Green Wombat

Silicon Valley’s solar energy startups are grappling with a shortage of engineering talent, several solar executives said today at ThinkEquity’s Greentech Summit in San Francisco. "We are going to invest in an European operation because, in part, it balances the talent pool available and the market access," said Martin Roscheisen, CEO of Nanosolar, a Palo Alto thin-film solar company. Dave Pearce, chief executive of Santa Clara, Calif.-based Miasole, another thin-film company, said he’s opened a 25-person facility in Shanghai. "We’ve been very successful in attracting executives with good Western language and management skills and who also understand the Chinese market," he said.  Part of the problem, according to the solar execs, is that some of the best engineers work in countries with big solar industries. Echoing their counterparts in Silicon Valley’s tech industry, they complained that U.S. immigration laws make it difficult to bring those engineers to California. "I think it’s ridiculous that we’re going into 2007 with all the H1Bs already taken," said Conrad Burke, CEO of Santa Clara’s Innovalight, referring to the visa program for tech workers. "We found a lot of very talented individuals in Germany and other countries that have experience in solar that we couldn’t hire because of immigration problems with H1B visas, green cards."