Emcore Photovoltaics: The Light Side
Utility
Written by Jill Rose   
Thursday, 31 January 2008
Emcore Photovoltaics: The Light Side - American Executive - RedCoat Publishing
After overhauling operations, David Danzilio and his team are ready to help build the next generation of solar-powered electric plants.
Turning around a business is never an easy task, and when both operations and the sales model need an overhaul, it’s especially tough. But having recast a struggling, unprofitable Emcore Photovoltaics into a profitable, operationally sound one, David Danzilio and his team are up to the next challenge: helping build the first solar-powered electric plants.

Emcore Photovoltaics: The Light Side - American Executive - RedCoat Publishing
David Danzilio, Vice President and General Manager
When Danzilio joined Albuquerque, NM-based Emcore Photovoltaics in 2004 as vice president and general manager, it was a $20 million company with operational inefficiencies and a limited customer set. The company’s focus was selling photovoltaic cells to satellite companies, many of which were struggling themselves.

“The space industry was in a depression, and business conditions here were difficult—we needed to diversify our product portfolio and fix the base business,” said Danzilio.

Danzilio used his long background in semiconductor production (at companies including Raytheon and M/A-COM) to lead his new team away from their traditional R&D-style of organization. “We had to completely overhaul operations—set clear goals, focus the staff on operational metrics, and concentrate on productivity and yield,” he explained.

Change this drastic comes with a price, of course, and the 18-month process involved the loss of a few employees. However, Danzilio found, as he had hoped, the majority of critical staff members understood the changes were necessary to turn the business around.

With the operations side running smoothly, Danzilio and his team turned their attention to adjusting the division’s main product to meet the needs of utility-scale solar power installations. Today, the business has revenues of $60 million and is in the midst of shifting from serving mainly satellite companies to helping build terrestrial solar power stations.

A Canadian solar farm
Currently, about 10% of the company’s business is terrestrial use; the rest is from satellite manufacturers, which need the type of high-performance, low-weight source of power provided by photovoltaic cells. Danzilio said he expects fiscal year 2008, which began in October, to look very different. “It will be more like 50/50.”

In December, the company agreed to supply several concentrating photovoltaic systems (CPVs) to the Ontario Power Authority over the next three years. Danzilio explained that Emcore will be building and deploying the hardware for Ontario’s planned solar farm and, as in many regions, power generated by renewable means garners a higher price in Canada. For example, a typical commercial rate for power is $0.12 to $0.14 per kilowatt hour; solar power is priced at more than double that.

The Ontario solar plant is one of several being planned around the world to take advantage of CPV technology, which is based on a compound semiconductor material system and can convert about 39% of the available solar energy to electricity. That’s a sharp contrast with older silicon technology (found in solar roof panels), which converts only about 12% to 15%.

Danzilio said that although solar technology has not reached the point where it can compete with coal-fired electric plants, it is ideal for replacing gas-fired peak plants that only run during high-demand periods, such as a humid August day in New England.

“When you look at what will make a dent in our consumption of fossil fuels—it won’t be the 1- or 2-kilowatt solar panels people put on their rooftops,” he said. “It will be the multiple hundred-megawatt fields that get installed in the Southwest US, Southern Europe, and North Africa that generate gigawatts of power—that’s what will really make a difference.”

The terrestrial boom
As a division of Emcore Corporation, maker of a variety of compound semiconductor-based components, Danzilio’s photovoltaic group benefited from corporate finance resources and investments in research as it positioned itself to take advantage of what he refers to as the terrestrial photovoltaic boom, which began in 2005.

Specifically, the group invested heavily in improving product performance and customizing its products to various system requirements. “Everyone in the terrestrial market has customized requirements for the solar-cell component of their system,” said Danzilio. “We can modify the cell and the componentry to match the customer’s system—we’re the only company that offers that level of customization.”

In fact, Danzilio said the company’s business strategy revolves around knowing its customer’s business as well as the customer does. “Our philosophy is to do whatever we can to make our customers successful. If they’re successful, we share in that success,” he said.

That means cultivating a close relationship at the technological and product level, Danzilio explained. “We cultivate an open relationship because we need to have a free-flow of information to allow us to find and present the best possible solution to the customer.”

The company takes a similar approach to its relationships with suppliers. “We want to cultivate the right type of relationships so suppliers recognize that we’re not in business just to beat the crap out of them or to try to get them to sell products to us at a loss,” Danzilio noted. “Ultimately, that results in suppliers no longer being able to supply.”

Long-term, the next big thing for Emcore’s CPV technology may be small applications such as power for military sensors deployed as remote monitoring devices and reducing the need for the 15 pounds of batteries the average soldier must carry today to power electronic devices.

The company is part of a consortium working with DARPA to develop a 50% efficiency solar powered system that could replace batteries in the field. “It will reduce the strain on the military supply chain and could be an interesting sector and a large opportunity for us,” said Danzilio.
 
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