Now researchers at the University of Cambridge are studying the light-harvesting proteins of the deep sea Green Sulfur Bacteria to see if they can provide breakthroughs for solar energy and other electricity devices. The research is in an area called quantum biology, and the scientists say it falls outside of ‘classical’ physics, and into quantum physics.

Organisms that do photosynthesis use a network of pigments held in place by protein structures, or what scientists call pigment-protein complexes, where electrons are harvested. In many organisms as the electrons move through these systems they lose energy. But in the Green Sulfur Bacteria they are able to move electrons through their photosynthesis system to the point of harvest without losing that energy on the way.

Raising the efficiency of solar cells (which make up solar panels) is very important work for solar companies. The higher the efficiency of the cells, the more electricity can be created by the panel and the fewer cells and panels needed.

Solar companies have been working diligently on these innovations in recent years, as the basic low efficiency solar panels become more and more commoditized. For example, Alta Devices, makes cells that can convert a whopping 28.8 percent of sunlight into electricity. But those types of cells are far more expensive than the standard cells, and many are still in the research and development phase.

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In these 5 charts, we track the growth of solar power:

1). The amount of solar energy produced in the U.S. has risen 500 percent in 2012 alone, according to the Energy Information Administration.

2). The increase in solar production has to do in part with the growth of solar panel installation and capacity in the U.S. Solar panel installation is expected to rise nearly 70 percent this year, according to the Solar Energy Industry Association’s third-quarter report.

3). SolarCity’s IPO in late 2012 was one of the rare success stories for solar and cleantech startups. While some solar stocks have taken hits this year — due to over supply and super low prices — SolarCity was able to go public and its stock rose 50 percent on its first day of trading. The company, which finances and installs rooftop solar panels, originally priced its shares lower than expected, but the company’s stock price remains relatively high.

4). The price of silicon — the main material in solar panels — has dropped by half in less than two years, making solar panels cheaper to produce and to buy. The low prices, in turn, have fueled the growth of solar panel installations.

5). As is common with new commodity industries that grow rapidly, solar cells and panels are now so cheap to produce and make that there’s an oversupply problem. According to SEIA, there’s now 70 GW worth of solar module manufacturing capacity, but the current world capacity for solar modules is only 31 GW.

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The funding follows on SoloPower’s work this summer raising $15 million in equity, with a plan to raise $44 million total from that round. In March of this year, the company had raised about $13.5 million in equity while gunning for $20 million, and in January of this year, SoloPower also raised a $51.58 million round by selling equity and rights to buy shares later.

Needless to say, manufacturing solar panels is an expensive business, as Solyndra execs can tell you all too well. And like Solyndra, SoloPower develops solar panels using copper, indium, gallium and selenium (CIGS) instead of conventional silicon to convert sunlight into electricity.

Like Solyndra, too, SoloPower has a loan guarantee from the Department of Energy, and SoloPower’s guarantee, which was finalized in August, is for $197 million. The loan guarantee will help the company secure about 54 percent of the $364 million project cost, according to the DOE website.

SoloPower is among a cadre of CIGS solar panel manufacturers who have completed product development and either have recently started or planned to begin mass production within the next year or two. Its peers include Stion, the now-bankrupt Solyndra, MiaSole, Sulfurcell and Nanosolar. Q-Cells, based in Germany, also is a competitor and has started selling its CIGS panels in North America.

SoloPower launched a set of flexible CIGS solar panels last year. Instead of using glass to protect the solar cells from moisture, flexible panels use special polymer materials to encase the cells. Flexible solar panels are lightweight and can be built into roofing materials. But since glass is such a solid protective material, many CIGS solar panel manufacturers have opted to use glass instead of the newer and more expensive polymer materials.

However, roofing materials with built-in solar cells haven’t taken off in the market yet. The vast majority of the solar panels, regardless of whether they use CIGS or silicon solar cells, are mounted on the rooftop or on the ground.

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But what if the use of solar power could help data center owners save energy, reduce the cost of cooling data center equipment and guarantee a steady power supply? That’s the idea that IBM is exploring as it anticipates a greater use of servers that run on direct current (DC) and responds to queries from customers in developing countries where the grid isn’t dependable, said Roger Schmidt, an IBM fellow and its chief engineer for data center energy efficiency.

Using its research lab in Bangalore, India, as a test site, IBM is developing equipment that will make it feasible to use solar power to help eliminate power conversion steps that lead to power losses, which become heat and require the use of cooling equipment. Giant data farm operators such as Yahoo, Facebook and Google are always looking for lower-cost and efficient ways to cool their data centers.

Using solar to directly power data centers is rare, Schmidt said (he said he doesn’t know of any data centers currently doing that). That’s partly because solar production can fluctuate, and a data center needs a steady, uninterrupted supply of power. Marrying the two will require equipment and wiring to adjust the voltage and make sure power from the grid will flow in when not enough solar energy is produced.

