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The demise of yet another thin film solar maker

Ucilia Wang — Sun, 02 Dec 2012 21:25:30 +0000

The lights are apparently out for yet another thin film solar startup. Global Solar Energy, which was building a business around flexible solar panels, is laying off nearly all of its employees and stopping its manufacturing operation, according to Inside Tucson Business.

The Arizona-based company developed ultra-thin solar panels using the materials copper, indium, gallium and selenium (CIGS) to convert sunlight into electricity. Venture-backed Global Solar initially sold strings of CIGS solar cells to companies that would then assemble those strings into panels. Around 2009, the company said it would focus on making flexible solar panels that forgo the use of glass as a protective cover.

Flexible panels could be a good fit for roofs that can’t bear heavy weight, or they could be shaped to resemble – or become embedded in — roofing materials. But foregoing the use of glass meant Global Solar had to find another way to protect the CIGS from its chief enemy: moisture. Companies such as 3M in recent years have rolled out protective films for moisture-sensitive solar cells, but those encapsulants tend to be expensive. A Global Solar executive told me last year that the company had found a good barrier film for its CIGS cells, though he declined to divulge its cost or maker.

Global Solar’s star seemed to be rising when it started to work with Dow Chemical to create roofing shingles with its CIGS cells inside. Partnering with a large company meant Global Solar could lean on Dow to help promote its technology. But Dow delayed the launch of roofing shingles, especially given the home construction market was in poor health following the mortgage crisis. Dow finally launched the solar shingle product about a year ago in Colorado. It then began selling them in California and Texas earlier this year.

Global Solar had factories in Tucson and Germany. By Arizona law the company had to notify the state when it was planning any meaningful layoffs. It filed a notice in July about letting go nearly 40 employees. A Global Solar employee told Inside Tucson Business that the company was laying off about 95.

Global Solar appears to be a casualty of an imbalance of supply and demand that has persisted for two years and knocked out dozens of solar manufacturers worldwide. Major solar panel makers, including Suntech Power, First Solar and SunPower, all have shuttered production lines and posted losses as a result. Suntech recently announced its plan to scale back production and lay off about 50 employees at its Arizona factory.

Startups have had a harder time toughening it out because they typically lack the financial strength of their larger rivals. Most often times they need to be in an expansion mode – to build factories and line up customers – in order to move technology out of the labs and into the marketplace. Doing so when the market is experiencing a glut of solar panels simply lowers the startups’ survival rates. Solyndra, which also made CIGS solar panels, suffered a high-profile death last year when it was ramping up production and realizing it couldn’t compete against companies that were able to sell solar panels far more cheaply.

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Flash analysis: lessons from Solyndra’s fall

Ucilia Wang — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 18:48:24 +0000

Solar technology startup Solyndra, which has raised more than $1.5 billion in private and government funds, has suspended manufacturing and laid off 1,100 full-time and temporary employees. We conducted a survey and asked GigaOM readers for their views on the fallout of Solyndra’s decision to file for bankruptcy and what the future holds for the company. This research examines the survey’s results. It also includes an analysis of Solyndra’s struggles over the past two years to move into mass production, and to do it amidst difficult and volatile economic conditions. Companies mentioned in this report include Evergreen Solar, First Solar and SpectraWatt. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial.

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Report: Monetizing Digital Content

paulzagaeski — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 07:00:16 +0000

The worldwide online market for digital goods will grow amid a state of continuous disruption across all forms of content markets. Fueled by an ever-growing user base, migration from physical formats to digital distribution, and a proliferation of new connected devices, the overall market for digital goods will grow to $36 billion by 2014, up from $16.7 billion in 2009. This report examines the state of paid content and the various monetization and payment models across each of the various digital goods markets. The report examines key players and market dynamics in the film and video, newspaper, online game, music and social networks space relative to their paid content strategies, and includes a revenue forecast of each of these segments relative to the overall paid content market.

IBM’s Building Blocks for Greener Plastic

Jeff St. John — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 05:00:25 +0000

There are ways to make greener plastic besides making it from corn. On Tuesday, IBM’s Almaden Research Center and Stanford University announced a new line of organic catalysts that they say could revolutionize the green plastics industry by giving it a set of tools to build up — and break down — plastics in a more environmentally friendly and energy efficient way. While these new organic catalysts are limited to the lab right now, Saudi Arabia’s King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST) wants to try a pilot plastics recycling plant with IBM and Stanford’s catalysts that could break down polyethylene terephthalate, or PET — the plastic found in milk bottles, polyester and many other consumer and industrial goods — into its starting components, and rebuild it as a whole new range of plastics. (Oh, and it could work for bio-based plastics, too.)

