Solar startups to offer affordable, thin-film solar cells

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(NaturalNews) Solar energy startup companies are promising advanced solar technology -- such as thin, solar-cell-printed "power plastic" for use anywhere from rooftops to cell phones -- and investors are taking them at their word as more than $100 million in venture capital has been obtained by solar entrepreneurs this year.

"These technologies look incredibly more real than they did five years ago," said Dan Kammen, founding director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory at the University of California at Berkeley. According to Kamen, solar sources could go from producing less than 1 percent of the United States' power -- as it does now -- to eventually supplying one-fifth of the country's energy needs.

The aforementioned power plastic stands to be a big part of that endeavor, because the thin, printed material is produced by using conductive metals and organic polymers instead of silicon, which industry experts expect a shortage of in the near future. Experts do not foresee mass-production of the cells for years, but production is quickly gaining momentum.

California-based Nanosolar has plans to build a thin-film solar cell factory by next year, replacing hard-to-find silicon with copper-based semiconductors.

"Silicon models are too expensive in the first place," said Nanosolar CEO Martin Roscheisen, adding that a 400-megawatt plant produced using silicon would cost close to $1 billion, while their proposed 400-megawatt plant will only cost around $100 million. Roscheisen said Nanosolar's cells would still come with the standard 25-year warrantee available with most silicon solar products.

Another California solar startup, Miasole, is also moving into the thin-film solar cell market, but they are coming in with cells made from copper indium gallium selenide (CIGS) to make solar building materials and rooftop solar panels. For more information, read the NaturalNews article on CIGS technology here.

Massachusetts company Konarka is focusing on the smaller applications of solar technology, making an agreement with manufacturers to produce power plastic for portable devices rather than the big, grid connected systems most people associate with solar power.

The development of these technologies has actually gotten a boost due to the impending silicon shortage, already felt throughout the solar industry, said Travis Bradford, president of the Prometheus Institute for Sustainable Development in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Bradford estimated that 95 percent of modern solar cells use semiconductor-grade silicon, but he expects that number to drop to about 80 percent over the next few years if new technologies can prove to be cost-effective. The technologies will also have to be made from core materials that are in adequate supply for mass production and last for a decent amount of time. Bradford is optimistic about the future of solar energy, but does not think the technology he described exists yet.

"It takes a lot longer and a lot more money to commercialize technology than people think ... which is why crystalline silicon has been around for so long," he said.

IDTechEx research firm CEO Raghu Das disagrees, saying that the only real hurdle for the commercial application of today's printed photovoltaics is durability, which he expects manufacturers to overcome by around 2009 or 2010, with mass-production occurring around 2012.

However, Das does admit that clean, low-cost, solar power for things like building materials and cell phones still lies in the future.

"As plastics are used to make this and not silicon, it will be incredibly low-cost -- you could compare it to the cost of printing ink on paper," he said. "However, if it was ready today, everybody would be doing it."

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