The emergence of DC servers is making solar energy, which flows out of solar panels also in DC, a more attractive source of power supply. In a typical rooftop solar system, the solar panels come with an inverter that converts the DC to alternating current (AC) so that it can join the electric grid. In fact, the power that runs from a power plant to your home is all AC, and along the way the AC power goes through equipment to lower its voltage, because many of the appliances and gadgets we use run on much lower voltages.

More efficient conversions

Power reaches data center buildings today in AC, and then it goes through some AC-to-DC-to-AC conversion steps before reaching the servers. Although the servers take in AC (they are AC servers), it actually converts that internally into DC. Each conversion step leads to a bit of power losses; cumulatively the losses add up to a significant amount of power, and they are dissipated as heat. Many companies are working on reducing that power loss, including startups such as Transphorm, which counts Google as an investor.

Some companies in the data center world — from equipment makers to data center operators — have been advocating the use of DC servers and other equipment as a way to eliminate a conversion step or two, which reduces not only power losses but also the amount of money and equipment needed to keep the data center cool. Server manufacturers, including Dell, Hewlett-Packard and of course IBM, have been rolling out DC servers.

Adding solar complements this effort to create a DC microgrid by eliminating an AC-to-DC conversion step. Solar also can be seen as a more reliable source of power for data centers in places like India, where the grid can go down three to four hours a day, Schmidt said. The Indian government has also set a goal of subsidizing the installations of 20 GW of grid-tied solar power and 2 GW of off-grid solar by 2022.

IBM has built a 50 KW solar array on top of its software lab in Bangalore to run its servers. The plan is to add a DC server, an ultrafast IBM Power 775 (which can take AC power as well) and a “smart box” that will be able to take the DC power from solar panels and tweak the voltage to make it suitable to run the server, Schmidt said. The box also will monitor the power flow and make the switch to accept power from the grid when the solar panels aren’t producing much energy or not at all.

“If the move is toward DC power in a data center, the solar array provides a huge opportunity because it provides DC already,” he said. “We want to take advantage and hook directly up to our DC power server in that data center and eliminate some conversion losses.”

IBM, which sells not just servers and software but also services for operating data centers, wants to sell that box and the engineering know-how of wiring a solar array to power a data center, Schmidt said. He declined to say how long the project will take, except that it should be “less than a couple of years.”

Photo courtesy of IBM

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JinkoSolar outlined a series of events this year that eventually led to the 500-person protest and caused it to suspend its solar cell factory last week. But the Shanghai company never talked about offering to compensate the villagers, at least not here in the U.S., where it’s bound by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s rules on disclosing information that might affect shareholders or potential shareholders in their decision to invest in the company. There were no press releases about its waste disposal problems and offers of payments to villagers on its website or in SEC filings.

While the payments won’t make a big dent on the company’s finances, they do cast a negative light on a company that promotes itself as an environmentally conscientious manufacturer and a transparent company. An investor may not want to put money into a company that runs afoul of environmental regulators, offers to pay the victims and discloses it after the fact.

Now, the SEC rules on disclosure aren’t cut-and-dried and are therefore subject to interpretations by companies and their attorneys. The disclosure rules are there to protect shareholders by making sure that companies divulge positive or negative information that could affect their investment decisions.

In a report filed with the SEC in May, JinkoSolar outlined a list of risk factors that might impact its finances and operations. Among them is a discussion about its compliance with Chinese environmental regulations, specifically the local rules in Zhejiang Province, where the factory that drew protests is located. The report made a vague mention of how the company is waiting for an environmental approval for part of its factory and that if it didn’t get it, it could be subject to fines or disruption of its operation.

The revelation

Fast-forward to Thursday, Sept. 15, when about 500 villagers converged at the cell factory to protest fluoride-containing waste in a nearby river that they said came from JinkoSolar. The villagers contended the pollution killed fish and pigs, according to news reports. Media outlets, including those from the government-run Xinhua News Agency, reported (via Reuters) that JinkoSolar had failed pollution control tests since April and was supposed to suspend its operation until it could figure out how to comply with waste disposal regulations.

News of the protest made international headlines and has pushed JinkoSolar’s shares down by 36 percent this week. After a press conference and the press release early on Thursday, the company’s stock rebounded nearly 6 percent to close at $6.10 per share. Clearly, the company’s environmental compliance had a big impact on its stock.

The company said it didn’t intentionally allow the waste to flow into the river and outfitted its factory with equipment designed to “minimize environmental impact.” There was a one-day event in May when it found higher-than-acceptable fluoride levels, but the company said that wasn’t usual when starting a new production line, and it lowered the level to below the limit. JinkoSolar said it did have to store wastes in outdoor bins temporarily and suspected that heavy rains in August caused some of the fluoride waste to flow into the river.