“We can apply this and rip polymers, which otherwise would have gone into a landfill, back into polymer-grade monomers,” is how Jim Hedrick, IBM’s lead scientist on the effort, described it to us. Monomers are the starting components of plastics, mostly petrochemical-based, though the share that is coming from plant-based materials is increasingly growing. Polymers are the PET, PVC, polystyrene and other forms of plastic we all know and (gulp) love.

The IBM/Stanford work on organic catalysts is aimed at replacing, or augmenting, a line of metal oxide or metal hydroxide catalysts now used in a step of the polymer-making process known as ring-opening polymerization. These traditional organometallic catalysts work well for this, but can leave heavy metals behind that have to be removed or left as contaminants in the plastic. In fact, IBM’s research started as a search for an organic catalysts that could be used in microelectronics manufacturing without leaving trace metals that shorted circuits. Being able to make plastic without nasty heavy metal residue also opens up medical uses for the research, Hedrick noted.

Plastic recycling is another angle to the discovery, Hedrick said. If the new organic catalysts can polymerize, or put plastics together, they can also de-polymerize, or take them apart. Not only that, but they can do it at room temperature — today’s chemical plastic recycling methods need high temperatures, and thus energy, making them cost-prohibitive in most cases. That’s why today’s PET recycling is overwhelmingly mechanical in nature, which means shredding up old PET and mixing it in with fresh PET, Hedrick explained.

The work in Saudi Arabia is aimed at reducing PET to its starting materials in this low-energy manner, he said. It could also be designed to yield other materials that might have higher value than PET and be harder to make, he said — besides working at room temperature, the new organic catalysts have high “selectivity,” meaning they can be applied to yield very specific, standardized plastic products.

Just how long it might take to get a pilot plant up and running — as well as how much it might cost — Hedrick wasn’t able to say just yet. How well the new technology might compete with traditional ways of making plastic may depend in part on the growth of government mandates and private initiatives into greener plastics, he noted.

How green is plastic getting? While there’s no doubt that more eco-friendly plastic is in demand, it’s still a tiny share of the market, according to Frederick Scheer, CEO of bioplastics maker Cereplast. The market for plant-based resins used to create plastics, for example, is expected to grow from about $1 billion in 2007 to about $10 billion in 2020, he said — but that’s out of an overall resins market of about $2.5 trillion in 2009. Cereplast is now working on expanding bioplastics from their traditional place in the plastic bags and spoons category to more durable plastics, such as cellphone cases.

Other companies are tackling different angles on the green plastic business. Novomer, a startup that uses recycled carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide to make polymers and plastics, raised $14 million in August, and algae-to-ethanol startup Algenol Biofuels told the New York Times in June that it was working with Dow Chemical on a plant to make ethanol, at first for fuel, but later as a replacement for natural gas in plastics making.

No doubt the more than 80 members of the Biodegradable Products Institute, among them BASF, DuPont, GeorgiaPacific, Dow and Cargill’s bioplastic subsidiary NatureWorks, are interested in ways to make their products cheaper, stronger and cleaner. But beyond the work of a few other university researchers, Hedrick isn’t sure if the big plastics companies are working on organic catalysis — or, as he speculates, “If they are, they’re not telling us.”

Image courtesy of NatureWorks.

Algenol, Dow Chemical Team Up on Algae Fuel Plant

Katie Fehrenbacher — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 12:00:21 +0000

The demise of a well-funded algae fuel company earlier this year doesn’t seem to be deterring startups, or oil and plastics companies, from working on new algae fuel tech. This morning Algenol Biofuels, a Naples, Fla.-based company that uses carbon dioxide from power plants to grow algae in order to make ethanol, tells the New York Times that it is building a demonstration plant with Dow Chemical on a 24-acre site at Dow Chemical’s property in Freeport, Texas, which will house 3,100 bioreactors (clear troughs that grow algae) that will be able to produce up to 100,000 gallons of ethanol per year.

Dow Chemical will provide the plastic material for the bioreactors. It’s interested in Algenol’s algae tech in order to use the ethanol produced as an ingredient for plastics to replace the use of natural gas. While many companies are working on ways to create ethanol to power vehicles, the bioplastics space has been relatively neglected. For the demo project Algenol is also working with researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology, the Membrane Technology and Research, and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory to improve the process and study algae fuel.

Algenol was founded in 2006 and uses a slightly different approach to algae fuel than its competitors. While most algae-to-fuel startups (15 listed here) grow algae so they can process the algae directly into fuel, Algenol collects ethanol vapors from the algae, which involves neither killing the plants nor the use of an expensive refining process. The company has reportedly raised $70 million in private backing to build out its innovation and beyond the Dow Chemical partnership Algenol has said it has an agreement with Sonora Fields (a wholly owned subsidiary of Mexican-owned BioFields) to build an $850 million project that will deliver a billion gallons of fuel a year.

