Alta unveiled two designs on Friday that are charging mats of 10-watts and 20-watts, both of which are much smaller than other solar charging mats out there. Alta plans to make the cells at its existing, 2 MW production line and hire another manufacturer to put the cells into the mats.

The company’s CEO, Chris Norris, told us Alta also plans to announce a military contract within the month, and from there raise a new round of funding in 2013 to build a 40MW factory, which could end up being located in Asia. Alta Devices was founded in 2007 and has raised $120 million in venture capital from investors such as Kleiner Perkins and Dow Chemical.

Solar-powered soldiers

A soldier’s pack could weigh 100 pounds, and over a third of that are batteries to power various communications and safety devices. Alta claims its solar chargers could reduce that battery heft by 70 percent, or roughly 25 pounds.

The company says it can pack more charging power into a small footprint than other solar cell developers because it’s developed a process for harvesting more energy from a set of materials that already are inherently better at turning sunlight into electricity than the more common materials. Alta’s solar cells can convert a whopping 28.8 percent of the sunlight they take in into electricity, compared with the mid- to high-teens that most common solar cells on the market can achieve today.

Why isn’t Alta targeting rooftop solar panels yet? Currently Alta’s panels are more expensive than the less efficient but abundant solar cells that have been flooding the market in recent years. So Alta had to look elsewhere for its initial set of customers, and the military, unlike utilities, power plant builders, and home owners, are more willing to pay a premium for more power in a small space. Down the road when Alta decreases its manufacturing costs, it could go after rooftops.

Alta is hardly alone among the solar manufacturing startups that have been forced to pivot their business plans because the market for conventional solar panels has way too many suppliers. That imbalance of supply and demand has caused high-profile bankruptcies of startups who couldn’t reduce their production costs quick enough. Solyndra, Abound Solar, Global Solar Energy and Twin Creeks Technologies are among the startup casualties.

The challenges that Alta and other solar startups have faced also are plaguing companies working on batteries for electric cars. Electric car sales haven’t grown as quickly as expected by tech companies, and that has sent battery developers to look for alternative markets, such as consumer electronics. But even there, the startups face tough competition from battery giants that have ruled the world of computers, cell phone and other mobile devices for a long time.

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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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Beck tells us he would like to line up $130–$150 million for a new CIGS manufacturing process, and he would like to take that technology to its first commercial shipments in about three years. While the investment isn’t all that exorbitant, considering how much money venture capitalists pumped into Solyndra (roughly $1 billion) and Nanosolar (more than $500 million by mid-2008), the proposal may not be so enticing these days — and Beck knows it.

“For venture capitalists it’s too much money. For large corporations, it’s viewed as too risky,” Beck said.

First Solar days

During Beck’s keynote talk and interview at the Photon Thin Film Conference in San Francisco on Wednesday, he said that his team at First Solar was working on a 96 MW CIGS pilot line that could produce a 10 percent efficient panel initially, which was higher than his first projections of a 7–8 percent efficient panel. The efficiency also went up to an average of 11 percent after five months of running the line, Beck said.

Then the infamous silicon solar panel price collapse occurred that forced makers of other types of solar panels to lower prices as well. First Solar made the difficult decision to shut its secretive CIGS workshop. Many startups and their venture capital investors have pumped billions of dollars into commercializing CIGS technology, but it has yet to fulfill its promise. First Solar “saw its profits go away, and it had a system business that needed cash,” Beck said. “I wanted a joint venture (to continue CIGS development), but that was not what First Solar wanted.” The CIGS development work was 80 percent from completion, he added.

Before First Solar, Beck spent a big chunk of his career working on CIGS solar technology, and he was the lead scientist at Solyndra for nearly three years, as well as at Global Solar Energy, another CIGS thin film maker, in Arizona.

Life after First Solar

Beck doesn’t want to give up working on CIGS technology, but he acknowledged that finding investors to support his work will be tough these days. Many CIGS companies are young players that have yet to produce solar panels at any big scale. Some, like Stion and SoloPower, have small 10 MW pilot lines at their headquarters and are now trying to build their first commercial-scale factories.

Nanosolar just got a new CEO earlier this month after having shipped 10 MW (even though it was supposed to have started commercial production in late 2007). MiaSole is really pushing up the efficiency of its solar panels and can now claim that 13.5 percent of its business is making solar panels — which is a higher figure than rivals such as Nanosolar and Stion — but it sorely needs a buyer or some other form of investor to survive.

Meanwhile, First Solar has told Dow Jones that it is still thinking about what to do with the intellectual property from its CIGS program. Beck doesn’t think First Solar will sell it, because it doesn’t want to let competitors get hold of a technology that could end up undercutting First Solar’s own in the future. “If they give it away, it’d be suicide,” Beck said.