Compensation coming

On Thursday the company said it knew about the waste disposal issue before the protest and in fact agreed on Sept. 7 to pay “compensation for the crop damage as well as for the death of any livestock and wildlife arising from the pollution incident, if any.” JinkoSolar expects the payments and cleanup costs to be less than 8 million yuan ($1.3 million). It said there is no evidence that the company’s operation caused a cluster of cancer cases.

JinkoSolar suspended the factory operation on Sept. 17 and now expects to restart the factory in early October.

Being a good environmental steward is particularly crucial for cleantech companies, because they often tout their products as eco-friendly. Even tech companies who are not in the cleantech world, such as Apple, are facing growing scrutiny over the environmental practices of companies that make its products in China. For a cleantech company, being forthcoming about its struggles with pollution control and offering solutions to overcome them is a more responsible strategy.

Images from JinkoSolar and Inyucho via Flickr

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The Sunnyvale, Calif., company said in a statement that it is shrinking its solar cell production in order to focus on being a silicon manufacturer. Calisolar was founded in 2006 to commercialize a technology to make cells from purified silicon. Around that time, the prices for conventional, pure silicon were going up to a few hundred dollars per kilogram, because silicon producers couldn’t make enough to meet the demand from both the solar and chip manufacturers. Silicon is the key ingredient in processors that power consumer electronics such as laptops, cell phones and iPads.

Purified silicon uses cheaper but dirtier metallurgical-grade silicon material, and using it to make cells requires a different process. The company says that purified silicon costs less and works just as well as conventional silicon, but there is skepticism about whether it can deliver the same quality. Calisolar built a small solar cell factory to demonstrate the quality of its purified silicon cells.

The company opened its first solar cell factory in Silicon Valley in 2009 and began shipping products to customers in 2010. Calisolar’s website says more than 60 MW of solar panels that contain its cells have been installed.

Calisolar bought a silicon purifying company, 6N Silicon, in Canada in 2010, and the company is continuing to operate a silicon plant there. The company also has an R&D center in Germany.

For a while, it looked like Calisolar was on a path to expand its business in both silicon and cell manufacturing. Back in mid-2009, the company’s then CEO, Roy Johnson, told me that the company was building a 50 MW cell factory in Sunnyvale and wanted to expand that to 200 MW by the end of 2010. The company currently has a 75 MW cell factory, a Calisolar spokesman said.

Prices for conventional silicon were falling quickly in 2009 because more producers had opened factories. Johnson said the company could still produce its purified silicon cells at a lower cost.

But the company indicated as recently as two weeks ago that cell manufacturing was no longer its focus. As we pointed out, the company talked about building a silicon factory in Mississippi and intended to sell the material to cell manufactures rather than using it to produce cells at Calisolar’s own factory.

Mississippi approved a $75.25 million package to help Calisolar build the $600 million factory, which will be able to produce 16,000 tons of silicon per year. The project promises to create 951 full-time jobs with an average annual salary of $45,000, as well as benefits, according to a press release from Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, after the state legislature approved the incentive package. There will be around 1,000 construction jobs when factory building reaches its peak.

The company’s current plan doesn’t involve shuttering the cell production plant. It says it’s “reviewing several options for the facility.” One potential use could be turning it into an R&D space.

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Apple’s solar patents

First let’s look at Apple’s solar patent applications. The latest was granted last month (via Patently Apple), and it is for a voltage converter and controller for charging a device with solar power. A good deal of this patent focuses on algorithms and devices that can monitor and control the way in which a portable device could most effectively be charged via solar, using both embedded solar cells and an attachable solar power source.

According to Patently Apple — which as the name denotes follows Apple’s patent applications like a hawk — Apple now has two solar-related patents granted and five solar applications filed in total. The other solar patent granted was awarded in January 2011 and covers similar territory, including a way to monitor and control a charge from a solar source for a mobile device.

What Apple sees in solar

In all of these patents, Apple looks at solar as a way to enable its gadgets to be charged in locations where there is no grid available and also as a way to generally extend the battery life of a device. Apple has long been willing to invest in ways to boost the battery life of its gadgets, including selling extra battery chargers that will still be able to hold 80 percent of its charge after a year.

Back in 2009, Apple launched a 17-inch MacBook Pro with a built-in battery. Lots of critics didn’t like the built-in aspect of the battery, but the lithium-polymer battery that Apple used could run for up to eight hours on a single charge and retain at least 80 percent of that capacity for up to 1,000 recharge cycles. Compare that with only about 300 recharges for Apple’s 13- and 15-inch models’ removable lithium-ion batteries. The longer life of the 17-inch model was also due to an adaptive charging mechanism — an embedded chip that monitors charge level and temperature and helps manage the charging current.

