Daybreak

Don't blink.
This is it.

By then end of this year, solar is going to cross into the mainstream.

This has all happened before. Remember a time when desks were bereft of computers, and when magazines carried no computer ads? Now the sight of a personal computer is more ubiquitous than the Coca-Cola logo.

This is your last chance to view the world as it once was, pre-solar. Go and get the current Architectural Digest and note that it doesn't yet burst with solar ads. Take a walk around your neighborhood and see that there are no rooftop solar panels, just like there were once no dish antennas. Watch an evening of television and record for posterity that not a single solar ad rolls past. (Although in late night basic cable, it may already be too late.)

Sharp Solar is now launching a rich television campaign that will likely signal others to follow.





But that's not all. Between now and the end of the year, we'll see both Presidential candidates climbing over each other to claim leadership in this most promising and least controversial of all solutions to our biggest problem of energy. Crowds of people inside and outside of both of the upcoming conventions will be wearing "Solar Voter"(tm) tee shirts. By the end of the year, major new Thin Film (a-Si, CIGS) companies will be launching into production. The economic recovery will be led in the media by newly minted solar giants.
The secret of solar will be revealed for all time.


Someday you'll tell your grandkids about was like, before solar.

"Wait a minute. I don't get it. You say that when the Sun was shining the hottest, you actually turned the air conditioning down?"

Do laugh right along with them. It is rather silly.

The Silicon Valley Solar Community Congratulates Santa Clara University

The full page ad above (San Jose Mercury News, 11/11/07) represents more than mere congratulations of an exceptional team of students in the 2007 International Solar Decathlon Competition. It represents the tipping point for Silicon Valley and its launch into the Solar Industry's next generation.

2007 is the first year that the World is getting a glimpse of the capability and spirit that Silicon Valley is unleashing in the pursuit of economic solar energy. On this roster of congratulators there are both existing and emerging powerhouses of solar innovation, investors and government official who are fostering and facilitating solar entrepreneurship. Consider that behind the list are deep ranks of unlisted start-up companies still in stealth mode funded by enormous venture capital.

Perhaps most promising of all are the student members of the 2007 Solar Decathlon team themselves, many of whom list their post-graduate aspirations as solar themed entrepreneurship.

Solar panels have had little visible change in the past 30 years, but by the 2009 Solar Decathlon competition, new technologies under development today will render them unrecognizable. The entrepreneurship represented above will insure that the new technologies will be available at the neighborhood solar dealership. Consumers (and investors) will reap fantastic rewards in the years ahead.

Everything is going to change. The solar century starts now.

Solar Decathlon Underway

Today, October 14, 2007, is the third day of the Solar Decathlon competition in Washington DC. (Live scores for each team can be seen here.) Twenty university teams from around the world are exercising their undergraduate designed, ultra energy efficient homes for the judges in hopes to take home first prize. At the same time, the teams together are achieving collective success in attracting much deserved attention to the state of the art for residential Clean Tech.

The technical achievements of these teams are staggering. But it must be remembered that these are young undergraduate engineers grappling with their first exposure to real world problems.

The Santa Clara University Team is no exception.

For the past year, the project has grown in complexity. The team's ranks have bloomed to include more than a hundred students and corporate sponsors ranging from Silicon Valley start-ups to the Fortune 500. By September, the home was built and the competition strategy was planned. All that remained was it disassemble the house, ship it to Washington DC and reassemble it.

The Santa Clara Team is an underdog. It was the 21st ranked applicant to 20 slots. Only when one team dropped out did Santa Clara become an entrant. It is the smallest University accepted to the competition and the only University without an architecture school to be accepted. It also has the farthest shipping distance to Washington DC. (The international teams assembled their houses in nearby Maryland.)

The shipping distance, it turned out, was a big deal. Undergraduate projects typically involve displaying your project beside the podium as you give your final presentation. They do not typically involve the transcontinental wide-load version of Murphy's Law.

The truck transporting the house had breakdowns en route: twice. The first before it was out of sight of Santa Clara University. This breakdown required the students to drive to Sacramento for parts followed by pre-dawn welding before the house was at last on its way.

Then, the day before it was due to arrive, news came that the truck had broken down again -in Nebraska. The students had to phone truck repair shops to arrange after-hours service.

