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Next-gen solar makers still finding funding

Katie Fehrenbacher — Mon, 21 May 2012 13:04:00 +0000

Despite the fact that solar panels are quickly becoming a commodity — cheap and uniform — it looks like investors are still willing to put a small amount of funding into the next-generation of solar equipment. Three startup solar makers have raised funds over the past week or so — two that make concentrating solar technology and one that makes crystalline silicon solar cells.

Last week Solexel, which uses silicon gas to make solar wafers, closed on $25 million in funding, according to a filing. Bloomberg reported on the deal and said that the funds would be used to build a pilot plant in California, which would be a testing ground for a larger commercial plant in Malaysia. Solar panel maker SunPower participated in the round, as did venture investors Kleiner Perkins, Technology Partners and DAG Ventures, reported Bloomberg.

Solexel has been rather quiet about its technology, but says that its manufacturing process is less expensive because less silicon is wasted in the process. At the same the price of silicon dropped dramatically over the past year, so the technology will become more valuable if the price of silicon jumps back up. Other next-gen solar makers that focus on making solar cells with less silicon include Twin Creek Technologies, 1366 Technologies and Astrowatt.

The other two solar makers that raised funds in recent days are focused on concentrating solar technologies, or using mirrors to concentrate and focus the sun’s light. SolFocus, which uses mirrors to amplify and direct sunlight onto photovoltaic solar cells, closed on a $10.75 million round of equity. So-called concentrating solar photovoltaic tech (CPV) has gotten more respect over the past year.

Finally, Honolulu-based startup Sopogy makes concentrating solar thermal systems, which are essentially a condensed version of the massive mirror-and-lense setups that companies like BrightSource develop in the deserts. The company raised a $1 million round, which included debt and options, according to a filing.

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Solar-Powered Steam Courtesy of Thermata

Katie Fehrenbacher — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 17:26:03 +0000

The heat and rays of the sun aren’t just being harnessed for electricity. An early stage startup called Thermata, backed by Bill Gross’ Idealab, is looking to build a business around solar-powered boilers that produce steam for industrial processes, like paper making, food processing, and petroleum processing.

This type of industry already uses standard boilers, traditionally powered by natural gas. Thermata CEO Brad Hines said recently at the Cleantech Forum that the market for industrial heat via boilers is already a $26 billion business in the U.S. Thermata’s plan is to install heliostats (big mirrors) on the roof of a factory. The heliostats concentrate sunlight onto a receiver on top of an adjacent tower, which in turn powers the boiler to produce steam.

Hines said he thinks Thermata can produce steam in this way at a cost of $4.60 per MBTU compared to average prices for natural gas-powered steam, which can cost between $6 and $10 per MBTU. Beyond being lower cost, the process has far fewer carbon emissions.

However, you can probably already guess that it’s a complicated and expensive proposition to convince an industrial plant owner to commission the construction of one of these solar-power steam systems. It’s a separate tower, and then they have to connect the tower to the existing boiler and also install the solar tech on the roof. But Hines says even with the upfront cost, the pay-back period is two years for potential customers.

So far Thermata has a partnership with boiler and receiver maker Aalborg CSP, and has the benefit of the experience developed in the solar thermal incubation lab of Idealab. Hines was the founding CEO of concentrating solar photovoltaic startup Soliant Energy, and was VP of engineering for Idealab’s CPV startup Energy Innovations. Before that, he worked in NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab for 14 years.

Hines said that the company has been backed by $500,000 in funds from Idealab and is looking for another $600,000 from investors to build its first pilot system by 2012. Competitors include Sopogy, Chromasun, Heliodynamics and Cogenra.

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Solar Startup Funding: SoloPower Raises $51M

Katie Fehrenbacher — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 16:09:37 +0000

Looks like investors aren’t done pumping money into solar gear startups, despite some missteps in 2010. According to a filing, thin-film solar panel maker SoloPower has raised $51.58 million in equity and security from investors including Crosslink Capital, Hudson Clean Energy Partners, and Norwegian firm Convexa.

At the same time, Hawaiian solar concentrating startup Sopogy is also looking to raise $30 million, according to a filing also revealed Wednesday morning, and has closed on $4.5 million of that round. Yesterday, the CEO of solar panel startup Stion told us the company plans to raise between $100 million and $150 million in an IPO sometime in 2012.

Solar gear companies still seem able to raise funds, despite many predictions that 2011 will be the year solar investors will turn to low-capital investments like software and services.

San Jose, Calif.-based SoloPower has developed a flexible solar panel, which received UL certification in September: a certification required for installation in many U.S. regions. Its panels are made of copper-indium-gallium-selenide cells, which represent the next generation of thin-film solar technology.

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.

Producing these cutting-edge solar panels at scale will require hundreds of millions of dollars. SoloPower raised nearly $45 million in debt financing about a year ago, according to a regulatory filing. Close to half was paid to co-founders Bulent Basol and Homayoun Talieh, in what appeared to be the last chapter of a lawsuit settled between Talieh and SoloPower.

