San Jose welcomes Underwriters Laboratories

SolarTech, a consortium of Silicon Valley-based solar companies that includes SunPower (Nasdaq: SPWR), REgrid, Pacific Gas & Electric (NYSE: PGE), Miasolé and SolFocus, joined together in 2006 to collectively push for policies and programs that would help to establish the region as a center for the solar industry in the United States.

Part of that push was to bring a testing facility to the area for solar panels. Currently, all photovoltaic panels installed in the U.S. and Canada must be certified according to standards set by Underwriters Laboratories (or "UL Listed"). But the only Underwriters Laboratories testing facility in the country is at Arizona State University, which has caused a massive bottleneck in the American photovoltaic market.

According to Solar Tech president and REgrid CEO Tom McCalmont, companies have had a six month to a year wait for testing over the last several years. That will change next week when Underwriters Laboratories opens its new 20,000-square-foot testing facility--the Photovoltaic Technology Center of Excellence--in San Jose.

In addition to testing for safety, Underwriters Laboratories test the efficiency of solar systems, which makes it all the more crucial to solar companies working to increase the efficiency of their systems. Last year, McCalmont told Sustainable Industries that customers and service providers should focus on the efficiency of panel systems rather than their size, which is what most incentive programs on the West Coast are based on, apart from Washington state, which has a unique efficiency-based incentive.

"If you were buying a car, you wouldn’t look at how big the engine is, you’d look at how many miles to the gallon you get,” McCalmont said in November 2007. “It’s the same with solar; the size of the system is secondary to how much energy you’re going to get out of it over time, because essentially the more you get, the less you paid for your system.”

In addition to helping solar companies test and prove the efficiency and safety of their systems, the Photovoltaic Center of Excellence will help the city of San Jose achieve some of the goals laid out in its Green Vision planning document, which includes a number of aggressive goals the city hopes to achieve in order to distinguish itself as a cleantech hub. When fully operational the center will be the largest Underwriters Laboratories testing facility in North America.