Scientists at the University of Cambridge in the UK have found a way to improve the efficiency of photovoltaic cells by as much as 25% through harnessing more of the sun’s spectrum than most traditional silicon-based solar cells can.

The new design, developed at the university’s Cavendish Laboratory in the Department of Physics, can absorb both red and blue light, and generates electrons from photons at a two-to-one ratio on the blue light spectrum. Most current solar cells lose blue photon energy as heat, leaving them unable to turn more than about 34% of the sunlight they absorb into power.

The team, led by professors Neil Greenham and Sir Richard Friend, recently published results in a paper. The hybrid cells have an added organic semiconductor called pentacene, which helps harness blue light energy to strengthen the electrical current coming from the cell, making the product up to 44% efficient.

The university’s team also innovated on how the cells are made, by producing the cells in bulk using a roll-to-roll printing technique. While cheaper, more efficient photovoltaics sound promising, there remain hurdles to be overcome. The greatest costs in building a solar power plant are installation hardware, labor and land, so a cheaper solar cell is only a piece of the puzzle.

In an unusual hybrid, British industrial designer Phil Pauley created Marine Solar Cells that harness energy from both the sun and water.

The web of energy generators capture energy off-shore, using a combination of floating photovoltaics and natural buoyancy displacement. Thanks to the reflective nature of water, the solar component’s efficiency is up to 20% greater than it would be land-locked.

The devices can be made using recycled materials and, by attaching the units to underwater mooring, can be placed nearly anywhere off-shore, creating subsea batteries or power plants.

The technology is currently in concept stage, so you won’t need to dodge them on your next water sport adventure, but it does have the potential to be a substantial source of new energy, especially if installed in turbulent high sea areas.

Photos by PAULEY Interactive

Solar manufacturer Solaria and solar performance monitoring software and hardware provider meteocontrol have today announced a partnership that will see meteocontrol’s Virtual Control Room (VCOM) monitoring system added to Solaria’s projects. The system aims to help Solaria’s customers increase their solar yields through remote management.

With meteocontrol’s VCOM system, developers and utilities will be about to tap into the remote, cloud-based operating system to monitor and manage their PV systems’ performance in real-time.

Solaria, which designs, produces and sells silicon PV modules to solar system integrators, project developers, utilities and other power producers, just this week announced it now offers a new 270-Watt high-performance solar module that’s been optimized for industrial and utility-scale projects. The 1 x 1.9 meter frameless modules, now shipping, are also available in a complete integrated tracker package that combines modules, trackers and design services to optimize system performance. They are just the type of system that would benefit from a monitoring solution like the one from meteocontrol.

The partnership also fits in nicely with Solaria’s goals to improve the economics and system performance of solar installations, while also reducing the complexity of solar operations management.

Last month, meteocontrol partnered with Princeton Solar Solutions (PSS), a N.J.-based solar provider, which is now also using the VCOM system.

GE has announced plans to spend $600 million on a new solar factory located in the Denver suburb of Aurora, Colorado. The factory, which begins operations in 2012, will be capable of producing enough solar panels per year to generate 400 megawatts of power, or enough energy to power 80,000 homes. When completed, the factory will be bigger than 11 football fields – soon to be the largest factory of its kind in the U.S.

The business will also bring 355 jobs to Colorado plus 100 more positions at GE’s research facility in upstate New York.

The company is retrofitting and expanding an existing 200,000 sq. foot former L’Oreal Worldwide warehouse, a project which will require a $300 million investment. Over the next two years, GE will double the building’s size.

Colorado is already the manufacturing site for GE Energy’s thin film solar pilot line, a joint technology development between GE’s Global Research Center and PrimeStar Solar, a company GE acquired in April. The new factory is located near this smaller, 30 MW facility and a GE solar research center. GE says the location will enable an accelerated start-up schedule with production equipment installation beginning in January 2012.

The new factory will produce thin film solar panels made from cadium telluride, which are cheaper than traditional crystalline silicon panels. It’s the same technology as produced by First Solar, the largest solar company in the world by market cap.

The panels are lighter, which helps ease installation. They’re also large, which helps to lower the total system cost by reducing the amount of racking and electrical components required. Shipments to utilities and commercial customers will start in early 2013, according to the annoucement.

GE’s plan for solar is similar to the one for its wind business, a space the company entered in 2002 – that is, it plans to grow through both technology and scale. GE now has more than 27 gigawatts of wind and solar resources installed around the world.

The spectacular failure of solar manufacturer Solyndra is being held up by some as a shining example of the Obama administration’s failure to properly manage government subsidies after its collapse left taxpayers with $535 million in federally guaranteed loans. But Solyndra’s failure on its own is not remarkable. There are always risks involved when you’re introducing innovation into a commoditized market. The bigger, and still unanswered, question is why did it take this much capital before it failed, given the warning signs?