Back in 2008, Venture Wire reported that SoloPower had raised a grand ol’ $200 million to scale manufacturing up to a 100-megawatt-per-year plant (via VentureBeat), though Solopower never confirmed that round size with me.

In late 2009, SoloPower said it was looking for a $190 million loan guarantee from the Department of Energy to build a high-volume manufacturing plant, and would raise more funds to meet the equity-share requirements of loan guarantee. To date, that loan guarantee hasn’t come through.

SoloPower is also now reportedly seeking a $20 million loan through Oregon’s State Energy Loan Program for a 75-megawatt capacity plant in Wilsonville, Ore.

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SolFocus Founder Turns Up the Heat with New Solar Startup b2u Solar

Jennifer Kho — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 08:00:59 +0000

Gary Conley, the entrepreneur who founded concentrating solar company SolFocus, is at it again. Last month he launched b2u Solar, a startup which uses the sun’s heat for industrial applications like drying, curing and commercial baking, and is one of a crop of startups working to take advantage of the higher efficiency potential of heat compared to electricity.

At the Cleantech Forum in San Francisco last week, Conley claimed b2u’s technology can deliver the equivalent of 40 to 60 cents per watt – and 2.5 to 4.5 cents per kilowatt-hour – by generating heat directly, instead of producing energy that is then used to make heat. That makes it potentially competitive with natural gas today, and the economics look even better if the heat is also used for air conditioning, as well as heating, Conley said. (It may sound counterintuitive, but heat can be paired with a chiller to generate cool air).

Other solar companies that are developing ways to utilize the sun’s heat include Sopogy, which installed its first commercial project in Hawaii last year, Focal Point Energy, which is developing systems that produce hot water and steam for industrial applications, HelioDynamics, Chromasun, and the Center for Architecture Science and Ecology.

These solar heat systems are generally based on the same type of technology as the big projects that BrightSource Energy, Abengoa Solar and others are installing in the desert. A reflector directs the sun’s heat to a tube in which fluid circulates, and the hot fluid then provides heat for other applications.

But companies like b2u Solar are working to make the systems viable for applications that can use the heat directly — and at smaller sizes so the systems can be installed where the heat is used, avoiding transmission losses. In b2u’s case, the design utilizes an evacuated tube collector, normally used for hot water heating, and Conley claims the system can capture and convert diffuse light, not just direct light like most concentrators.

B2u’s technology generates heat of between 135 and 200 degrees Celsius. But one issue with these types of technologies has been the difficulty of using all of the heat. Even though making heat is cheaper than producing electricity, “if a system generates more heat than [a customer] can use, that’s not a payback,” said Jenny Chase, lead solar analyst at Bloomberg New Energy Finance. Solar-thermal cooling has proven more difficult than expected, with Chase saying she has yet to see a company make it work on a commercial scale and volume.

B2u believes its ability to use diffuse light will allow it to tap into the elusive cooling market. A case study comparing production on a cloudy day with a sunny day found only 16 percent lower production on the cloudy day, Conley said. And a demonstration project has been cooling successfully since Dec. 1 at a third of the current electricity cost for air conditioning during the day, he added.

With that ability, along with its temperature range, b2u believes its technology has plenty of industrial applications, including concrete curing, paper finishing, wastewater treatment and commercial cooking. “ConAgra drying onions and garlic for McDonald’s – that’s the temperature range you need,” Conley said. The company also hopes to replace some of the natural gas used to inject water for oil production, he said, and has just bid on one such project in the Middle East. All together, b2u estimates its technology could potentially address 30 percent, or $90 billion, of the market for industrial process heat and commercial heat.

B2u, which is seeking $6 million to $8 million in its first round of funding, is in final negotiations with contract manufacturing partners and plans to begin shipping commercial collectors in the second quarter of this year, said Conley. The company already has several demonstration projects installed in China and the United States, including one at the NASA Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif. that has been running for nearly two years. B2u also has formed a partnership with the Gas Technology Institute, a nonprofit to develop new energy technologies, and, together with its partner, won a $400,000 grant from the California Energy Commission for a demonstration project in Southern California.

Image courtesy of Sopogy.

PHOTOS: Sopogy's Small Scale Solar Thermal at SoCal Gas

Josie Garthwaite — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 21:00:58 +0000

Think small. That’s the basic design concept (if not the ambition) for Honolulu-based startup Sopogy’s concentrating solar thermal systems. The technology is essentially a condensed version of the massive mirror-and-lense setups that companies like Ausra, BrightSource, Solel and eSolel use on large swaths of land to heat liquid and turn it into power. As CNET’s Martin Lamonica has put it, “If giant solar thermal power plants spread across the desert are like a mainframe,” Sopogy, which is backed by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, “is making the equivalent of a personal computer.”

