PHOTON International The Photovoltaic Magazine

Loves me, loves me not, loves me...

February started with the Bush administration calling for a decent– albeit accidental – 4.1 percent increase to its PV R&D budget request for 2004 of $76.7 million. Then the US Congress finally put the 2003 budget to bed at the same amount. It must be love.

	© data: US DOE; graphic: PHOTON International
Dueling budgets: Both the 2003 budget and Bush's request for 2004 have come in at $76.7 million.

Don't blame the PV manufacturers, universities, and research institutes hoping for R&D contracts from the US Department of Energy (DOE) if they were getting a bit testy recently. Not until Feb. 14 – Valentines Day – did they know that the US Congress still loved them when it passed at a respectable $76.7 million PV R&D budget for the fiscal year 2003 as part of an omnibus bill. And the romantic part is that it is exactly the same amount President George W. Bush requested for 2004 at the start of February.

While no detailed breakdown was available at press time, the 2003 budget does have a few flirtatious morsels outside of the realm of R&D. For one, it includes $1.5 million for something called the Palo Alto PV Demonstration Project, a scheme nobody at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) or the US Department of Energy (DOE) seems to know about. No doubt some California congressman was doing his bit for the home state.

There is also $2.5 million for the Navajo Nation. Of the $3 million that went to the Indian reservation in 2002, only about $800,000 was really used for PV; the rest went for very non-PV and non-R&D transmission line extension. The word is that all of the money for 2003 will go to PV.

This brings down the»pure« 2003 PV R&D budget to about $74 million. And with the threat that some or all of the appropriations will have to take a 2.6 percent hit to help fund the new Department of Homeland Security, the real budget number could come down to just over $72 million. Still compared with the $65 million for 2002, PV is ahead of the game.

The real shocker is Bush's request for 2004. At $76.7 million, it is 4.1 percent better than Bush's 2003 request of $73.7 million, nearly wiping out the memory of his first request in 2001 of $39 million (see PI 5/2001, p. 26).

But dumb luck seems to have played the biggest role in beefing up the PV pot. In 2002, PV was put under the umbrella of the solar budget, including solar thermal and concentrating solar power (CPS). While the latter gets $5.5 million in the 2003 budget, 2004 is so far a different story. Following a bad report from a national research council, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), the federal agency that oversees budgetary matters for the president, zeroed out the Bush's CSP request of $1.9 million for 2003. Only after reducing solar thermal by $1 million to $3 million did OMB realize its blunder: It had left Bush ripe for the accusation of cutting solar energy research. So OMB replaced the missing funds in the only category that hadn't been touched – PV – and raised the overall 2004 solar budget request to $79.6 million, outdoing the previous year's request by $68,000.

Still backing thin-film R&D

The most interesting aspect of the 2004 request is its maintenance of support for thin-film R&D through the DOE's National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado and Sandia National Laboratory in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The closures in November by BP Solar of an a-Si factory in Toano, Virginia, and a CdTe facility in Fairfield, California, put a big question mark over the future of the thin-film technology. Larry Kazmerski, head of the National Center for Photovoltaics, agrees.»It pointed out a real problem: that thin-film modules aren't ready yet,« he says. But instead of cutting back, he says DOE resolved to increase its investment. The long-term goal is to reduce the cost of PV-generated electricity from the current $0.25 per kilowatt-hour to $0.06 by 2020, and module production costs from $2.50 per watt in 2000 to $1.75 by 2006.Although crystalline silicon remains the industry workhorse, the best bet for reaching its goals of reducing costs is still thin-film, says Kazmerski. While there is no change in the $30.4 million request for Fundamental Research or the $29.8 million for Advanced Materials and Devices, the $16.5 million for Technology Development is an increase of $3 million over the last request. It will probably include extra money for thin-film module reliability.

«In fact, 'reliability' is going to be a big word in the coming few years,« says Kazmerski. In addition to research on systems, work continues on doubling the reliability of inverters from five to ten years. The second phase of inverter R&D is expected to start in late spring.

With the presidency, House, and now Senate controlled by the Republicans, the road to budget approval should be smoother than in previous years. Glenn Hamer, executive director of the Washington, DC-based Solar Energy Industries Association thinks there has been»a meeting of minds« in Congress on the subject of PV.»If they aren't on the same page, they are at least within a page or two of each other,« he says.»I don't think there is an appetite in either body to drag things out this year.« Maybe this year Valentines Day will come in October.