Solar Still a Draw: Intersolar North America Attracts Double the Visitors
More than 17,000 solar industry insiders are gathering in San Francisco this week for the annual Intersolar North America conference.
Conference organizers say the event is bigger this year, attracting more than double the attendees as the inaugural event last year – when the industry saw the solar-technology market grow 80 percent, with 5.5 gigawatts of sales, according to Navigant Consulting analyst Paula Mints – as well as more than double the number of exhibitors and almost triple the floor space. The growth has been “faster than we ever imagined,” said Eicke Weber, chairman of the conference committee and director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems, in a press release.
The boost this year may seem surprising at first glance, because the solar industry is in a downturn. Slower demand – partly due to an incentive cap in Spain that significantly shrank what was the largest market in the world last year, as well as limited financing in the recession – have led to falling solar-panel prices around the world. Mints estimates the market this year will fall to 3.75 gigawatts. “That’s going to hurt,” she said, especially because the industry’s gotten used to high growth rates and has built some 11 gigawatts of run-rate capacity. “We’ve overbuilt.”