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NuvoSun, founded in 2008, has been pretty quiet about what it’s been up to since announcing in Sept. 2010 it was moving into a new headquarters in Milpitas, Calif. The company makes thin-film solar panels using copper, indium, gallium and selenium (CIGS), the same materials used by a number of high-profile solar startups such as Nanosolar, MiaSole, SoloPower and Stion.

It’s also the kind of technology that has bedeviled bright engineers and managers, because many of these startups have taken a lot longer to complete technology development and reach mass production. Pearce was MiaSole’s founder and CEO and left in 2007, and he’s conceded that he, too, underestimated the amount of time it would take to reach commercial production at MiaSole. He remains a MiaSole shareholder.

The lone CIGS “success” story seems to be Solar Frontier, which is part of energy giant Showa Shell and began producing its CIGS solar panels from a new 900 MW factory last year. It’s set to supply up to 150 MW of panels for a project in California. We actually don’t know how successful Solar Frontier is – the company doesn’t divulge its production costs or profits, and it brought online that huge factory at a time when the market had a glut of solar panels and many manufacturers were reducing production or closing factories.

Spend less to do more

So how do you build a new company like NuvoSun at times like this? The answer, not surprisingly, is to keep costs low. Pearce said he’s been able to design and start running that first 40 MW commercial production line by raising a total of $47 million in equity and convertible notes.

“Our capital expenditure is dramatically lower than our competition. Most companies spend way more than $47 million just on their production line,” Pearce said.

When NuvoSun designed its pilot production equipment, Pearce says it kept in mind that the equipment has to closely resemble what it envisioned the production equipment would look. That wasn’t the case at MiaSole, which required a lot of changes to the production equipment and process, he said, so he’s learned that lesson.

NuvoSun has a team of engineers in Shanghai for designing its production equipment. It’s the team that existed at MiaSole and was let go by Pearce’s successor. Pearce said he folded that team into NuvoSun in 2008 to work on a new CIGS thin-film manufacturing process. He said developing and building factory equipment is cheaper in China, where the 40 MW production line came from.

The Dow connection

NuvoSun’s technology deposits the CIGS materials on stainless steel foil. After adding all other layers to the thin films, such as the transparent conductive oxide, the films are cut into reels of cells. Here is where copper ribbons are partially laminated onto the top of the cells to form the metal contact lines for transporting electricity produced by the cells. After that, factory tools cut the reels into cells, test their performance, then connect them into strings, Pearce said.

NuvoSun will ship the CIGS strings to Dow, which will then assemble them into shingles that are topped by glass (the bottom is made of a polymeric material). Dow is also working with other CIGS suppliers like Global Solar.

NuvoSun also plans to make solar panels of 0.7-meter by 1.4 meter, which would include 4 strings of 12 cells each. The company is making cells with 10- to 12-percent efficiency, Pearce said.

The company doesn’t yet have the equipment for some of the final assembly steps for making panels, such as encasing the cells between glass and adding other components such as the junction box. It’s outsourcing that part of the work out right now since it’s not producing products in high volumes.

The startup’s pilot line uses a 13-inch wide foil, but the 40 MW commercial line is using a 1-meter wide foil. NuvoSun is still doing test-runs of its factory equipment to make sure it can produce cells and strings of desired performance and can mass-produce them. The plan is to reach that mass-production mode this year and start delivering to Dow, Pearce said.

Although the company doesn’t plan to add more production capacity soon, given the solar market still has more supply than demand, it’s thinking about where that next factory might be. China is a likely location, because it can offer lower-cost manufacturing and a large market, Pearce said. He’s looking at maybe building a 200-400MW factory in central China.

The company has 56 employees, including five temporary staffers, in Milpitas and 40 in Shanghai.

Photos courtesy of NuvoSun

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Walmart is hiring SolarCity to install up to 15 megawatts of solar panels at 20-30 locations in California and Arizona. In its press release, Walmart highlighted its cash-rich ability to help lower the costs of the newer of the two technologies: solar panels from MiaSole that use layers of copper, indium, gallium and selenium to convert sunlight into electricity. First Solar, the publicly-traded leader in the thin film solar space, uses cadmium telluride as its semiconductor material.

MiaSole, a Silicon Valley startup that emerged in recent months after a few years of re-engineering its CIGS technology, began commercial shipments in small quantities only late last year. The company, backed by investors including Kleiner Perkins, recently signed a 600-megawatt supply deal with German project developer Juwi Solar.