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Vid-Biz: Dow Chemical, Turner, MediaFLO

Chris Albrecht — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 17:04:57 +0000

Dow Chemical Creates Web Video Series; the three-year old “Human Element” campaign, aimed at showing how the chemical company is working on global problems, expands to the web. (AdWeek)

Turner’s Contextual TV Ads Launch; media buyers Starcom and Magna Global sign up for the service that better targets ads to content within shows. (Broadcasting & Cable) (previous coverage)

MediaFLO Bulks Up Mobile TV Offerings; My Own Worst Enemy, The Ex-List, and CSI among the new shows being offered by the service. (MediaPost)

Stream Live Video from Your Blackberry; Next2Friends announces support for the Blackberry Curve and Pearl. (jkOnTheRun)

Olympics Were a Loss for NBC; despite generating $1 billion in revenue, the network recorded a loss for the event, the size of which it hasn’t undisclosed. (The Hollywood Reporter)

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Parallels Poker: double-up with two additional licenses at $20 each

Kevin C. Tofel — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 19:08:17 +0000

Just got an e-mail that’s too good to keep to myself. And if you like this one, I’ve got a few thousand more in my Junk Mail I can send your way. ;) I’m kidding, this one is worth it if you’ve been holding back on another Parallels license for your Mac. Or Macs (plural), as the case may be.

You can grab a two-pack of Parallels Desktop 3.0 licenses for $39.99, which is a huge savings. A single client license normally retails for $79.99 direct, although you’re sure to find better deals than that if you shop online. Still: $20 a pop? I don’t think that can be beat. July 6th is the last day for this deal. I should point out that I never upgraded my Parallels license from the 2.x version and the e-mail says that the deal is for folks who previously purchased Parallels Desktop 3.0. I’m not one of them, but I was able to add the deal to my cart, so who knows? And what’s with all of the multiple Apple deals today… this deal is optimal for a three Mac household, while JVC’s new product works for homes with two iPods.

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And the latest OS install on my UMPC is…

Kevin C. Tofel — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 18:45:00 +0000

I think I’ve had my new Samsung Q1 Ultra Premium UMPC for around six weeks now. In that time, I’ve run Windows XP Tablet Edition (which came pre-installed), Windows Vista and even Mac OS X. It’s time to settle down now and that means I need an operating system for the long haul. Yes, I might do more experimenting, perhaps with a Linux distro or two, but I need my UMPC to be usable and rock-solid for everyday mobile use. So I’ve just wiped the drive and made a choice. Many of you would choose otherwise, but I went with Microsoft Windows Vista.

Let me clarify one point right from the beginning. I’ve now run Vista on UMPCs with a 900 MHz Celeron, a 1 GHz Pentium M and most recently, a 1.33 GHz Core Solo CPU. The experience obviously varies with different equipment. However, one thing has remained constant: the overall performance is greatly enhanced with 2 GB of memory. If I didn’t upgrade the RAM on the Q1 Ultra Premium, my choice would have been Windows XP.So why did I go with Vista? There’s a few reasons and these reasons are personal to me. I won’t go into every possible pro and con here, but instead, I’ll hit the main points. I fully expect that others might make a different choice because logically, they have different needs and requirements.The main reason I made this choice is for the inking experience. Bar none, Vista offers the best and most integrated Tablet PC experience over any other option. The Tablet Edition of XP isn’t even what I’d call a close second. Yes, it’s very usable, but by comparison it feels like an add-on feature at best. Ink, and to a lesser extent, touch, permeates the operating system in a way that makes it a part of the operating system. Obviously, if ink isn’t important to you on a UMPC, you’re more likely to go with XP for performance reasons.While I could use the split QWERTY keyboard on the Q1UP, it’s usually my last option. When out and about with the device, I carry a Bluetooth keyboard with me. For heavy text entry, it’s my tool of choice. But when I’m sitting around the house or enjoying a nice day on the deck, I really don’t want to balance a keyboard on my lap. It’s far more effective to whip out a stylus and ink for a little input. I’m sure the integrated QWERTY keyboard works well for many people, but it simply doesn’t for me. The keys are too small for prolonged use and I don’t like darting my eyes back-and-forth as I search for keys. I’ve tested my input speed and I’m far and away a faster inker than keyboarder with the split keyboard. It doesn’t hurt that Vista’s handwriting recognition learns to become more accurate over time as well.The second reason I opted for Vista relates to my point of clarification above. Simply put: the hardware I have can handle it quite well. No, the UMPC I have isn’t a desktop-class device, but it does have a notebook-class processor in the Intel Core Solo. Coupled with the 2 GB of memory, the integrated Intel 945 graphics chipset, 80 GB hard drive and 1024 x 600 touchscreen, I’ve got a very capable device that makes for a positive computing experience with Vista. I’m certain that folks using XP will point out “When I use [insert application name or feature here], it’s much faster in XP”. That may well be and if so, I say: great! But again, everyone’s needs are different and we all value different aspects of our computing experience in a personal way.Another reason for my choice: I’ve somehow avoided some of the performance issues that many others have unfortunately experienced. Call it luck of the draw, but I never saw any major disk thrashing and when I sleep and resume my device with Vista, it only takes a few seconds. I rarely shut my device down so boot times are a non-issue. I don’t think I’ve done anything special to avoid this situation and I suspect that part of the reason for it is that I don’t install tons of third-party applications. I’m a pretty basic web-worker these days and I gravitate more towards web applications over installed applications.Staying with XP is certainly a strong consideration. Many people would do just that due to personal experiences or second-hand horror stories with Vista. Honestly, folks are justified to keep XP for their needs. For me though, there’s no compelling reason to go with XP over Vista. I end up losing functionality (out of the box) in terms of ink integration and I don’t need the performance of my UMPC to compare with my Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro. It wouldn’t with XP anyway. Make no mistake: not everyone needs or wants Vista and I suspect Windows XP will be around far longer than folks think. Still, for my needs with the current device I own, Vista is a solid choice for me at the moment.

