Word: solarity
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...million solar gamble If you are in research and development, it's like playing poker. When you have a good hand, you have to up the ante." So says Atlantic Richfield Vice President Robert Chambers, who feels that the oil company holds some winning cards and that the pot must be hiked. The bet: a $25 million futuristic long shot on Inventor Stanford Ovshinsky, 57, the president, founder and principal stockholder of Energy Conversion Devices of Troy, Mich. Arco, which initially gave ECD $3.3 million in funding last May, now believes the company's research hi new ways...
...quite a gamble. Ovshinsky is a self-taught physicist without a college degree. ECD, which he founded in 1960, has never had a commercial success, has had only one profitable year (1964) and last year lost $3.4 million (on revenues of $1.6 million, largely from Arco funding for the solar project). The company's over-the-counter stock price has fluctuated sharply. One high came in 1968, after Ovshinsky said in a highly publicized news conference that his research would "transform" the electronics industry...
Ovshinsky also has been working on new materials that could replace, among other things, the silicon cells used to generate solar power, the electronic chips in computer and calculator memories and the light-sensitive chemicals in camera film. If looked at under a powerful microscope, a silicon crystal shows perfectly arranged patterns of atoms. Ovshinsky is working with "ovonic" materials that have disordered or amorphous atoms. He claims that if perfected, these substitute materials could serve just as well and would be much cheaper to make...
Though some of the deals are long dormant and none has yet paid off, Arco seems enthusiastic. Claims Ovshinsky: "Since May, all the essential steps for ovonic solar cells have been production-proven, and they have shown themselves to be far superior to anything else...
Arco sees two big potential markets for solar power if ECD's new cells substantially cut the cost. The two: rural areas in the Third World that lack electricity, and big power utilities that need cheap fuel. Says Chambers: "If it all works, we will have an industry in place by the end of this decade." But, he admits, "there are still some cards we haven't seen...