MiaSole is one of a club of American companies that aim to popularize the use of CIGS thin films. Other members include Stion, SoloPower, Global Solar Energy, Nanosolar, Solyndra and Ascent Solar Technologies.

CIGS solar panels are thinner than conventional, crystalline silicon solar panels. They can forgo the use of glass as a protective layer, making them good candidates for projects that require light-weight equipment. SoloPower, Global Solar and Ascent all recently launched flexible thin films for paving over flat roofs or even integrating into roofing materials.

How much of the 15-megawtt project will use CIGS thin film solar remains to be determined, SolarCity said. Installations at Walmart stores in Mountain View and Stockton already have been completed. The rest of the project is set for completion by the end of 2011. Each installation will provide 20-30 percent of a store’s energy needs, Walmart said. The retailer already had added solar to 31 other sites in California and Hawaii before signing up SolarCity.

SolarCity, based in Foster City, Calif., will own and maintain the systems and sell the solar electricity to Walmart. Both companies declined to disclose the financial terms of the deal. First Solar has been a supplier to Walmart for some time, and the solar maker announced a $25 million investment in SolarCity in October 2008.

SolarCity has managed to attract a lot of investments to grow its business, including $90 million from U.S. Bancorp and $60 million from Pacific Venture Capital (part of PG&E Corp.) to finance residential and commercial installations.  Back in May, it announced it had bought the assets of Building Solutions, an energy efficiency equipment and service provider, in order to beef up its offerings beyond solar electric systems. At the time, SolarCity said the acquisition will allow it to sell products in lighting, cooling, water heating, among others, that help to a home and business use electricity more efficiently and save money in the process.

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Image courtesy of Miasole.

SoloPower, backed by Hudson Clean Energy Partners, received the certification for its “SFX1,” which is made out of copper-indium-gallium-selenide cells, which represent the next-generation of thin film solar technology. The San Jose, Calif., startup is one of CIGS solar panel makers that are starting to roll out flexible thin films, which they say can lower installation costs by forgoing a need to use mounting systems (for flat roofs). Another selling point is that these thin films can be built into roofing materials.

Just last week, Global Solar Energy, unveiled a flexible solar panel. Global Solar, based in Tucson, will need to get certification for its new product as well. Update: Ascent Solar Technologies, a public company in Colorado, also is launching a flexible CIGS panel (320-watt, 5-meter by 0.6-meter), and the manufacturer plans to show it at a solar conference in Los Angeles in October.

SoloPower plans to make its SFX1 an 80-watt panel that is 0.3-meter by 2.9-meter. It also has engineered a larger, 260-watt version (0.9-meter by 2.9-meter), which is undergoing certification testing now, Tim Harris, CEO of SoloPower, told us in an interview.

“At the end of the day, what customers care about is the total installed cost,” Harris said. “By being light weight and flexible, you can do a whole bunch of things that take out the total installed cost.”

Getting safety and performance certification is an important item on the check list for any solar panel maker, and it’s not just for the U.S. market. UL is one of the testing standards available and most widely known in the U.S., while IEC testing is standard for continental Europe. The boom in the solar market in recent years has prompted testing organizations such Underwriters Laboratories and TÜV Rheinland to set up labs in different parts of the U.S., Asia and Europe.

The majority of the solar panels on the market use crystalline silicon solar cells, which are fragile and rely on glass to protect them. Thin film solar panels, on the other hand, contain ultra-thin layers of alternative versions of silicon or other semiconductors and don’t necessarily need glass. However, the world’s largest thin-film maker, First Solar, sandwiches its cadmium-telluride solar cells in between glass.

CIGS materials can be deposited on glass, metal foil or plastic, but even those made with metal or plastic substrate often are packaged with glass. A lack of adequate materials to protect the solar cells from moisture and other environmental damage has been a big stumbling block, though CIGS solar panel makers say they are finding better solutions these days.

SoloPower can make its SFX1 model with 11.5 percent aperture efficiency, which takes into account only the area on the panel covered by cells. The total-area efficiency is about 10 percent, Harris said. The company has a factory that can produce 10 megawatts of solar panels per year, and it plans to install a second production line of 75 megawatts, with shipping from the new line to start in a year, he added.

Aside from Global Solar, SoloPower will be up against United Solar Ovonic, which has been making flexible thin films using amorphous silicon for years. Uni-Solar’s panels have lower efficiency, at around 7 percent, but it has gotten an early start in the flexible thin film business. Dow Chemical has also said it will roll out roofing shingles with solar cells next year.

Whether these companies can offer the right mix of high-performing products with low prices remains a big question mark, not the least because they will not just be competing against one another but also manufacturers of conventional solar panels.