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GreatPoint Energy: Going Commercial, Grabs FutureGen Exec

Katie Fehrenbacher — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 07:00:03 +0000

One of the most well-funded cleantech startups in 2007, GreatPoint Energy, is using its more than $115 million in funding to tread a path toward commercializing its clean-coal technology.

This week the company, which converts coal and other fossil fuels into pipeline-quality natural gas and then captures and stores the associated carbon, said it has gotten successful results from tests at its pilot facility in Des Plaines, Ill., and is now working on the “immediate development” of a commercial-scale facility. O.K. good, so that 9-digit investment from high-profile investors Dow Chemical, Advanced Technology Ventures, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Khosla Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and coal company Peabody Energy isn’t all for naught.

The company is still figuring out where to build the plant, but the location choice will be made based on close proximity to a source of feedstock that can be converted to natural gas (coal or petcoke), a natural gas pipeline, and an aquifier that can store the carbon that will be sequestered, GreatPoint Energy’s Chief Operating Officer Avi Goldberg told us.

And in order to move commercialization along, GreatPoint has hired Jerry Oliver as executive vice president of commercialization. As Oliver was formerly the senior VP of project development for the group behind the now basically defunct clean-coal project FutureGen, he probably wasn’t too hard to woo away. Oliver will be in charge of selecting the location and getting the plant up and running, which Goldberg predicts will happen by 2011.

GreatPoint’s moves toward commercialization come at a time when there are more and more questions raised about how long it will take to develop the clean-coal technology. Climate scientists like James Hansen says clean-coal tech could be at least a decade away. We’ll see if GreatPoint can meet its three year goal.

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Peabody Buys Into Clean Coal Startup GreatPoint Energy

Katie Fehrenbacher — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 18:30:09 +0000

“Clean coal” startup GreatPoint Energy, which had one of the largest venture investments in 2007 with $115 million, is getting funding from massive coal company Peabody Energy. A nod from the coal company that fuels about 10 percent of all U.S. electricity, and more than 2 percent of electricity worldwide, is a significant validation of Cambridge, Mass.-based GreatPoint’s technology.

Peabody Energy (BTU) says it has agreed to become a minority investor in GreatPoint Energy, though the companies did not disclose the size of the investment. Peabody joins a long list of GreatPoint investors, including Dow Chemical (DOW), Citi Sustainable Investments, AES Corp. (AES), Suncor Energy (SU), Advanced Technology Ventures, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Khosla Ventures and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Beyond the investment Peabody Energy and GreatPoint Energy also say they will work on coal gasification projects using Peabody reserves and land.

GreatPoint Energy converts coal, and other fossil fuels, into “pipeline-quality” natural gas, which it can sell, and then captures and stores the carbon. The company says it can produce its natural gas product “bluegas” for about $4 per million BTUs (British thermal units), lower than the current market price of nearly $7 per million BTUs. In the latest press release the company says it has finished testing a pilot facility in Des Plaines, Ill., and has started engineering on its first commercial project.

Dirty-burning coal is a massive problem. About half of U.S. electrical generation comes from cheap-but-dirty coal power, according to the Energy Information Administration, and more coal plants are in the works, particularly in rapidly developing countries like China. While there has been more backlash against coal plants recently, (check out our coal deathwatch) many say that clean coal technologies like GreatPoint’s are at least a decade away.

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