When the US Secretary of Energy Samuel Bodman visited the team, the house was still hours away. At last, on October 5th, with only a week until the competition began, the house arrived to the cheers of every Solar Decathlon team.

Wisely, the students had used their extra wait time to lay out in minute detail their construction plan. It is telling that although the Santa Clara house was the last one to arrive, it was one of the first to successfully pass inspection.

Now the competition is underway. The Solar Decathlon website is reporting team standing and scores updated every fifteen minutes. The winner and final scores will be announced on Friday, October 20th.

We're rooting to Santa Clara to perform well in its representation of the West Coast of the United States, but all of the teams are making history this week. Give them your support.

Don't let anyone you know who can visit the competition miss out on this unique opportunity to see the future. The 2007 Solar Decathlon teams are the first graduating class of the Solar Century.

The Sure Things and The Hail Mary

Albert Einstein's photoelectric effect (PV) is the process by which the photons in sunlight are converted into electricity. It is the reverse process that is observed in familiar LED lights. The materials which exhibit this effect are small band gap semiconductors.

There are (currently) four major technical approaches to photovoltaic generation of electricity. Each has an proportional balance of advantages and risks. Each approach is a combination of light gathering (how much sunlight is collected per unit area of a cell), PV conversion efficiency (how much electricity is generated per area of sunlight) and cost (Dollars per Watt of energy produced by the cell).

Each is well represented in Silicon Valley today.


Crystalline Silicon (Ex.: SunPower)
This is a sure thing. Based on the same traditional crystalline silicon that is used in electronics, crystalline silicon solar cells have the advantage of being using extremely well understood physics as well as high volume manufacturing practices. There are literally tens of thousands of industry seasoned experts on this material in the electronics industry. This results in an early advantage in unit cost and manufacturing scalability. Crystalline silicon offers high photoelectric conversion efficiency, but is very complex and expensive to produce. Crystalline silicon cells are actually made from the "waste" wafers that are unusable for electronics.

However, Even with these seeming advantages, crystalline silicon is very complex to manufacture and after forty years of cost reduction, it is a fair concern that flat plate silicon solar cells should not expect many more major cost reductions. (or should we? watch for a future blog..)

The Bottom Line: This is what you see on rooftops today. Nearly all solar cells in existence to day are crystalline silicon based cells. Today they are less expensive than other exotic approaches, but it may be difficult to reduce cost further.

Light Gathering: 1 Sun
PV Conversion Efficiency: 15-18%
Current cost per Watt: $4.80


Amorphous Silicon Thin Film (Ex. Applied Materials)
Amorphous simply means non-crystalline. Also comprised of familiar silicon, this is a sure thing as well. Because it lacks the delicate crystal lattice structure of crystalline silicon, it is much less expensive to produce (imagine filling a sandbox with sand versus building a house of cards). For the same reason, its PV conversion efficiency is also lower -but not proportionally. Amorphous silicon based solar cells must be larger in order to generate the same amount of power, but the resulting cost will be lower. Amorphous silicon also benefits from incumbent status: It is the material used in LCD displays of which ten square miles will be produced in 2007.

However, while industry experience reducing the cost of amorphous silicon is not as mature as that of crystalline silicon, it has already seen cost fall by 20x. There is certainly still room for improvement, but the bottom of the well may not be far off.

The Bottom Line: Amorphous silicon is slightly less efficient at converting sunlight into electricity but much less expensive to produce. While the physics and manufacturing issues surrounding amorphous silicon are well enough understood that it can be produced in volume today, it is not so well understood that we should not expect further breakthroughs and cost efficiencies. All of the World's expertise with crystalline silicon for electronics can easily be ported to amorphous silicon.