In commoditized markets, explains Brad Zangler of Pivotal Investments, a firm with numerous investments in the cleantech/greentech space, the challenge is to disrupt the cost of producing energy, not just to create a worthy innovation. In fact, in a business like solar, the go-to-market strategy is just as important as the technology a company is developing. In Solyndra’s case, that technology was a new, unique type of tubular solar panel. The shape itself was an innovation. But the company was also benefitting from another advantage: it didn’t use polysilicon, so it wasn’t affected by the shortages which were hurting its competitors. In 2008, polysilicon was more than $400 per kilogram, but by the time the federal government issued Solyndra’s loan, the prices had fallen to just over $50 per kilogram.

The earlier shortages were obviously going to be a temporary issue, given that new polysilicon plants were in the process of being built, explains Michael Butler, CEO of Cascadia Capital and managing director of the firm’s Sustainable Industries practice group. He says, ”any first year economic student knows the price goes down if the supply increases. Which raises the question: “what were they [the government] thinking?”

Zenger agrees, also noting, as did Butler, that the government has smart people working there, which leaves many wondering what happened. Did the due diligence stop? Did they miss key indicators that could have pointed to issues? Did they misinterpret the data they were seeing?

These questions get murkier, thanks to a report from the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service (CRS), which now says there were several factors that could have served as warning signs ahead of or shortly after the government investment. These included the price shifts in polysilicon (as noted above), the panels’ inability to work with residential roofing systems or in large solar farms (a key part of the solar market) and increasing competition in manufacturing capabilities from expansions in China and Taiwan.

Solyndra, says CRS, was planning to drive down its costs by scaling up its operations with the government backing, but there was no guarantee that it would be successful. Clearly, it was not.

Perhaps the real issue with Solyndra is not its failure, the politics of how that loan was achieved or the government’s possible oversights of the surrounding risks. Perhaps the failure is an indication of why the government isn’t the best entity to be investing in markets where a winner or loser has to be chosen. The government’s process is not driven by the same market considerations which drive private investors, Zenger explains, and the decision-making has “way more influencers.” No argument there.

As for private investors, Solyndra’s failure doesn’t have much impact on their current investment plans – over the past year, they have been shifting money away from companies dependent on government subsidies, like solar, biomass and wind to other areas like smart grid technologies, energy efficiency technologies, battery storage and transportation.

And the solar stock declines? As Aaron Chew, an analyst with Maxim Group told CNN Money, they have nothing to do with Solyndra. “They’d be here even without that. Solyndra gets a lot of attention for symbolic reasons. But what’s happening is you have oversupply and plunging prices and that’s just being exacerbated by Europe.”

Demand is lower in Europe than previously expected and some governments have cut down on solar subsidies, potentially limiting Solyndra’s ability to sell there.

If anything, Solyndra’s crash shows just how quickly the bottom can fall out in commoditized markets, how easy it is to underestimate how low the price needs to go to gain traction, and frankly, how hard it is to introduce innovation into markets that have existed for years, like energy. Solyndra had the innovations, but it didn’t get to the price point where it could compete, not only with other energy sources, but even with the conventional solar panels it was trying to disrupt.

Private investors are not surprised or concerned by a solar failure – they price it in from the start. And by the time there’s a public failure like Solyndra, investors will have already changed their course. But the bigger problem with the now-politicized Solyndra situation is that it sends out a message that says failure is unacceptable. “That is an absolute mistake,” says Zenger. “We have to fail in order to succeed. We have to try new things.”

Of course “we” should. But when the “we” is the U.S. taxpayer, debates about how much risk is too much risk is going to be hotly debated…for a long time to come.

As for smaller companies trying new things in solar, it may get worse before it gets better. Those with capital may have staying power – like the ones trading on the public market, for example. But more will go bankrupt, allowing survivors to swoop in and buy some interesting technologies and products in the meantime.  The fittest will keep on innovating and be rewarded by the market.

In 2010, the U.S. installed 887 megawatts (MW) of grid-connected photovoltaic (PV), up 104% from the 435 MW installed in 2009, according to a new recent report by the Solar Energy Industries Association and GTM Research. However, the U.S. market’s share of global installations fell to 5.1%, down from 6.0% in 2009.

In the end of 2011, that’s expected to change, thanks to slowdowns in major European markets like Italy and Germany. And in a few years time, the report says, the U.S. market may be the largest in the world.

The report looks specifically at PV, or photovoltaics, which are the main kind of solar panel produced. These panels use polysilicon, now in oversupply.

One of the report’s key findings was the increase in grid-connected PV installations in Q2 2011 – up 69% since the same quarter last year and up 17% over Q1 2011. These have now reached 314 MW, or enough to power 63,000 homes. In addition, cumulative grid-connected PV in the U.S. is now at 2.7 gigawatts (GW).

Commercial projects increased by 22% from the previous quarter to account for nearly half of the new installations, while residential projects were about 30% and utility-scale plants were 16%. The commercial trends are expected to continue until 2012, when major non-residential markets (NJ, CA, PA) are expected to see a downturn while residential and utility markets grow. Overall, the report says, 2012 will be a more difficult year for the U.S., in large part due to the end of the Treasury grant program (Section 1603).

