Green Options

The idea looks like a cool new version of the old SimCity computer game. You link a city to a solar manufacturing plant to a solar farm. The plant employs the people, the farm collects the energy and the city is up and running.

But this isn’t a game, it’s a pitch from Applied Materials, a Fortune 500 company known for making computer microchips.

They call it the best idea in the last 4 billion years.

Building materials giant Johns Manville, a Berkshire Hathaway company once best known for its asbestos shingles, has just announced that it is entering  the solar roof market in a big way.  The company will buy thin film solar laminates made by Michigan-based United Solar Ovonic, a subsidiary of Energy Conversion Devices.  United Solar has already started bringing green jobs into Michigan, and the Johns Manville connection could mean that more expansion is in store.

Dirt and reflection are no friends to thin film solar panel efficiency, and XeroCoat Inc. is on the way to solving both problems with a set of patented solar coatings that keep solar modules cleaner while cutting down on reflection.  The Redwood City-based company has just won a U.S. Department of Energy grant to develop a method for applying its anti-reflective coating directly onto assembled thin film modules.  A XeroCoat subsidiary is also working on a complementary coating that resists soil and dust, under a grant from the Australian government.  Along with lowering production costs and boosting efficiency, the coatings could substantially reduce maintenance costs for solar energy, bringing it closer to true cost-competitiveness with coal and other non-renewable fuels.

Solar venture investments hit a three-year low in the second quarter, the Cleantech Group said Wednesday. According to Brian Fan, senior director of research for the group, solar startups in North America, Europe, China and India raised a total of only $113.8 million for the quarter, which is down 7 percent from $365.7 million in the first quarter and down 86 percent from $834.7 million in the year-ago quarter.

SRS Energy, a developer of sustainable solar roofing systems, is launching Solé Power Tile this month, bringing the first building-integrated photovoltaic (BIPV) roofing product to curved roofing systems.

“Sustainability and green living is high on the consumer agenda for 2009, with so many homeowners looking to save money and also be eco-conscious. With green building playing such a significant role in the Obama administration’s economic stimulus efforts, it could not come at a better time.” - Marty Low, CEO of SRS Energy

A new piece of thin film manufacturing equipment with the unlikely name of Viper (TM) could help bring solar energy to the masses.  Viper (TM) was developed by Sencera, a North Carolina company that got its start supplying thin film hardware for manufacturing transistors and integrated circuits.

A new European Union funded research project called “ROD-SOL” aims to improve the efficiency of thin-film solar cells using nanotechnology.  The three year project has a budget of EUR 4 million and may yield a breakthrough for solar power.  

Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory released a study this week concluding that the solar industry could use many cheaper and more abundant alternatives to silicon, including iron pyrite — most commonly known as fool’s gold.

In total, the researchers found 23 alternative semiconductors, but only 12 are more easily found than silicon. Iron pyrite was named the most probable solution among those 12. Solar producers have often faced shortages of silicon, so even one new material would be a welcome jolt for the industry.

Sun Well Solar—a subsidiary of the notoriously poor CD and DVD manufacturer, CMC Magnetics—has announced today that it is one month ahead of schedule in the ramp-up of its new photovoltaic production line.

At first glance, the latest numbers from the Cleantech Group look like terrific news. After all, they conclude that 2008 was a record year for cleantech investments, with venture deals in North America, Europe, Israel, China and India reaching a total of $8.4 billion, up 38 percent from $6.1 billion in 2007.

But most of that money was dealt out in the first three quarters, with investment slowing significantly – as expected – in the fourth quarter.

According to preliminary numbers, venture capitalists in these regions committed $1.7 billion in 99 deals in the fourth quarter, down 35 percent from the third quarter and 4 percent from the fourth quarter of 2007. In North America, by far the biggest venture-capital region, fourth-quarter investments totaled $1.14 billion, a decrease of 38 percent from $1.83 billion in the third quarter and of 5.8 percent from $1.21 billion in the last quarter of 2007.

If you’ve ever flown into LAX on a clear day, you have seen the miles of industrial buildings that stretch out into the desert. Edison International has seen it too, and has taken advantage of one of those empty rooftops to install the largest solar panel installation in the state.

Mounted on the roof of a distribution center owned by Prologis in Fontana, 50 miles east of LA, the 600,000 square feet of panels will produce about 2 megawatts, enough electricity to power up to 1,300 homes. The thin-film panels were installed by First Solar. Even better, this is only the first of about 150 similar projects planned for factory and warehouse roofs in SoCal.