Tuesday, October 7, 2008

Konarka opens New Bedford solar manufacturing site

By Efrain Viscarolasaga

Lowell-based thin-film photovoltaic developer Konarka Technologies Inc. today opened its first commercial scale, roll-to-roll solar manufacturing facility at the former home of the advanced printing technology division of Polaroid Corp. in New Bedford.

According to company officials, the 250,000 square-foot building will allow Konarka to begin the commercial scale production of its thin-film solar material using a roll-to-roll process and become the largest facility of its kind in the world.

The plant, which is capable of producing 100 feet of flexible solar film per minute (or 10 million square meters of material per year), will initially employ 10 to 15 people, with executives hoping to add 100 more employees over the next two to three years.

The company has made product for test applications at its pilot manufacturing facility in Lowell but has yet to announce any commercial customers. According to CEO Rick Hess, the company expects to begin commercial production for customers in the first quarter of 2009.

Included in the acquisition of the building, Konarka also purchased the automated roll-to-roll manufacturing line housed therein and hired a number of former Polaroid process engineering employees to work in the facility. According to Hess, there are only a handful of facilities in the world that could support Konarka’s process, and the company was lucky enough to have one in its own backyard. The facility, he said, will give the company a leg up in a highly competitive thin-film solar market.

“A lot of companies (using other processes) would have to come into a site and build from scratch, but because we can use existing infrastructure, this allows us to set up quickly,” he said.

While executives would not reveal the total cost of the expansion, funding help came from a number of local sources, including the Massachusetts Technology’s Green Energy Trust and MassDevelopment Corp.

In addition, the company also partnered with the City of New Bedford to become a certified project under the Massachusetts Economic Development Incentive Program, which grants favorable state and local tax treatment in exchange for committing to certain job creation and private investment criteria in the area.

Konarka’s thin-film technology allows for the colored printing and application of a polymer material that can convert light into energy. The technology, originally developed by the late Sukant Tripathy, a materials scientist and professor at UMass Lowell, and Alan Heeger, a 2000 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, has attracted a lot of attention since the company was founded in 2001. As a result, the firm has raised more than $100 million in private funding from a number of investors, including 3i Group, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, New Enterprise Associates, Good Energies Investments and Chevron Corp.