Six states in the U.S. installed over 10 MW each in Q2, compared with just 3 states in all of 2007. And, for the first time ever, New Jersey’s non-residential market (excluding utility projects) exceeded that of California’s, making it the largest in the country.

Despite the high-profile failures of companies like Solyndra, Evergreen and SpectraWatt, over 100,000 Americans work in the solar industry, double that from 2009, the trade group’s president Rhone Resch told Bloomberg this week. And on the whole, states the report, the U.S. is the strongest and most stable growth market for PV worldwide.

Main Street Power, a national solar financier, is partnering with AlsoEnergy for a nearly three megawatt distributed generation solar project in California. AlsoEnergy, an energy monitoring and financial management software solutions provider, will provide the energy monitoring software for the project, which will be spread throughout the state of California.

AlsoEngery’s Web-based PowerTrack performance monitoring and financial tracking software and its PowerLobby kiosk display systems will be used by Main Street Power for the project, set to be operational by year-end.

Systems will be located at 35 sites across the state, including the San Diego Unified Schools, the University of California at Davis and Contra Costa County.

Main Street Power will also partner with locally based solar installation firms and will own and operate the installed systems.

Meteocontrol North America, a global provider of solar performance monitoring software and hardware, bankable energy yield reports, technical due diligence and operations management services for photovoltaic installations, has partnered with Princeton Solar Solutions (PSS), a top N.J.-based solar provider.

PSS provides services including project development, cost analysis, design/build consultation and more, for private, government and utility grade systems.

As a result of the partnership, meteocontrol’s software called “Virtual Control Room” will be used to gain better insight into PSS’s projects. This multi-screen Web application will handle operations management and performance monitoring for the installed systems. In addition, meteocontrol’s WEB’log will be used to provide real-time data and alerts to monitoring teams, who can quickly react to problems and take proactive measures to optimize solar production.

The PV (photovoltaic) plant engineers will be able to use the new software to access operational data and control solar performance using either their computers or mobile devices from anywhere they have a Internet connection.

PV systems produce energy for 25 years or more, which is why performance monitoring tools are so critical. The U.S. is the world’s fastest-growing solar market, with an increasing demand for systems such as these.

Meteocontrol currently monitors more than 3.3 GW across 22,000 PV systems. PSS, meanwhile, is responsible for the design, procurement, construction and/or monitoring of 239 MW of large-scale solar PV systems.

A Year In The Life Of An Entrepeneur

1. July 2010: Ready: Set:  Delaware, the state with the lowest highest point. David Argentar, a biochemist by training and bioinformaticist by trade, has launched a startup. Of sorts. Well – more of a hobby, he’d be the first to admit. He has no business plan, no investors, no employees. All he really has, in fact, is an idea and a pending patent. And as everyone is eager to tell you these days, ideas are a dime a dozen, and patents are practically a scam.

It gets worse. Much. His idea is hardware. A new kind of solar concentrator, to be exact, made mostly of water. His first version was too heavy; but he thinks his redesign could conceivably, in his wildest dreams, drive down the cost of solar power by quite a lot. But—come on, now, really—a hardware startup? With only one founder?

Hardware is hard. It allows for no binary abstractions, no digitized purity to protect you from the real world. It is the real world, in all in its vicious and unforgiving glory, perpetually at the mercy of a hundred unexpected environmental factors. And almost by definition it is incredibly expensive to develop. I should know: I myself have a degree in electrical engineering – but I fled to the warm embrace of software as soon as I graduated. Hardware was much too temperamental for me.

Argentar, fortunately, is made of sterner stuff.

Good thing, too. Over the next year he’s going to need everything he’s got.

2. August 2010: Minions! Go! Argentar acquires two new things:
* a small crew of university undergraduates who have signed on for a work-experience term. They may not be experienced, but they only cost $5K/month.
* A blog. What follows is a selection of its greatest hits over the next roller-coaster year. (No, you can’t go read the whole thing: it’s mostly private. I have some access because I’m a friend of a friend.)

I have a tiny start-up, but I hesitate to call that my job, ’cause it doesn’t pay me anything, and in fact has an impressive burn rate. Since my patent applications will become public soon, I’m slowly lowering the veil of secrecy around my full-time hobby.

He and his minions get to work designing a working prototype of his concentrator. Everything seems to go well for a couple of months, until -

3. Early October 2010: Mo’ Hardware Mo’ Problems. They hit the first of many hardware pitfalls: parts. As Argentar says, “Badly written software often still runs, but badly build hardware usually doesn’t.”

