Friday, July 11, 2008

Thin is in for hot solar cell space

By Efrain Viscarolasaga

The thin-film photovoltaic market has attracted millions in venture capital investment recently as analysts predict billions in revenue over the next five years. A Boston College spinout is the latest to enter a solar technology area that one report this week suggests could generate more than $20 billion in revenue between now and 2015.

Solasta Inc. was formed in 2006, and after raising an undisclosed amount of funding from West Coast venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, has kept its particular innovation under wraps. But next month Solasta is expected to publish a technical report detailing what executives say is the “decoupling of the optical and electrical components of photovoltaics,” capable of increasing the efficiency of traditional thin-film amorphous silicon circuits by between 50 percent and 150 percent.

Thin-film photovoltaics work on the same premise as other types of solar panels, taking light and converting it into electricity. Thin films are essentially solar panels applied to flexible, sometimes transparent substrate, and they hold the promise of applying solar technology to items like backpacks, window panes or roofing tiles, turning virtually anything into an energy-generating device.

While Solasta’s technology still works on the same basic physics, the company’s founders — all members of Boston College’s physics department — want to use nanowires to separate the electronics and the optics within the technology.
“Thin film is balanced between the electrical and optical components, but what we want to do is completely separate those two in an entirely new architecture,” said Michael Naughton, co-founder and CTO of Solasta. Naughton is joined on Solasta’s founding team by Kris Kempa and Zhifeng Ren, both Boston College professors.

Solasta is using nanowires — “like tiny coaxial cables,” according to Naughton — to pull electrons from the cells, increasing efficiency.

Casting a shadow?
The opportunity in the $20 billion market size estimated by electronics industry analyst firm NanoMarkets Inc. has also attracted some big players. Last month, IBM Corp. announced a joint effort with Japanese semiconductor maker Tokyo Ohka Kogyo Co. Ltd. to develop thin-film panels. In late May, The Masdar Initiative, Abu Dhabi’s energy initiative, announced it would throw $2 billion at developing its own thin-film solar products and has already bought two manufacturing lines from Applied Materials Corp. for $600 million. Masdar is also working with MIT to launch what it calls the world’s first graduate-level institution devoted to alternative energy, which includes 14 faculty members at MIT and 100 students expected in the 2009 entering class.

Despite the entrance of the big players, investors are placing big bets on smaller companies. Konarka Technologies Inc. in Lowell has raised more than $100 million in private capital, and Vanguard Solar Inc. in Sudbury, Stellaris Corp. in Billerica, and 1366 Technologies Inc. in Lexington have all raised money over the past year.

“I think the industry is an open field and a lot of the smaller companies have a lot of the innovative IP around it,” said Dennis Costello, a managing director at venture investor Braemar Energy Ventures, which went out of state to invest in its thin-film solar company, California-based startup Stion Corp. “It’s a race  to meet the efficiency of traditional silicon and beat it in cost.”

Startups are aglow
Solasta is using nanotechnology to accomplish its goals but is not the only local company on that path. Both Konarka and Vanguard also use nanotechnology in their products. But each has a different approach toward the same goal: cost and efficiency.

Konarka uses a nanoscale inkjet-printing technique to make thin-film photovoltaics production easy using traditional roll printing methods, reducing cost. Vanguard is using carbon nanotubes to expose more photoelectric area to the sun (increasing efficiency). But nanotechnology is not the only approach. Stellaris and 1366 Technologies are working on concentration technologies that could help thin-film photovoltaic material operate more efficiently or cost less to deploy.

None of the products, however, have yet reached the commercial market.

According to Rick Hess, president and CEO of Konarka, demand for thin-film technologies is growing quickly enough to support the many different approaches.

“For a few years, we’ll see room for a lot of different approaches, and then over time, some will shine through and some may not,” he said.