Green Wombat

Green Wombat recently sat down with John Langdon of HelioVolt, a thin-film solar company based in Austin, Texas. Thin-film solar promises to be the next big thing in solar technology. At the risk of oversimplifying, the technology prints solar cells on rolls of flexible metal foil. The payoff: relatively inexpensive solar film that could be incorporated into the roofs and walls of homes and office towers and, eventually, even windows so that a skyscraper, for instance, might generate half of the electricity it needs. A passel of thin-film startups are racing to be first to market, including Silicon Valley’s Miasole, Innovalight and Nanosolar, which the San Jose Mercury News’ Katherine Conrad reports today, will open one of the world’s largest solar cell manufacturing plants in South San Jose by mid-2007.

Given that most of the companies use basically the same underlying technology, the key is how quickly and cheaply they can manufacture thin-film solar. HelioVolt exec Langdon contends that’s where his company has the edge with FASST (Field Assisted
Simultaneous Synthesis and Transfer), its patented nanotechnology printing process. Without going into the technical details, FASST allows solar cells to be printed directly on metal, glass and other building materials. "We can turn a knob and make different form factors" on the fly, says Langdon, HelioVolt’s marketing vp and a Texas Instruments veteran. "We use less energy and have less inventory. When you have a plant that costs $50 million, it all comes down to how many units you can make at what cost."

The five-year-old company plans to break ground on a manufacturing plant next year and begin shipping products by late 2008. As interesting as its manufacturing process is the company’s distribution strategy and take on the market.

Continue Reading »

Palo Alto startup SolFocus has yet to release its high-efficiency solar concentrator technology but the company is already expanding overseas, said co-founder Steve Horne this afternoon at the ThinkEquity Greentech confab. He said in 2007 SolFocus will operate test sites in California, India and Hawaii and has signed a deal to produce half a megawatt of solar power in Spain.
The company also inked an agreement with an Indian manufacturer. Altogether, SolFocus will install 2 megawatts of solar power next year, according to Horne, the
company’s
chief scientist.
"It’s a global business," he said. "In 2007 we’ll be turning our design into a full-fledged product."  SolFocus initially plans to build small-scale power plants that will feature fields of solar concentrator panels. The photovoltaic technology uses small lenses and curved mirrors to concentrate the sun’s rays on solar modules made by Spectrolab, the Boeing subsidiary that just set a world’s record for wringing a 40.7 percent efficiency rate from its solar cells. Horne said SolFocus is currently working on a second
generation version of its technology, which should be ready for market in two to three years.  Going global was a theme of the day. Ira Ehrenpreis, a cleantech venture capitalist with Technology Partners, told the standing-room-only audience that investors need to be prepared to travel away from Sand Hill Road as renewable energy technology, research and markets are found far afield from Silicon Valley.

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."

Boeing (BA) subsidiary Spectrolab subsidiary has created a concentrator solar cell that achieved 40.7 percent efficiency – a new record that could finally make solar energy  competitive with coal and other fossil fuels, according to the U.S. Department of Energy, which
helped fund the company’s work. Standard solar cells like those used in rooftop panels have efficiency rates of 12 to 18 percent.  Spectrolab, based in Sylmar, California, achieved the world-record efficiency in a multi-junction solar cell.  Multi-junction cells are being used in  solar dish arrays like the one pictured above at a Solar Systems power station in Australia.