Having now spent a long time on the phone with various prototype outfits, we’ve found that a couple of the ones we wanted to work with are offering very coarse tolerances. Both the rapid CNC-machining place and the one outfit that’ll do “rapid” extrusion (still a six-week lead time (because they have to make a die, then test it, then send us a sample part for approval, then adjust the die because the sample is wrong, then and so on and so forth)) are saying they can manage only ±0.01″/0.2mm on key dimensions. That’s too crude for optics work; ten-fold finer would be better.

and meanwhile

One of the other things we still need is a light source that can simulate full sun. I’m leaning towards LED arrays, and trying to get the overall power in the visible, NIR (meaning wavelengths < 1100nm, the bandgap of silicon solar cells), and far IR bands approximately correct. Problem: finding LEDs with longer wavelengths is difficult, and they’re not very efficient ( → very expensive) … The IEC is willing to let us use their new full-sun test cell… if we’re willing to wait until december, which, um, we’re not. *sigh* So, we still need to come up with some way of simulating sunlight.

I suspect that if I wasn’t captain of this ship, I’d be running for the lifeboats already. (The students can’t run; since they’re graded on this, they’re effectively chained to the benches.)

4. Late October 2010: The Scramble For Solutions.

The current plan for simulating sunlight is to use quartz-tube radiant heater elements combined with red and green LEDs to build up more or less the right spectrum. While the spectrum will be crudely approximated, this approach has the advantages that the heater bits are already long and thin, the LEDs in question are both cheap and efficient, and unlike using high-intensity IR LEDs to build up the IR spectrum, are unlikely to accidentally blind anybody. (Since I know academic labs are really sloppy about safety, I don’t want my team messing around with gear that can do them serious harm on my orders. I can’t help if they electrocute themselves with high-voltage power supplies, but I can avoid adding to the risk.)

Ah, another charming quirk of hardware: the threats of, say, accidental blinding or death by electrocution. Have I mentioned that I really like software?

The other problem is solved by the simple expedient of throwing his scarce money at it:

I’m going to buy a ~$15k mold, which probably won’t be useful after this prototyping stage. I can’t really afford this, but the other alternative would be to essentially abandon the student prototyping effort. I might be able to take the monetary loss on that, but the time is gone for good, and I’d still need to find a bunch of engineers to build a prototype for me. (That’s been previously estimated at $50-100k, and I certainly can’t afford that without investors, grants, or loans… but the point of having a prototype is to demonstrate that the technology is worth investing in.)

Writing off a $15k mold, but having labor at a fixed $5k/semester isn’t so bad… I could be flailing around while paying professional engineers $200+/hr each to help me learn in a particularly inefficient manner.

5. In Which Our Hero Considers The Lessons He Has Learned The Hard Way So Far

Observations:
* I was even more unprepared for this than I suspected. Specifically, I should have done much more groundwork talking to vendors about tolerances and lead times.
* I’ve learned an expensive lesson about manufacturing tolerances and the difficulties of dealing with them. But I can’t see that there was anything that I could have done to prevent this, since I was too unfamiliar with the problem to grasp its difficulty.

6. November 2010: Plus/Minus

+ ordered optical components for prototype today
– critical path has no slack left
– discovered that bank silently reduced credit limit on company card, necessitating use of personal card for the Part of Unusual Complexity.
– still need to catch up on far too many things from ~9 week push on this project

7. Catastrophe Redux

Oh yes. Another endemic hardware problem: it breaks.

My student engineers and I have run into a little crippling problem with the prototype light concentrator array we’re building: the bare solar cells are too fragile to handle. We’ve broken most of ones we had trying to mount them, even handling them with tweezers. So, I’m looking for ideas on what to try next. I figure somebody who reads this must have some experience working with fragile things. …anybody got other ideas?

8. Into The Melee

And now, on to a milieu perhaps even less forgiving than hardware: business development.

I talked to a new lawyer (at the same law firm) about the contract I want to sign with the current /bus/dev/ folks. It turns out the reason my patent attorney wanted me to talk to him is that he tried to start a company, but was betrayed by one of the hired suits they got to run it, which caused a funding deal to collapse.

So… he had lots of skeptical things to say about /bus/dev/ companies and in fact anybody else who tries to get money out of start-ups. In short: caveat emptor, and keep your laser legal team handy. and now I’ve got a long list of questions to ask the /bus/dev/ guys about the contract and a another measure of circumspection to add to my deep suspicion of the /bus/dev/industry.

iIm also clear that the fundamental relationship I’m entering w/ the /bus/dev/ guys is prospector to over-priced-equipment vendor during a gold rush. While lots of people talk about “long term relationships”, it’s fundamentally true that the /bus/dev/ guys are paid in cash, and if my company flames out, it will at worst just disappoint them.

9. December 2010: Victory Snatched From The Jaws Of Defeat?

It appears the solution to the strengthening and handling question is double-sided tape. It’s cheap, it’s off-the-shelf with no lead time, and it’s relatively strong… The cells we have wired up are working very close to perfectly, which is a big relief.

As expected, our construction schedule has gone *poof*! one vendor — who shall remain nameless so long as they don’t further annoy me — finally shipped parts, only two and a half weeks late. But we now have the parts and test equipment in hand. That sounds lame, but it’s a surprisingly big step: it means everything could be manufactured with very short timelines, and was.

