Seven Generational Ruminations

Suniva is a company spun off from Georgia Tech's Center for Excellence in Photovoltaics. They have developed solar panel technology which today is 18% efficient, over 50% more efficient than normal solar panels, and they have a clear roadmap leading to 20% efficiency Real Soon Now. Further they claim an inexpensive cost, under $1 per watt, again Real Soon Now. They are just entering mass production with funding for a production facility capable of producing 25 megawatt's of panels per year.

Applied Materials is a major supplier of equipment to the semiconductor industry. In many ways the innovations by Applied Materials enables the rest of the semiconductor industry to continue moving forward. In any case they have made a series of acquisitions of companies specializing in solar power manufacturing tools. The latest is Baccini, a European company specializing in manufacturing tools.

I passed by this company on my way home this evening and saw the tag-line on the sign outside their building: We're making solar electricity cost effective and went, "hmmm... why haven't I seen that sign before?".

I've passed by that building a hundred times, and not seen it. Maybe they're new to the building or something.

Anyway: solaicx.com/

That's the company web site. They don't say a lot, probably they're still in R&D and don't want to disclose very much. Anyway, they do say their focus is to optimize "single crystal" photovoltaics, pointing to the fact that most of the cost is from the traditional way the wafers are made. They're apparently developing a new process of producing wafers that's "optimized" for photovoltaic production.

In the quest for cleanly produced power, photovoltaics (a.k.a. solar panels) are one of the primo sources. However the issue that has dogged every "alternate" electric power generating system is the cost. Thems that makes the rules (because thems are the ones with the gold) have proclaimed that an alternate electric power generation must cost competitively with the existing power generation systems.

This situation creates a "moat" around existing power generation systems, making for a very tough hurdle to jump. For nearly any product to become "cheap", the rules of mass market capitalism says that the product must achieve mass production. But to achieve mass production it has to be selling pretty well in the market, and it won't sell well in the market if people aren't buying the product because it's more expensive than the existing technology.