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Nanosolar, one of the several companies trying to popularize CIGS solar panels, says it will move into commercial production later this year, and it's already booked the first 12 months of production.

The company hopes to inaugurate its manufacturing facility later this year and start shipping products before the calendar turns to 2008, according to CEO Martin Roscheisen.

"November and the first part of December are going to be extremely busy," Roscheisen said in a phone interview. Technically, Nanosolar is five days behind its own internal schedule, he said.

Nanosolar's flexible Cell Foil product.

(Credit: Nanosolar)

Even if production slips a bit, 2008 is looking up. The entire year of production has already been allocated to customers who have placed advance orders. The first 100,000 panels will go to a small number of commercial solar installations.

Roscheisen would not say exactly how many panels the company will make in 2008, but allowed that the 100,000 panels represent "a fraction" of the total output for the year. Back in 2006, Nanosolar said its first factory would be capable of churning out 430 megawatts worth of panels a year. The company will sell its product through wholesalers.

Meanwhile, the Department of Energy has awarded the company a $20 million, three-year development deal. The company will get $9.5 million between now and October 2008 and the rest will follow afterward, subject to continued availability of funds.

Nanosolar has already received $100 million in financing. Investors include Mohr Davidow Ventures, Sergey Brin and Larry Page. Since the company's big funding round in 2006, Nanosolar has been aiming to move into commercial production in 2008.

Solar cells based on CIGS--which stands for copper, indium, gallium, selenide--aren't as efficient as silicon solar cells, but they are less expensive to manufacture. CIGS cells can also be printed on rolls of foil. Conceivably, the roof of a Wal-Mart could be coated with a sheet of CIGS cells to turn the entire roof into a giant solar panel.

Although CIGS cells have been made in laboratories, no one has yet to move to commercial production. Rivals such as Miasole and DayStar Technologies have had to delay their products.

CIGS will no doubt be a topic of conversation at Solar Power 2007, taking place this week in Long Beach, California.

A lot of thin-film solar-panel concepts will face hurdles to gaining ground in established markets. The silicon shortage will ease, the cost of making and installing silicon solar panels will decline, and silicon will likely remain more efficient at converting sunlight to electricity than the thin-film alternatives.

But in emerging nations, it could be a completely different story, Alain Harrus, a partner at VC firm Crosslink Capital, said during a meeting this week. Many villages and homes in Africa, Asia and Latin America don't have electricity to begin with, so there's no incumbent technology to dislodge, he noted. And where power exists, electricity theft and blackouts are persistent problems.

Locals, potentially, would quickly find applications for portable, flexible solar panels. That's how cell phones became a common possession in China and India. Flexible panels could be attached to a pump to draw water from a well or attached to a water purification system. UC Berkeley has field-tested a purification system that employs a fluorescent bulb to kill microbes in water. A huge number of the hospital beds in the world are filled with people with water-borne diseases.

"You could roll it up (the flexible solar panel) and carry it under your arm," he said.

Thin-film solar panels could ultimately replace roofs in shantytowns, opening up the opportunity for refrigerators (where they don't exist), TVs and PCs. Those heat-trapping corrugated roofs would disappear. Instead of electricity theft, families would have to worry about roof theft. Still, objects are tougher to steal often than energy.

Thin film has a further advantage: it is easier and cheaper to ship than glass silicon solar panels. Get a high-profile philanthropist to fund a project and solar chargers could start popping up in Mali.

Crosslink is an investor in SoloPower, which wants to make CIGS (copper-indium-gallium-selenide) solar cells. SoloPower will put its cells on flexible substrates. Who knows? This may turn out to be where SoloPower aims a lot of its products.

Miasole, a notable solar start-up that has been hit with some delays, is getting retrofitted.

The company, which specializes in copper indium gallium selenide (CIGS) solar cells and panels, has appointed Joseph Laia as CEO and president. Laia, a veteran of the semiconductor chip equipment industry, worked most recently at KLA-Tencor.

Dave Pearce, founder and former CEO, will stay on as chairman.

"The board and I have long talked about a transition to a leader who will scale Miasole to commercial manufacturing and worldwide operations," said Pearce in a prepared statement Monday.

Sources also say that the company is in the midst of closing another large found of funding. In earlier rounds, the company raised more than $56 million. More executive and management changes are under way, sources added. The new round of funding will likely help Miasole move to volume manufacturing, but it may create a cloud of uncertainty over the company. Occasionally, increased funding rounds, prior to a maiden product release, are seen as a sign that the company didn't anticipate some of the difficulties.