Most importantly, the quality of the optical components is far beyond what I was expecting … this means that an extremely cheap process can produce a difficult part for pennies a square meter. My fantasies involving lopping two-thirds off the price of solar power seem much less fantastic now.

I’ve just signed the contract hiring a business development firm. Because of the way it’s set up, I’m up on the hook for at least $16k over the next two months. Even though I’m fully aware of the cost of doing business as a high-tech start-up, that’s still bracing.

10. Victory!

Q: what is the fully amortized cost of a watt of electricity generated from coal?

A: $2.22

Q: what is the fully amortized cost of a watt of electricity generated by a short production run of my panels?

A: $2.17, according to my student engineers. I have not verified this number, nor do I know what assumptions went into it. I know they haven’t thought too hard about it, because they got the production cost estimates just this morning, so I suspect there may be some error.

However, this is for the existing design, which is just a step up from bear skins and stone knives… and a longer production run gets the cost down to around $1.50/W, according to the students. This is strongly suggestive that with a better design, some cost engineering, and a production run of hundreds of thousands of panels, I’ll be able to reach the mythical $1/W cost, and dominate the world power industry (insert maniacal laughter here).

11. …maybe.

Revised A: $2.58

That’s a very rough cost of manufacturing one of my panels to produce a watt of power at peak rating. It’s not as useful a number as I’d hoped, but still isn’t bad either. It’s deliberately a high estimate, since where we had to fudge extrapolate numbers, we aimed high, so that all the error is against us. For example, we used the retail cost we paid for a single box of 12 solar cells to estimate the cost of silicon in the system. Just accounting for regular wholesale markup should roughly halve that, and bulk orders from solar cell foundries might reduce it to a tenth that.

Since plastic and metal costs were roughly equal to the cost of silicon in our spreadsheet, that knocks the guesstimated peak watt cost to a buck and change, easily enough to undercut the grid. Go us! I’ll eventually have to get a total cost of ownership, but looking at other vendors’ claims suggests that will put me ahead of the game — nobody wants to own up to that.

12. January 2011: The Patent Game

An international patent examiner has looked over the prior art and found a patent he claims makes my work obvious. Which would be a crippling problem except for the similarities ending with the words “light concentrator for solar energy use”. As it is, it’s just a nuisance: I know about this patent, my attorney knows about this patent, and we know how to overcome such claims.

I don’t want to say the differences should be obvious on inspection, but they’re very easy to state, largely involving mechanical complexity and cost of the prior art. Oh, and just some utterly trivial differences in the way it functions. I mean, a diesel engine is just like a steam engine, right? Y’know: pistons, heat, intake, exhaust, motion, blah, blah, blah.

Legally, inventors are expected to know the entire prior art in the field they’re inventing in. Inventors are also expected to cite all relevant prior art in the patent application, although the law punishes only deliberate omission. The main practical effect of having cited it is that we also listed a few reasons it doesn’t apply, so later, binding examinations can see that we were already aware of the prior art, and give our objections more credence.

Apparently, I got off easy. It’s unusual that this round of patent examining finds only a single pre-empting patent. This is a very good sign that my patent application will succeed, and gives me hope that it will issue quickly.

13. The Business Game

The business plan has been declared done. What we ended up with sure looks like a best-seller: even allowing for huge mark-ups and large, unanticipated costs, we think that my solar arrays can undercut the power grid with another year’s worth of engineering, and a year after that the company will turn a profit of a half million dollars. Growth thereafter is limited only by our ability to raise capital to keep up with demand.

Now, everybody who deals with business knows this is genre fiction, but one of the little white lies of the business world is that we treat it as fact.

14. February 2011: Running To Stand Still

My to-do list grows without bound, which is a fancy way of saying I’m overwhelmed. There are simply more things to do than I have time for (at least while preserving what’s left of my sanity). Bringing investment in will help some, but too many of the things seem to require me. While gathering data tomorrow, I’m not — for example — working on my pitch for the upcoming poster session. While the /bus/dev/ guys can do a lot of that stuff for me, I have to polish the result for my speaking style. And I need to chase after a particular business contact who the /bus/dev/ guys don’t know yet. And so on.

15. March 2011: The Rubber Chicken Circuit

15a:

I talked to a local angel/VC fund. Only three guys from the fund there: the head, his lieutenant, and their minion. They seemed very interested, and asked lots of questions. The head even called up another VC that only does energy plays, and gave them my pitch(!). Other VC interested: asked detailed technical questions, wants to see business plan.

Result: their lips said no, but the way the /bus/dev/ guy interprets their answer is that they want the energy VC (or possibly somebody else) to take the lead, and they’ll follow, because they lack the technical background to really evaluate my technology. The /bus/dev/ guy thinks that if the energy VC is interested, the two funds will will come up with all the money I need to get stuff on the market, ~$850k, probably split $600k/$250k. /bus/dev/ thinks this is the sort of deal they want because they asked for our nominal valuation ($3.25 million, by the pneumatic valuation method, ie we pulled a number out of the air), and didn’t balk when we said that the $850k would get them about a quarter of the company. (We don’t think they’ll take that offer, but merely accept that it’s our opening position.)

