Word: thinly
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Either way, there may be room for almost everyone as the solar market grows and cheaper thin film eats into the share held by crystalline silicon. "I've had three tours of combat, and this is more exciting than that," says Global Solar's Gering, standing on the floor of his new factory. "I'm a true believer." A limitless supply of clean, cheap energy--if thin film can deliver that, who wouldn't believe...
That evolution hasn't occurred overnight. Thin film is a relatively young technology, and moving it from the laboratory to mass production has been tricky. Even some of the best-funded thin-film start-ups--like Miasolé, based in Santa Clara, Calif.--have been plagued with production disruptions. "Going from R&D to manufacturing is always fraught with gotchas," says Joseph Laia, Miasolé's CEO. "There are a whole series of things you didn't see because no one has really done this at scale." Since the industry is still small, for example, companies can't always count on easy...
...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 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...