Miasole nor its investors have commented on the new round of funding or the other executive changes. CNET News.com sent an e-mail to Miasole for further clarification, but has not heard back. News.com is currently in the process of getting information on these issues from some of Miasole's investors.

The announcement of the executive change was soft-pedaled. The company put an announcement on its Web site on September 10. Nonetheless, there was almost no notice of it in the press, which is unusual considering that the company has been one of the most closely watched solar companies in Silicon Valley. Solar venture capitalists and executives contacted by CNET News.com in the past two days were discussing the management changes as the latest unconfirmed rumor. At best, they could confirm that a search for a replacement was on.

The green industry is going through growing pains. In recent months, Tesla Motors, the electric car company, and GreenFuel Technologies, which captures carbon dioxide with algae and then sells the algae to biofuel refiners, both replaced their founding CEOs. Like Miasole, both chose executives with more experience in logistics and "scaling up" operations.

Scaling up is a big issue. To produce revenue, a large number of green companies will have to build large, expensive, complex manufacturing or logistics facilities. Solar companies such as Miasole and competitor Nanosolar plan on erecting multimillion-dollar factories to make CIGS cells. Ice Energy, which makes an air conditioner that cools by making ice at night, recently raised $25 million to build a factory.

In many cases, the founding CEOs are experts in the core technology, but not in issues such as low-cost manufacturing. Thus, VCs are turning often to old friends in the chip and hardware business to take over. Tesla's interim CEO, for instance, is Michael Marks, who used to run contract manufacturer Flextronics.

CIGS solar panels aren't as efficient as silicon solar panels, but proponents say that the panels, along with the factories, will be a lot cheaper. A factory that can produce 30 megawatts worth of silicon solar panels might cost close to $100 million. CIGS manufacturers say they can build factories for $25 million that will produce their 25-megawatt panels.

The catch? CIGS aren't in mass manufacturing yet anywhere and cracking that problem is proving tricky. There are several companies trying to bring products out and each has a slightly different manufacturing technique.

In May, news of Miasole's delays leaked out. The company could produce 5-square-foot sheets of CIGS solar cells that hit the company's target efficiency of 8 percent to 10 percent on its research-and-development production lines. (The efficiency rating refers to how much of the sunlight the panel can convert into electricity.) However, on its commercial production lines, Miasole was only seeing efficiencies of 4 percent to 6 percent, with some high spots of 9 percent mixed in.

At the time, Pearce said the company will likely enter into volume production in October--later than expected. In September 2006, Miasole had said it expected to achieve revenue of $100 million by the end of 2007. That probably won't happen now, Pearce added.

"We're trying to give birth to a new process. The trouble is that we don't know how long the gestation period is," said Pearce in May about the delays. "But nothing has changed in terms of the fundamentals of the technology."

DayStar Technoloogies and HelioVolt, CIGS competitors, have also experienced delays.

The secret to producing thin-film solar cells comes in part from the snack food industry, says Ascent Solar.

The Littleton, Colo.-based company says it will deploy high-speed thermal evaporators--the same equipment used to seal Doritos bags--to produce copper-indium-gallium-selenide (CIGS) solar cells.

Here's how it works. Ascent will spray the active CIGS material onto a polymer sheet rolling from one spool to another. The evaporating equipment will rapidly heat up the coated polymer sheet to eliminate liquid carriers and fix the CIGS material in place.

Ascent will then cut up the sheets and integrate the solar cells into roof tiles, building materials or traditional solar panels.

"You can do rapid thermal evaporation. The CIGS is what slows it down," said CEO Matt Foster. Some of the evaporation equipment comes from General Vacuum of Manchester, England.

In a sense, Ascent is mixing early and new ideas from the CIGS industry. Laboratory scientists have demonstrated how to produce CIGS cells through evaporation. Evaporation, however, can be a slow process.

Several start-ups, and even some established solar manufacturers, have tried to get around the slow pace of evaporation by applying the active CIGS materials in a different way and combining roll-to-roll manufacturing. Miasole is trying to sputter the material onto metal or polymer substrate in a roll-to-roll process. Nanosolar wants to print CIGS onto rolls of materials. Solopower is trying to combine electroplating with roll-to-roll processes. HelioVolt has developed what it calls the FASST process.

To date, no one has perfected an alternate method to evaporation. Rather than fight the status quo, Ascent is essentially trying to marry the proven process with roll-to-roll manufacturing.

"CIGS is hard enough to do without a proven process," Foster said.