15b:

This group was a large investor consortium; there were 33 people at the table, and some unknown number watching via video conference at remote sites. They were interested, but asked a bunch of questions I didn’t have answers to, mostly about money. Fast, definitive turn-around, though: they voted while-I-waited. Answer: no. The claimed reason is that they look at later stage companies. We suspect they’re concerned about technical risk.

15c:

An investment fund said no. I knew this pitch wasn’t gonna go well as soon as they said their investors are union pension funds. While they’re looking for risk to drive up returns, they’re not looking for that much risk. The feedback we got was worth the nickel, though. They like the technology, but want to see some operating experience. That’s the same as we’d gotten from the previous bunch who were unimpressed.

16. May 2011: Seeded!

I now have

1) a logo
2) investors
3) a salary

which means this quixotic quest goes from being an expensive hobby to being a job. My salary is charmingly low, but its real point is just to make it possible for me to continue to play tech entrepreneur until Serious Money shows up, which ought to happen after the next prototype has sat on peoples’ roofs for a few months.

17. July 2011: Preparing For Liftoff

Need to round up engineers soon. Way behind on that as a consequence of being way behind on working up my data. To paraphrase an ancient videogame, “startup geek needs staff, badly.”

Today, Sun Edge has $200,000 in seed funding, and a new batch of students is working on the concentrator’s frame and cooling system, while professionals are being brought in to build the next, fully functional prototype, with a target date of early 2012. Argentar has already sunk a year of his life and $100,000 of his own money into the project … but even though the science still seems very promising, there’s no guarantee of market success. An entrepeneur’s life is never easy. When he or she is building hardware, it’s even harder.

When it comes to renewable energy solutions, sometimes nature has the best ideas. That was 13-year-old Aidan Dwyer’s conclusion after a wintry hike in New York’s Catskill Mountains, a trip that inspired him to build a unique and effective solar array design.

Dwyer observed patterns in the trees and, after further research and contemplation, realized the branches matched up with the Fibonacci sequence, a mathematical pattern found throughout nature, such as in falcon flight paths, nautilus shells and ratios within the human body.

Dwyer speculated that this pattern aided the trees in photosynthesis and tested his hypothesis by building a miniature tree-shaped solar array. The project won him a 2011 Young Naturalist Award from the American Museum of Natural History.

The 7th grader describes his experiments in a detailed essay:

I designed and built my own test model, copying the Fibonacci pattern of an oak tree. I studied my results with the compass tool and figured out the branch angles. The pattern was about 137 degrees and the Fibonacci sequence was 2/5. Then I built a model using this pattern from PVC tubing. In place of leaves, I used PV solar panels hooked up in series that produced up to 1/2 volt, so the peak output of the model was 5 volts. The entire design copied the pattern of an oak tree as closely as possible.

The design generated up to 50% more power than the model of a traditional solar installation during periods of low sunlight. The individual solar panels’ various angles help the array capture light even when the sun is very low in the sky. And, since they don’t lie flat, many of the panels are also less affected by shade and snow.

At this point, Dwyer’s design a backyard experiment, but perhaps in the future we’ll see roof gardens planted with solar tree arrays.

Images courtesy of the American Museum of Natural History Musuem.

Ford Motor Company is teaming up with San Jose-based solar panel maker SunPower to offer a rooftop solar system option which will be sold alongside the upcoming Ford Focus EV. The “Drive Green for Life” program, as it’s being called, involves mounting solar panels on a customer’s home.

These panels wouldn’t be used just to charge the Focus itself, however. They actually help offset the cost that comes with having to charge the car, something which most electric car owners do every night.

The 2.5 kilowatt solar panel system would offset the cost of about 1,000 miles per month, says Ford. After federal tax credits, the cost of the system would be around $10,000. Some local and state rebates may also be available, but it’s still a fairly pricey system.

At least Ford and SunPower are targeting the appropriate demographic. The option should appeal to environmentalists who want to buy an electric car, but don’t want to  feel guilty about consuming all the extra electricity needed to charge it. After all, it’s not really that “green” to drive electric when you’re charging your car using fossil fuels.

The solar system itself consists of 147 square feet of rooftop panels. There are 11 panels, measuring 4 feet by 2 feet. Customers will be able to monitor the panels’ performance online and via a specially designed iPhone app. SunPower also provides a 25-year warranty for the system, which is installed at customers’ homes by Best Buy’s Geek Squad. Best Buy also has the contract with Ford to install the home chargers.

Pricing and an exact launch date for the new 2012 Ford Focus isn’t available yet, but the car will go on sale first in California and New York in Q4 2011. Ford also plans to launch 5 other electric or hybrid-electric models in 2012 in North America, and in Europe by 2013.

