for Fat Spaniel Technologies, and John Giddings, author of The Solar Evangelist blog and the founder of Clean Tech Integration consulting, also have joined the team in the last week.

While many of us are watching for the bottle rocket of the solar market to suddenly take off in a shower of sparks, just as many are pointing out that the fuse keeps going out in the fitful rain of the economic slowdown.

Optimism, coupled with relief over recent Congressional developments, has been the prevailing mood at SPI ‘08.  But there isn’t anyone here who isn’t watching closely for that rocket to appear above the treeline, powered by orders, income and steady growth.

Bob Chew of Solarwrights, a Rhode Island-based installer with offices in New England and New York, has already spotted the rocket.

Solarwrights has built a good reputation in its market area as a primarily residential installer, while similarly-named Solar Works Inc. has done the same as a principally commercial installer in an almost identical market area.  The two are now coming together to form an entity greater than the sum of its parts, and will be totally integrated, according to Bob, in Q1 of 2009.

Bob is just as excited about the recent news that a project dear to his heart, a 160-kW solar project for Westover School in Middlebury, CT that had been put on hold earlier this year, is now back on active status.  For him, it’s a sign of the kind of business activity that will power the new entity to a healthy future.  And that future, despite the current economic uncertainty, will be enhanced by other factors, such as the likelihood of panel manufacturers dedicating more of their output to the U.S. market, and the expectation of reductions in the cost of solar materials.

Chew’s sales folks are even now revisiting those residential schemes that ran out of steam before they started, with a view to re-energizing them.   He admits, however, that it’s too early to tell how many of them will turn into income-generating projects, and is not counting out having to generate creative financing mechanisms to nudge them into reality.

“Now that we’re moving into a period in which businesses will be competing with each other, rather than each other and an unhelpful legislative landscape,” says Chew, “I believe the winners will be those who are best at marketing themselves and delivering on their sales promises.  In other words, we’ll be just like all the other industries out there.”

By Jennifer Kho, Greentech Media

Stocks are rising again after a steep drop Wednesday, when the S&P 500 dropped 9 percent, the Nasdaq Composite Index fell 8.5 percent and the Dow Jones Industrial Average declined 7.9 percent.

The roller coaster ride – the plunge of last week followed by a jump Monday, a fall again Wednesday and a rise again in recent trading today – has put the economy at the forefront of many of the conversations at Solar Power International.

After all, solar shares certainly haven’t been immune from the turbulence. So far today, SunPower (NSDQ: SPWRA) has grown 11.3 percent to $45.65 per share after falling 17.7 percent yesterday, First Solar (NSDQ: FSLR) has increased 6.7 percent to $132.45 per share after dropping 13.69 percent yesterday and Suntech Power (NYSE: STP) is up 6.5 percent to $22.23 per share after a decline of 16.6 percent yesterday.

And solar – as well as the energy industry as a whole – is capital intensive.

As Greentech Media senior analyst Eric Wesoff puts it, “Unlike building browsers, companies have to actually build these damn things.”

That could keep some companies from getting off the ground as soon as they’d like.

“Debt financing is nonnegotiable,” said Nathaniel Bullard, a senior analyst at New Energy Finance. “If you need it and can’t get it, you can’t build.”

Meanwhile, Julie Hamm, executive director of the Solar Electric Power Association, said that solar is more prepared to deal with fluctuating markets because of its long history of dealing with “start stop” government policies.

The solar industry’s “been on the roller coaster ride its whole existence,” she said.

If you’d like to read more about this issue, check out a Greentech Media story I wrote called Solar Industry Talks Economy.

Solyndra made a splash when it came out stealth mode earlier this month, announcing $1.2 billion in contracts with Solar Power Inc. and Phoenix Solar.

It had kept notoriously quiet before then, in spite of a peppering of provocation from Green Light bloggers Eric Wesoff and Michael Kanellos (see Green Light posts here, here, here, here and here).

Why the sudden change of heart?

J. Kelly Truman, vice president of marketing, sales and business development at Solyndra, said at Solar Power International on Monday that the company decided to start talking to help its customers sell their systems.

“We began revenue shipments in July, so this is our first full quarter,” he said. “It’s getting to where if they want to sell big systems, we’ve got to come out.”

The company didn’t really need the publicity before, he said.

“We were able to hire a lot of good people, raise money and get customers,” he said. “We can deal with a relatively small number of customers directly. We just wanted to do it without a lot of noise.”

To read more about Solyndra, check out these Greentech Media stories: Solyndra Still Raising Cash, Solyndra Increases Beta Testing, Solyndra Rolls Out Tube-Shaped Thin Film and Solyndra Plans Huge Thin-Film Factory.

RenewableEnergyWorld.com brings you coverage from the second day of the Solar Power International Conference and Expo in San Diego. On Wednesday we talked with companies exhibiting new products, went went to the keynote sessions and talked trends with some of the industry’s newsmakers, and everywhere we went the cameras were rolling.

Come back tomorrow to see coverage from the final day of Solar Power International.

But will it shine as brightly as once hoped? Decide for yourself by watching the comments from top executives with Kyocera, Sharp Solar, Advanced Energy, Suntech, Lumeta, Spire and Akeena on how the fluctuations of the Dow Jones Industrial will impact their businesses and the solar industry at large. Then let us know what you think!