Tucson's Global Solar is taking a similar, but even less fancy, tack with CIGS. It is using evaporation but applying CIGS cells to sheets of glass, rather than plastic. Glass costs more than polymer and it costs more to ship. But Global's chief technology officer, Jeffrey Britt, points out that it is also really simple to spray stuff onto glass. First Solar, one of the more successful solar companies in recent years, sells cadmium telluride solar cells on glass.

CIGS solar cells cannot convert as much sunlight into electricity as silicon solar cells. CIGS manufacturers are now producing cells on their in-development manufacturing lines that can convert between 4 percent and 10 percent of the light that hits them into electricity. Efficiency is expected to rise to around 16 percent. By contrast, commercial silicon solar cells can now hit 22 percent efficiency. But CIGS cells are expected to cost less. Conceptually, a contractor could shrink wrap the roof of a Wal-Mart and turn the massive surface into a solar generator.

Ascent has a ways to go. It will receive equipment and start to build a prototyping plant next month. It hopes that this plant will be running by the first quarter of next year.

Solar start-up SoloPower on Thursday said it landed a series B round of $30 million, in a vote of confidence for a nascent solar panel technology.

Oslo, Norway-based Convexa Capital led the round, which was joined by existing investors. Altogether, SoloPower is in line to receive over $42 million in venture capital and grants.

The $30 million will be used primarily to build up a 20-megawatt manufacturing facility near its Milpitas, Calif., headquarters, said company CEO Homayoun Talieh on Thursday. By the third quarter of next year, it expects to have that plant operating and delivering commercial products, he said.

SoloPower uses a process called electroplating to layer a combination of elements referred to as CIGS (copper indium gallium selenide) onto a foil substrate to make cells. A number of companies, including Miasole, DayStar Technologies, Nanosolar and Heliovolt, are building up manufacturing processes to fabricate solar cells from CIGS. Although CIGS cells aren't as efficient in converting light to electricity as widely used silicon cells, proponents say that CIGS will be cheaper.

Yet, at least some CIGS companies have run into some problems ramping up as quickly as hoped: Miasole, for example, has had trouble getting the same efficiency throughout its cells.

Talieh said that electroplating allows for a less wasteful use of the raw material and delivers more consistent efficiency on the cell, compared with other processes.

"It's one of the oldest technologies around," he said of electroplating which is used to put chrome on the bumper of cars and in circuit boards. "It's even been tried for solar cells of CIGS, but it has not been successful because of a few challenges. But we have been fortunate enough to have solutions to those challenges."

Talieh said its cells can be used in either residential or commercial solar panels.

In the solar industry, CIGS and silicon are often pitted as competitors. But Talieh said that the company's target is being commercially competitive with fossil fuel sources of power generation, rather than silicon-based solar panels.

"It's what the solar industry needs to do because once the subsidies go away, the solar industry has to stand on its own two feet. I think that can be done by 2010," he said.

When it comes to CIGS (copper indium gallium selenide) solar cells, Global Solar has decided not to fight convention.

The Tucson-based company is ramping up for mass production of CIGS like a number of other companies, but the interesting thing about its tack is its manufacturing process. Global will use the vacuum evaporation process, which involves converting the active CIGS materials into a vapor and then letting them condense onto a glass substrate or thin film in a precise pattern.

The evaporation process has been extensively studied at the National Laboratory Research Lab, which has produced experimental CIGS cells that can convert a high 19.5 percent of the sunlight that strikes them into electricity.

However, it has been challenging to speed up the process to produce large volumes of materials. Thus, several CIGS start-ups have experimented with sputtering the material onto substrates (Miasole, Daystar), printing it (Nanosolar), or electroplating it onto rolls of thin film (Solopower). Some of these other processes also can provide, potentially, a better utilization of the material and higher efficiency.

Unfortunately, no one has yet perfected these alternatives, and some have had to delay production.

"Rather than reinvent the wheel, we decided to pursue a workable technology," said Global Solar's Chief Technology Officer Jeffrey Britt. "If you do evaporation right, you can get high utilization."

Global currently has the capacity to produce about 5 megawatts worth of solar cells a year, which isn't much, and says it can achieve an 11.5 percent efficiency on cells coming off of its production line. It will next try to open a 60-megawatt facility in January 2008 and raise efficiency to 13 to 14 percent.

The timing will be interesting. Most other CIGS companies are aiming to go into mass production next year, too. Right now, it's hard to say who will come in first. (Global, by the way, has been around since 1996.)

The company will initially concentrate on CIGS cells printed on glass that can fit into conventional solar panel frames. Later, it will move to thin films, which cost less. The military will likely be early customers, Britt said.

"We believe we can achieve a 30 percent cost reduction" over silicon solar cells with thin films, he added.