Aviation enthusiasts interested in greener flying might put an Elektra One plane on their wish lists. PC-Aero‘s electric aircraft can fly for up to three hours on one charge with a 100mph cruising speed. The charging happens inside a solar-powered hangar included in the plane’s anticipated purchase price of $145,000.

The plane successfully completed its inaugural flight last spring, and will go on sale mid next year, pending certification as a new ultralight class aircraft in Germany. It recently won the Lindbergh Electric Aircraft Prize for aviation innovation.

Designed to maximize efficiency, the craft is made of a light fiber composite. With the battery, the plane weights about 440 pounds, and the whole thing is powered by a 13.4 kilowatt (17.96 horsepower) engine.

Don’t expect to invite friends on board, however: The aircraft only seats one person and the maximum cargo weight – pilot included – is 220 pounds.

Elektra One cuts down not only on air pollution, but noise pollution as well: Its engineers say the the plane produces one fifth the noise emitted by regular aircraft, and one half the noise produced by regular ultralight planes.

Watch the aircraft in action here:

Group buying is moving into the commercial clean energy space thanks to Solar@Work, a program designed by San Francisco’s Department of the Environment to make solar panels more affordable for business owners. Businesses have three options for acquiring solar panels through the program: Purchasing, leasing, and securing a loan. A federal grant covering 30% of installation costs is also on offer.

Solar@Work hopes to sign on at least 20 building owners in the San Francisco area by the end of the year, which could translate to as much as 2 megawatts of solar power.

While the program is innovative in simplifying solar for commercial buildings, it is not the first to harness group buying power for solar. 1Bog has a similar model for home-based solar installations, and SolarMosaic provides a crowdfunding platform for bringing solar to community buildings such as schools and churches.

The group buying model could discount the panels by 10-15% and reduce the cost of administrative fees by as much as 75%. That doesn’t sound like a steal by consumer group buying standards, but given the price tag on solar panels, it could add up to significant savings. The city says the high upfront cost of solar is the main barrier to entry into solar for most commercial property owners.

San Mateo’s SolarCity won the bid to provide the panels, and participating businesses are expected to pay less for solar than what they pay for power from the grid. Currently, commercial buildings fewer than four stories are eligible to participate in the program. If the pilot is successful, it could be expanded to other parts of the country, or even globally.

Photo by Living Off Grid

We will see more of these devices coming in the next few years, I am sure: Panasonic today announced [JP] the BG-BL01, a portable and solar-powered LED light that doubles as a charger for USB gadgets. The device is sized at just 152×104×24mm, weighs 150g, can house two AA batteries and is splash proof.

Buyers basically get three LED lamps (0.12W×3) that – once charged – work continuously for about 10 hours when set to “high brightness” and 60 hours when set to “low brightness”. It takes about 15 hours to charge the device with solar energy and about 7 hours when using USB.

Panasonic plans to start selling the in Japan on August 26 (price:$75).

Via AV Watch [JP]

SoloPower— a manufacturer of flexible, thin-film solar cells and modules— has raised another $43.7 million in an equity round this month, according to a new SEC filing. Investors in the round include: Greentech Capital in New York, and Thomas Weisel Partners in San Francisco. Earlier investors in the SoloPower include: Hudson Clean Energy Partners, Crosslink Capital, Convexa, and Firsthand.

In February this year, SoloPower locked a $197 million loan guarantee from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Loan Programs Office to build a “facility that, when completed and at full capacity, is expected to produce approximately 400MW of thin-film Photovoltaic (PV) modules annually,” according to a company press statement.

Based in San Jose, SoloPower is currently building its largest manufacturing plant (with the aforementioned funds) in Oregon. The company expects to spend $364 million on building the plant, and to employ about 500 people, full-time, once the facility is running at full capacity.

The company uses a roll-to-roll electroplating processes to manufacture its roll-up solar panels, a technique it has claimed will keep the costs of its CIGS (or thin-film) solar panels competitive versus other technologies on the market. While SoloPower has attracted a lot of cash and support, it faces stiff competition from Chinese manufacturers like Trina Solar, and public companies like First Solar, also in the thin-film game.

Okay, maybe not. But this one from Samsung, which has no special specs except for the solar panel on the back, was originally not coming to the US. And now it is. For $399. July 3rd. Word to your solar powered mother.

[via Laptop]

SunPower sells its solar technology and services to customers of about any size, including at the residential, business, government and utility level.

Let’s put the scope of the Total-SunPower deal in perspective. According to research by the Cleantech Group and Deloitte, for all of 2010, venture investments in cleantech companies of any stripe worldwide totaled $7.7 billion across 715 deals, and the solar segment attracted 24 percent of those dollars. Worldwide venture investments in solar companies for 2010 totaled $1.83 billion across 117 deals. In 2009, venture investments in solar companies totaled $1.34 billion.

[Ed's note: Cleantech VC money has never looked so Monopoly! The traditional oil and gas purse, on the other hand, looks bottomless.]

