This Week in Solar

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Hey there, solar fans. Time to take a peek at another exciting PV week.

SunPower (Nasdaq: SPWRA) kicked things off Monday with an announcement that Jabil Circuit will begin manufacturing panels in Mexico for SunPower's North American customers. The regional assembly will place these panels much closer to their end market, as SunPower's current production comes entirely from Asia.

The move stands somewhat in contrast to Evergreen Solar (Nasdaq: ESLR), which is now outsourcing panel manufacturing to SunPower's friend Jiawei Solar in China. Supply chains aren't my strong suit, but I imagine that SunPower has determined that the responsiveness enabled by regional manufacturing is worth forgoing somewhat lower-cost Asian outsourcing. We shall see.

Also on Monday, Harris & Harris portfolio company Innovalight announced that it had installed its first "high-throughput industrial silicon-ink inkjet printing system" at the company's own headquarters. The venture-backed startup estimates that its production process can cut the number of steps required to create a high-efficiency solar cell by half, and can reduce the thickness of the resulting cell to 50 microns. LDK Solar's (NYSE: LDK) wafers -- out of which folks like Canadian Solar (Nasdaq: CSIQ) fashion solar cells -- range from 180 to 220 microns.

Yingli Green Energy (NYSE: YGE) announced a new partnership with solar project developer Recurrent Energy on Tuesday. No hard numbers were provided, but Recurrent's CEO did cite Yingli's ideal fit for the company's utility projects. This is yet another sign that Yingli and other low-cost crystalline silicon players like Suntech Power (NYSE: STP) are gaining ground on First Solar (Nasdaq: FSLR) in the utility-scale market.

Speaking of Suntech, a rumor surfaced this week that the company had landed a massive 500-megawatt project way out in the western Chinese province of Qinghai. A company spokesman said that the project is in its very early stages, and at least one analyst urged caution while traders threw it to the wind and bid up a host of solar stocks on Tuesday.

I'm frankly glad to see another voice of restraint out there. I don't know who appointed Gordon Johnson of Hapoalim Securities to chairman of the Solar Curmudgeon Club, but he's doing a fine job.