Word: solarity
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Nanosolar ceo Martin Roscheisen, who, like many new solar kings, has roots in Silicon Valley, says he can achieve radical cost savings by directly applying photoactive chemicals with an ink composed of nanoparticles. Nanosolar's PowerSheet cells roll off the machines like pages of newspaper in a printing press, at the rate of several hundred feet a minute. Roscheisen, an intense Austrian, says Nanosolar's first 18 months of production have already been purchased. "We're looking for a 35% market share in the next couple of years," he says. "The simple truth is, we can scale a lot more...
...that reality that led the solar arm of BP to pull out of the thin-film industry in 2002, claiming that the economics would never add up. But the numbers have changed, thanks largely to the enormous success of Phoenix's First Solar. Though the company was launched in 1999, it has its origins in a solar start-up that had been around since the mid-1980s. First Solar spent years tinkering before moving to mass production. It was able to weather those early days of profitless experimentation because it had a rich, patient backer: Wal-Mart heir John Walton...
Walton's investment has paid off handsomely. Since it began commercial production of thin-film modules in 2002 (much of the output has been sold to small-scale solar farms in Germany, where generous subsidies have primed the market), the company has done nothing but grow. With factories in Arizona and Germany and another being built in Malaysia, First Solar should be producing 1 gigawatt of solar power yearly by the end of 2009. "They've fully overcome the technological barrier with large production and low defects," says Rhone Resch, president of the Solar Energy Industries Association. "Their plants...
...First Solar scaled production up, it was able to bring its costs down. Solar producers measure their costs in terms of dollars per watt of energy produced, a formula that's a combination of the cost of producing a module and its power efficiency. Right now the best crystalline-silicon makers can sell modules at $3 to $4 a watt; First Solar can sell at around $2.40 a watt, a price the company expects to reduce steadily. "They've really pushed this industry over the threshold," says Travis Bradford, author of The Solar Revolution. "They possess great technology...
...First Solar doesn't generate the most buzz. That notoriety belongs to the start-up Nanosolar, which shocked its competitors in December when it announced it would begin profitably selling thin-film panels at $1 a watt. That figure is solar's holy grail, the point at which power from the sun becomes generally cheaper than coal, without the help of subsidies...