The Dog Days of Solar
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/428583/the-dog-days-of-solar/[font face=Serif][font size=5]The Dog Days of Solar[/font]
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It's not enough to have compelling technologysmall solar companies need a solid business model, rich partners, and manufacturing know-how.[/font]
Martin LaMonica
Thursday, July 26, 2012
[font size=3]The solar industry has done a spectacular job lowering costs in the past three years, slashing per-watt costs in half. But that price freefall, driven by the massive scale-up of Chinese manufacturers, has put dozens, if not hundreds, of solar companies on the endangered list. To survive, fledging solar technology companies are rethinking strategies that seemed rock solid just a few years ago.
The danger is clear. Abound Solar went out of business earlier this summer because it simply couldn't stay ahead of the blistering pace of industry cost reductions (see "
Abound Solar: Another Solar Casualty"
. Its demise follows the spectacular collapse of Solyndra and bankruptcies, plant closings, and restructurings at many other solar providers.
The story of 1366 Technologies, based in Lexington, Massachusetts, illustrates just how difficult it is to introduce new technology in a volatile supplier market. Of the many recent solar startups, the MIT spin-off has been notable for playing its cards right. In contrast to riskier startups that spent vast sums of money designing special equipment for making new types of thin-film solar cells and panels, 1366 focused on improving the existing silicon manufacturing process, which is more dominant today than ever. And it tackled a big problem: the high price of solar-grade silicon.
1366 Technologies developed a disruptive process that creates a standard six-inch-square silicon wafer directly from a bath of molten silicon. In the process it eliminated a number of time-consuming steps and potentially sliced the cost of making wafers by more than half (see "
Making More Solar Cells from Silicon"
. Those wafers are turned into solar cells, and many cells are wired together in a solar panel.
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