Daniel Englander

Strange Bedfellows: Jim Rogers Joins Applied Materials’s Board May 14, 2008 at 9:35 AM

Applied Materials has appointed Duke Energy CEO Jim Rogers to its board of directors. Applied is one of a handful of dominant PV production equipment manufacturers, though it only entered that market about two years ago. It’s devoted a ton of resources recently with the aim of beating out Oerlikon for market share in the thin film production equipment industry. So, what’s the dealio, yo?

One clue is Duke’s recent plan to invest $100 million in solar power. North Carolina’s RPS requires utilities to hit a 12.5 percent target by 2012. Duke, which is one of the largest utilities in North Carolina (and the U.S. - 4 million customers with 36,000 MW of good ole’ American coal power), has got a pretty large portfolio to fill. Rogers’s plan involves acting like a PPA provider, building and operating solar capacity on commercial and residential rooftops, selling it to consumers and buying back the excess.

But thin film is an interesting choice. By way of comparison, the 40 MW plant going up in Germany right now will cost $170 million and use about 550,000 panels from First Solar. The project’s size is in excess of one million square meters. Big though it may be, 40 MW doesn’t really knock it out of the park. Could Rogers’s appointment be based only on his love/hate relationship with renewables, or maybe something a little more mutually beneficial. Applied could be using Rogers to build up their connections in the utility world - a place Rogers knows like the back of his (it is, actually, the back of his hand) - as a way of gaining customers building utility-scale projects. Contracts on the big projects would certainly put a dent in Oerlikon’s plan for world domination. Rogers, in turn, could use the board seat to clean up Duke’s image and grease a few thin film palms looking for good deals on fab equipment.

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