But the reality is that batteries on an individual level aren’t making all that much progress in terms of capacity and cost. Boosting batteries in the short term will come from things like software for battery and energy management, and perhaps — if it proves to be economic — tapping micro sources of clean power like embedded solar cells. In an increasingly mobile life, the plug is one of the last true barriers to mobility.

Extending the time between plugging in is also another way to target new markets in areas where there’s less reliable grid power. Yes, Apple generally focuses on developed markets and high-end goods, but Apple is no stranger to the need for finding new markets and developing new strategies. I could envision its one day looking to sell its devices in developing markets with less reliable grid power.

Solar gadgets

Adding solar cells to gadgets has been a sort of novelty and in a nascent stage for a while. The big barriers have been the price of solar cells as well as the tiny amount of solar power these tiny cells can usually generate. If you look at the variety of solar chargers for iPhones out there, the bulk of these chargers consists of an extra lithium-ion battery that is supplemented with a small amount of solar power from the embedded mini solar panel. In some of these cases the solar cell is more novelty than practical charging tool.

A startup called Konarka has been developing a next-gen solar plastic that could be a good fit for solar gadgets, and it is meant to be embedded in materials (umbrellas and bags), devices and buildings. However, Konarka has long been in a sort of research and development phase, and the solar plastic also has a very low efficiency.

But as more gadget makers target developing markets and devices themselves become more energy-efficient, these solar-powered products are getting better. Recently Samsung launched a solar-powered netbook that can run for 15 hours, almost double the 8-hour standard laptop, meant for the Kenyan market. The solar netbook is also supposed to go on sale in Russia, the U.S., South Korea and Europe.

And one of the barriers to solar gadgets has been slowly getting solved: the price of solar cells. As you can see if you’ve been following the recent spate of bankruptcies in the solar industry (Solyndra, SpectraWatt, Evergreen Solar), the price of solar panels and cells has dropped dramatically in recent months and years, which is bad for some of the solar tech companies but good for the overall solar market and solar consumers. The price of solar is pretty much the lowest it’s been in history.

Apple’s effect on solar

If Apple decided to launch a gadget with embedded solar, it could help bring down the prices of solar for gadgets even more. As Nat Bullard, an analyst with Bloomberg New Energy Finance, told me recently, Apple is “a fierce negotiator for components,” and if it’s interested in solar it could lock up low-cost supply deals for solar parts as it has with iPod and iPad components such as glass and memory.

Foxconn, Apple’s key supplier, has been looking into solar production and has been rumored to be investing in solar manufacturing in various ways. And why not? Solar is finally becoming a commodity, with low enough prices to justify the entrance of this type of low-cost supplier.

Apple has also been a leader in embracing new technology, when Steve Jobs deemed that the time was right. Then when Apple launches new tech into its cutting-edge simple designs, the rest of the industry tends to follow. As Bullard said to me:

If any company could reliably integrate PV into consumer portable electronics, it is Apple. Given its other devices, it would likely make the simplest, most elegant integration. It may sacrifice some nominal performance (and greater freedom of choice) for the sake of simplicity and robustness — as it has done time and again in the past decade.

Apple could be on track to sell 30 million iPhones globally in the fourth quarter of this year. Those kind of volumes could have a major effect on the solar industry, not only in the form of contracts but also as a way to educate consumers about the existence and usefulness of solar as a power source.

Images courtesy of Flickr user mikecogh, Samsung, and Patently Apple

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Solon says it will instead focus on solar project development in the U.S. and will source its solar modules from partners. The company says it will also look to develop new solar products for the U.S. market.

The news is yet another sign that competition from Chinese solar manufacturers and low costs of panels are leading to consolidation in the solar manufacturing industry. Combine that with declining solar subsidies in key European markets such as Italy and Germany, and sales for many solar companies have been significantly disrupted.

On Monday, struggling solar thin-film maker Ascent Solar Technologies said it plans to sell a stake in the company and license its technology to Chinese conglomerate TFG Radiant Group. TFG Radiant Group promises to spend roughly $165 million to build a factory in China to make solar panels using Ascent’s technology.

The most recent solar earnings were pretty difficult to hear. SunPower widened its second-quarter losses to $147.9 million, or $1.51 per share, from $6.2 million, or $0.07 per share, for the year-ago quarter. At the same time, SunPower reported $592.3 million in revenue for the third quarter, up 54 percent from $384.2 million in the year-ago period.

First Solar also reported lackluster second-quarter financial results. The company’s net income dived 61.6 percent down to $61.1 million from $159 million in the same quarter a year ago. That led to earnings of $0.70 per share, down 63 percent from $1.84 per share a year ago. At the same time, sales dropped 9.4 percent to $532.8 million from $587.9 million during the same period.

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