Some roofing companies have talked about integrating solar thin films into their products, but the market for this type of product is still very new. Johns Manville, a roofing membrane maker, inked a deal to buy Uni-Solar’s flexible panels last year. Instead of building the panels into the membranes, however, Johns Manville is putting them on a layer of insulating material that can then be added onto its roof membrane during installation, said Brad Burdic, who heads the portfolio owner services at Johns Manville. Solar panels, in general, produce heat when they are generating electricity, and that could damage roofs and void warranties.

He added that the U.S. commercial rooftop market hasn’t been great, and noted that some of the utility’s own programs to promote larger-scale installations on flat commercial rooftops, such as the one run by utility Southern California Edison, have create business opportunities for only a small number of companies.

“I would say the business is not robust,” Burdic said. “Several large building owners have participated in the Southern California Edison program for large, megawatt-size projects, but the [deployment] resides with a few building owners and manufacturers.”

However, companies such as SoloPower and Global Energy believe the idea of integrating solar into building materials is a logical step in the evolution of the solar market.

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Global Solar, which in March said it was breaking ground on the solar field, previously had said the project would go live between September and November. Last month, the Gunther Portfolio reported via an anonymous source that it had actually been turned on at the end of October.

MMA Renewable Ventures, which pays the upfront cost of renewable-energy projects for commercial customers in exchange for long-term agreements to sell the resulting power to those customers, financed the Global Solar system and owns and operates it.

The system will help power the thin-film company’s 40-megawatt factory and is expected to defray about 25 percent of the facility’s power needs during the day. Any surplus electricity the system generates will flow out to the grid under a contract with Tucson Electric Power Co., which previously owned Global Solar.

In July, Tim Teich, the company’s VP of sales and marketing, told me that the factory was running at a rate of between 5 and 10 megawatts per year, with two of five lines in operation, and he said the plant was on track to reach its full capacity by the end of this year.

The company expected the factory, which opened in March, to produce about 20 megawatts of cells this year and 40 megawatts next year, then to expand to 140 megawatts of production by 2010. Teich also said in July that the company already had sold out of this year’s planned capacity by signing contracts with five unnamed customers.

The company also plans to build a second plant, expected to have the capacity to produce up to 35 megawatts of cells, in Berlin. That factory is expected to begin production this year and to reach its full capacity next year.

Founded in 1996, Global Solar is different from most other thin-film companies in that it doesn’t plan to sell thin-film panels. Instead, it will sell strings of thin-film cells that its customers will frame into panels. The company claims the business model makes it easier to transport its product.

While Global Solar hasn’t released its expected costs or prices, Jeffrey Britt, VP for technology, told me in March that the company expects its cost model will allow its customers to be able to profitably sell panels for as little as $1.50 per watt. That’s the threshold that Prometheus Institute president Travis Bradford had forecast would be necessary for thin-film manufacturers to survive a solar shakeout he anticipated as a result of higher supply compared to demand.

Of course, other thin-film companies also are aiming for low cost. No. 1 thin-film manufacturer First Solar (NSDQ: FLSR) already has smashed through Bradford’s forecast threshold, reporting a panel cost of $1.08 per watt — by far the lowest in the industry — for the third quarter.

Meanwhile, several other thin-film companies also showed signs of progress this week.

Oerlikon Solar plans to announce Thursday that a German factory has opened the first thin-film solar factory using its micromorph technology. Oerlikon had previously announced orders for its micromorph tandem solar line from Auria Solar Co. Ltd. in Taiwan, Pramac SpA in Italy and Next Solar S.A. in Greece, among other customers. The technology deposits two layers of micromorph and amorphous silicon, and the company told Earth2Tech that the technology will make it the first to hit the “magic number” of 10 percent efficiency for thin-film solar panels.

Ascent Solar Technologies Inc. (NSDQ:ASTI) also announced efficiency progress this week.

The company said its flexible thin-film panels were able to convert sunlight into electricity with up to 9.64 percent efficiency, as verified by the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

While other CIGS manufacturers have announced higher conversion efficiencies — HelioVolt Corp. has announced 12.2 percent efficient cells, for example — most of those been from thin films on glass panels. Flexible panels on plastic tend to have lower efficiencies than panels on glass.

Still, Global Solar in January claimed it was the first to reach a consistent 10 percent average solar-cell efficiency with flexible cells from its 4.2-megawatt demonstration plant. It’s worth noting that some efficiency is usually lost when solar cells are converted into panels, so cell efficiencies can’t be directly compared to panel efficiencies. That means Oerlikon might still be the first to reach 10 percent efficiency for thin-film panels even though Global Solar already has produced cells with 10 percent efficiency.

Image courtesy of MMA Renewable Ventures.

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