In a press statement about the SunPower acquisition, Total touched on its previous involvement in solar:

“Through its joint venture affiliates Tenesol and Photovoltech, Total has built expertise along the photovoltaic solar power chain to make this technology more reliable, efficient and competitive. Tenesol is a French solar panel manufacturer with an industrial footprint in Toulouse (France) and Cape Town (South Africa). Total is also a large minority shareholder in [U.S.-based solar technology businesses] Konarka and AE Polysilicon.”

The company is expected by industry insiders to reorganize its entire business, globally, around its latest acquisition.

With traditional energy companies like Total buying up solar at this level, and huge amounts of competition from Chinese solar manufacturers and developers, do U.S. startups and newly public companies in solar have a chance to survive without ceding control?

Cleantech Group chief executive Sheeraz Haji believes,

“We will see a number of winners in solar. In the U.S., category leaders like Brightsource and MiaSole will thrive as independent companies, while a number of others will struggle on their own and be acquired.

I do not see the SunPower acquisition as a sign of weakness, at all. They sold for a big premium and gained access to a huge new balance sheet, including a $1 billion debt facility that Total did through the equity deal.”

Making the case that worldwide demand will remain strong enough to support new entrants in solar (yes, even American ones) a report today from the International Energy Association (IEA) forecasts that “by 2050, solar photovoltaics will provide 11 percent of global electricity production.” That amount of solar power represents a potential reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by about 2.3 gigatons, equivalent to reducing emissions from electricity use from 253 million homes per year, nearly the combined populations of Russia and Japan the report said.

The partnership brings Google employees a discount on residential solar installations and services from SolarCity. On a worldwide basis, according to the company’s last quarterly earnings report, Google employs about 26,300 full-time.

Earlier this month, SolarCity locked a commitment from U.S. Bancorp that put them past the $1 billion mark in terms of financing capacity. Google becomes the company’s seventh major financing partner.

Rick Needham, director of green business operations at Google wrote about the deal in a company blog post this morning:

“[At Google, we] believe the world needs a wide range of clean energy options in the future, each serving different needs. We’ve already invested in several large-scale renewable energy projects…We think ‘distributed’ renewable energy (generated and used right at home) is a smart way to use solar photovoltaic (PV) technology to improve our power system since it helps avoid or alleviate distribution constraints on the traditional electricity grid.”

Google also put $168 million in project financing into the BrightSource Ivanpah solar power tower project. Back in 2006, Google installed solar panels at its own Mountain View campus, too.

Google’s support of solar infrastructure dovetails nicely with Google Ventures’ investments in smart grid startups. Their portfolio includes Silver Spring Networks and Transphorm, for example. The more homes and businesses are rigged up with solar panels, and able to generate and distribute power back through the grid, the more data such companies will have to process on behalf of utilities.

Broken records we love to hear about, though, are like these from cleantech ventures Lighting Science Group and Flisom (in Switzerland). Here’s what they’ve done and why it matters…

1. One Million LED Bulbs Made In One Quarter

On May 31, Lighting Science Group — makers of light emitting diode (LED) bulbs that are Energy Star rated — reported that during the first quarter of 2011, they produced and sold 1 million bulbs. In 2010, Lighting Science produced and sold 1 million bulbs in the second half of the year, according to company statements.

Bulk production and sales increases like this suggest that LED lights, which are more energy-efficient and durable than flourescent and incandescent bulbs, are becoming mainstream and more affordable.

2. Flexible Solar Technology Reaches 18.7 Percent Efficiency

Flexible, thin-film solar cells can now deliver more electricity per square inch than ever before.

Scientists from EMPA, Switzerland’s Federal Laboratory for Materials Science and Innovation, along with a Swiss startup called Flisom broke the energy conversion efficiency record for flexible thin-film CIGS solar cells, last week. They hit 18.7 percent efficiency for their CIGS (copper indium gallium selenide) flexible solar cells.

A previous record of 15.7 percent was announced by MiaSole in December 2010 (as TechCrunch reported then).

The new record means that electricity generated by thin-film solar will become more affordable, hopefully alleviating reliance on petroleum and coal for power somewhat.

The improved efficiency also means that the flexible, lighter-weight solar panels could catch up to rigid, silicon solar panels in terms of performance which would allow more consumer choice and competition in solar.

Image: Records, under creative commons via Peter Organisciak

According to a SolarCity press statement, the San Mateo cleantech company now boasts: 14 solar project financing funds via six financial partners; 14,000 solar customers; and 24 centers of operation in 11 states and more than 1,000 employees.

In February, SolarCity acquired two solar installers with an established market on the East Coast — a division of groSolar and the solar division of Clean Currents — to expand its business well beyond the sun belt. The company plans to use its newly established fund to finance its SolarLease and power purchase agreement offerings.

SolarCity’s nearest competitor, SunRun, also offers financing help to prospective customers, enabled via partnerships with banks and energy companies. About a month ago, SunRun closed a $200 million fund for solar project financing via U.S. Bancorp. Overall, SunRun boasts $600 million in financing capacity, compared to SolarCity’s $1 billion.