Light Gathering: 1 Sun
PV Conversion Efficiency: 8-12%
Current cost per Watt: $3.99


Concentrated Photovoltaic (Ex.: SolFocus, Silicon Valley Solar)
This starts to be more of a long shot. The Concentrated PV approach addresses the high cost of the semiconductor material by using optics to focus a given area of light onto a small unit area of extremely high efficiency , but still proportionally less expensive compound semiconductor material. For example, by using 500x optical concentration (500 Suns), concentrated PV cell will generate as much electricity with 1 cm2 of semiconductor material as a standard (1 Sun) PV cell would produce with 500 cm2 of semiconductor. The idea is that the reduced cost of semiconductor material required will more than offset the added cost of optics and tracking motors (CPV cells typically must be aligned with precision toward the sun, tracking it across the sky through the day and the seasons)

However, it remains to be seen if the structural and maintenance costs of optics and motors over a twenty year lifetime outdoors will be justified by the accompanying increase in efficiency.

The Bottom Line: The principal of trading mystically delicate and expensive semiconductor material for apparently simple optics and tracking motors is reasonable, but there is a real challenge to the reliability and maintenance costs of anything that sits on a roof for twenty years. No one has been able to make this quite work yet.

Light Gathering: 2 to 500 Suns
PV Conversion Efficiency: 26%
Projected cost per Watt: <$3.00


CIGS Thin Film (Miasole, Nanosolar)
CIGS (Copper, Indium, Gallium, Selenide) is the Hail Mary, the long shot that could win the game. The preceding approaches all struggle with the manufacturing cost of their PV semiconductor material. CIGS approach seeks to reduce the cost of the semiconductor itself. Discovered in 1975, CIGS is a relatively new material, lacking the benefit of an enormous knowledge base of silicon. Despite this humble beginning, CIGS has demonstrated PV efficiency as high as 20% and thanks to a manufacturing process that requires comparatively moderate temperature and pressure control relative to silicon, it promises a dramatic reduction in energy cost. As an added benefit, CIGS PV cells are flexible, allowing cosmetic applications that are not practical with brittle crystalline silicon cells. It also greatly simplifies the demands of the panel structure -further reducing cost.

However, put simply, no one has ever been able to produce CIGS solar cells in high volume despite more than $140M of venture capital invested in Silicon Valley alone. In order to succeed, CIGS companies must develop new material physics, new manufacturing techniques and combine them into high reliability, high volume manufacturing processes. The risk is high, but the reward is its match.

The Bottom Line: CIGS has the best chance of delivering solar electricity at an price that will compete with coal. If CIGS is successful in its ambitions, it will be most important commercial development of this century.

Light Gathering: 1 Sun
PV Conversion Efficiency: up to 20%
Projected cost per Watt: <$1.00


What comes next? There's a very good bet. Watch for a future installment of The Solar Evangelist...

The Age of Economic Solar Energy Begins

Most of you reading this are entrepreneurs. A familiar entrepreneurial challenge in launching anything new is overcoming the unfamiliarity and resistance in the marketplace.

That’s not a problem with solar. Sunlight is clean and life giving. We love the Sun. We want to bask in it.

How ready are people for Solar? People not only like solar. They're begging for it.

The Solar Energy Opportunity
At more than $1 Trillion per year, electricity production is tied with global oil production and bested only by food, clothing and shelter as a share of global GDP. This is almost entirely based on coal and nuclear. And nobody is happy about that.

Disrupting and transforming this global power infrastructure to cheaper, more economical and more flexible solar energy will be the most important economic and cultural change force of our lifetimes. Our energy consumption and conservation habits based on scarcity, inflexibility and even guilt will change radically.

Solar energy’s roots begin just over a hundred years ago. Albert Einstein was awarded his single Nobel Prize not for the E=MC2 of atomic energy, but for the photoelectric effect. The first solar cells were realized in the mid 1950s and in 1975, the first terrestrial solar electric company was formed.

We find ourselves at the threshold of this new era. California in particular is uniquely equipped to take the leading role in the next generation of photovoltaic (PV) energy production.

1. Drawable talent from native Semiconductor Manufacturing, Equipment and Thin Film industries
2. Entrepreneurial Spirit, Venture Capital, Research Universities
3. The most solar-positive marketplace in the United States
4. California by itself is now the 3rd largest market for solar energy in the world as a result of Governor Schwarzenegger “million solar roofs” initiative
5. A base of existing companies such as SunPower leading the World in silicon cell efficiency.
6. Start-ups like Miasole and Nanosolar who are aimed at slashing the cost of solar power by more than half.
   
   Are you ready for one trillion dollars to change hands as Solar takes its place in our society? Everything is about to change.