Solar Firm Amonix Piles On $129M, Backed by Kleiner Perkins

Katie Fehrenbacher — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 15:08:05 +0000

Amonix, a 20-year-old company that has developed a 20-ton concentrating photovoltaic solar system for utility-scale solar projects, just joined the 9-digit funding club. This morning the Seal Beach, Calif.-based company said it has closed on a $129.4 million Series B financing round, led by the greentech venture capital celebrities at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Late last year Amonix closed on $40 million, and was reportedly looking to raised an additional $98.23 million, to help the company finance the addition of 300 MW of production capacity at two manufacturing facilities.

Concentrating photovoltaics (CPV) are a hybrid solar technology that uses mirrors and lenses to concentrate sunlight hundreds of times onto tiny, highly efficient solar cells. The systems are meant to cut back on one of the most expensive parts of traditional PV: the silicon-based solar panel. CPV units can also be smaller and more modular than their massive utility-scale solar thermal cousins being built in deserts around the world. There’s over a dozen companies working on CPV technology, most recently including oil giant Chevron.

Amonix will use its funding to — what else — deploy its technology and scale its business. Amonix has also been buying its way into expanding and in December acquired 2-year-old San Francisco startup Sunworks Solar, a developer of thin-film solar panel factories. Sunworks had developed a “platform” for utility-scale solar developments, including project finance, manufacturing services, equipment, work with local governments and other pieces of the puzzle for setting up manufacturing stateside.

Other participants in Amonix round include Adams Street Partners, Angeleno Group, PCG Clean Energy & Technology Fund, Vedanta Capital LP, New Silk Route, The Westly Group and MissionPoint Capital Partners.

Image courtesy of Amonix.

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Cleantech Market Overview, Q1 2010

Structure 09: What Will Broadband Unveil In A Decade?

Katie Fehrenbacher — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 23:09:09 +0000

Faster, cheaper, more ubiquitous bandwidth has spawned a decade of new applications that depend on it as a platform: Google, YouTube, Twitter, Hulu. The bigger pipes, the richer the application. What will higher bandwidth speeds, wider-reaching networks and cheaper access to connections produce in another decade? Well, if the panel made up by service providers and infrastructure gear makers at Structure knew for sure, they’d be on their way to producing the next Google. But a decade of bandwidth growth “will change the world another time,” said Kenneth Duda, VP Software Engineering Arista Networks. “We cant even imagine the possibilities,” said Tobias Ford, Assistant VP of IT AT&T, but suggested possibly bandwidth-needy applications like telepresence and telemedicine.

In a decade, the panelists, and members of the audience, said they hope that the bandwidth discussion moves away from focusing on speed — basically the speed is so high it’s no longer an issue — and moves towards the user interface and applications. In that world, when as much bandwidth as possible is readily and instantly available, service providers could start offering “broadband as a service.” David Yen, EVP and GM of the Data Center Business Group, Juniper Networks, thinks broadband as a service is on its way as service providers face a challenging market of escalating traffic and flat sales. Service providers need to offer more services to recoup the investment of the network buildout, said Yen, and “broadband as a service” can provide that. As soon as it does get here it will be “enormously valuable,” noted AT&T’s Ford.

But in reality, it could take a lot longer than a decade for instant, all-you-can-eat broadband. Internet service providers, infrastructure makers, and web services companies have been saying the same thing for years and there are a variety of challenges. One of the biggest hurdles right now for instant access is the transport layer, said Michelle Munson, President Co-founder Aspera. We have ways to engineer around the transport bottleneck but it’s still a limitation when it comes to massive data sets like those that come from an industry like genomics, Munson said. Mark Taylor, VP Product Management Content Delivery and Vyvx, Level 3 Communications, thinks it will take time for the service providers to build out the networks so that they reach everywhere, but as costs come down the buildout will speed up.

Whatever technical and market problems, it’s all about quality of service, said Juniper’s Yen — bandwidth, reliability and security will all be equally important (and leagues better) in a decade. And sometimes, it’s just not about the actual size of the bandwidth at all. Arista’s Duda pointed out since a Mack truck filled with magnetic tapes has a massive amount of bandwidth, why not move data around via truck? Cause that’s an issue for latency, ie it takes a whole heckofa long time.

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Solar Firm Amonix Piles On $129M, Backed by Kleiner Perkins

Structure 09: What Will Broadband Unveil In A Decade?