There hasn’t been much new Bay Area manufacturing in recent years, but Palo Alto-based Nanosolar wants to change that. The privately held company plans to build a factory that will produce solar cells to generate 430 megawatts of electricity a year—enough to power 325,000 homes—making it the largest factory of its kind in the world.
“Manufacturing the cells in the Bay Area close to our [research and development team] gives us a huge cost advantage,” says Nanosolar CEO Mark Roscheisen, MS ’95, PhD ’98. “It vastly outweighs the benefit of building in a location where labor is cheaper.”
Scheduled for completion in late 2007, the factory will employ several hundred individuals. A site in San Francisco, San Jose or Santa Clara will be announced in January.
After selling several Internet companies, Roscheisen co-founded Nanosolar in 2001 with Brian Sager, PhD ’94, using seed money from Google founders Larry Page, MS ’98, and Sergey Brin, MS ’95, PhD ’98. Says Roscheisen: “Financing was very difficult to obtain [at that time]; the venture capitalists had never funded a solar cell company before us. Today, just four years later, a lot has changed.” By October 2006, Nanosolar had secured a total of $148 million in funding.
Much of the investors’ change of heart can be traced to an innovative technology that Nanosolar claims will lower production costs dramatically and make mass-production commercially viable. Photovoltaic cells are printed directly onto a flexible film using a copper alloy, which generates electricity by absorbing light. The increasingly expensive use of silicon as a semiconductor material is circumvented, so the cells can be produced at about one-fifth of the normal cost. If Nanosolar’s factory reaches its annual output goal of 430 megawatts, the nation’s solar manufacturing capacity will be tripled—the combined capacity of solar cell factories in the United States generates only 153 megawatts.
Nanosolar isn’t the only company pursuing the technology that one tech blogger calls “solar’s holy grail.” Santa Clara-based Miasolé is also pursuing the thin-film method, and other companies are racing to develop even cheaper techniques.
“These days, clean energy is a space of great entrepreneurial opportunity, and solar in particular will benefit from new technology,” Roscheisen says. “[But] I remember when it seemed as if I’d be the only entrepreneur in Silicon Valley to pursue this.”
—Marie Cannizzaro, ’06
