Italian Minister of Economic Development Visits Applied

Applied Materials chairman and CEO Mike Splinter met with the Honorable Claudio Scajola, Italian Minister of Economic Development, at the company’s research and development campus in California on Friday for a demonstration of the Applied SunFab panel, the world's largest and most powerful solar panel. During the meeting, topics discussed included Italy’s growing solar photovoltaic (PV) market and government policies and how solar PV can help meet the country’s rising energy demand. Italy is Europe’s third-biggest PV power producer behind Germany and Spain. It currently generates less than 1% of its power at PV-powered facilities, with a total installed capacity of about 630 MW. The country is expected to boost capacity of its PV installations to 1,500 megawatts in 2010 with the help of incentives such as a feed-in tariff. This incentive has extended benefits to large-scale installations, such as those that can be achieved with Applied’s fab2farm business model designed to bring cost-effective, utility-scale solar PV power generation capability to local areas and stimulate economic development.