Today we have a glimpse of Sopogy’s tech in action, as Sempra Energy utility Southern California Gas Company (SoCal Gas) has just unveiled a new concentrated solar power system built by Sopogy and HelioDynamics. The installation is part of a 44,572-square-foot facility where it plans to trial and showcase its much of its cleantech R&D, including energy efficiency and green building projects.

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Solar Power: Photos of GreenVolts, Sopogy, SkyFuel

Katie Fehrenbacher — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 22:19:33 +0000

Too bad the convention hall in San Diego housing the Solar Power International convention this week has hardly any sun light. If so we’d be able to watch the innovative solar systems that are crowded into the building in action. Interspersed between giant solar panels from some of the major solar gear makers like Sharp, Suntech and Applied Materials, across the show floor, the technology of some of the startups — particularly GreenVolts, Sopogy and SkyFuel — stood out.

If there was a Best of Show award for displays, I’d give it to GreenVolts, which was displaying a system that uses 176 power units that concentrate light onto highly-efficient triple junction cells; called the CarouSol, it tracks the sun on two axis’ and can generate 3 kW. The setup had such a large crowd around it that GreenVolts director of marketing and communication, Michael Goldberg, had to constantly shoo eager attendees away from touching, measuring and taking pictures of it (photo opps for press only!) during a discussion with us.

Unlike GreenVolts, which uses concentrating and photovoltaic technology, Sopogy and SkyFuel use straight solar thermal technology. Sopogy is a Honolulu-based five-year-old company that makes small-scale solar thermal systems, which are condensed versions of the setups that use mirrors and lenses to heat liquid and turn that into power (the photo is of an even smaller prototype). The company has strong roots in the state, with local investors and money from the state legislature to build and operate a solar plant in Hawaii. As of October, Sopogy CEO Darren Kimura told us, the company is working on getting a 1-megawatt solar system up and running to help alleviate Hawaii’s “highest electricity rates in the U.S.”

SkyFuel has been working on dramatically lowering the cost of an established solar-thermal technology that’s been used for decades: trough-shaped solar concentrators. SkyFuel’s innovation is its ReflecTech film material — sort of like mylar but sturdier. SkyFuel developed the material while working with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and the company claims it can bring down the cost of a solar system by 25 percent.

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S3 Outage: the Aftermath

Mike Gunderloy — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 15:00:00 +0000

As covered both here and on our parent blog GigaOM, Amazon’s S3 storage service had a bad day yesterday. (So, by the way, did their Simple Queue System, but an outage in that service is less noticeable to most web users). How bad? Well, they missed their 99.9% SLA, and now owe 10% refunds for the month; indeed, they almost came down to the 99% level where they’d owe 25% refunds. Unfortunately, to claim a refund you need to submit your server request logs to confirm the outage, which is difficult or impossible for most web worker users. If you do navigate the credit process, let us know.

Meanwhile, the effects of this outage have plenty of folks discussing other storage services, either as an backup to Amazon S3 or a replacement. The leading contender appears to be Nirvanix, who offer storage at $0.25 per GB/month with uploads and downloads at $0.18 per GB – not too outrageously different from Amazon’s $0.15 per GB month with uploads at $0.10/GB and downloads starting at $0.17/GB. Watch for some smart developers to come up with middleware layers that do automatic mirroring and fallback from S3 to Nirvanix soon.

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Intersolar: News From 5 Solar Startups

Katie Fehrenbacher — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 12:30:06 +0000

The first annual North American solar conference kicked off on Tuesday with a lot of insight and discussion from some of the solar industry’s bigger and more well-established players (Applied Materials. SunPower). But leave it to the wily fast-moving startups to upstage the big guys when it comes to news. Here’s five startups — Wakonda, Fat Spaniel, Recurrent Energy, Sopogy, and Ausra — that announced some interesting news for the show.

Wakonda Raises $9.5M Series A: A Boston-based maker of solar photovoltaic technology, Wakonda Technologies, says it has raised $9.5 million in a Series A round from Advanced Technology Ventures, General Catalyst Partners, Polaris Venture Partners, Applied Ventures (Applied Materials VC arm) and the Massachusetts Green Energy Fund. Wakonda explains its technology as a wafer surface treatment that enables low cost metal materials to mimic the high efficiency of more expensive semiconductor material. Wakonda says this tech is “a revolutionary method” that will reduce material costs for the solar industry.

Fat Spaniel Taps Open Platform: Solar monitoring startup Fat Spaniel is taking a cue from all those Internet and mobile startups that have learned to open their platforms to invite savvy developers to make interesting applications. Wednesday morning Fat Spaniel is launching its “Insight Platform,” or what it calls “the world’s first open intelligence platform for building, sharing and running energy data applications.” If this is indeed the first open platform of its kind for energy, it’s taken a seriously long time to get here. The energy industry needs to start incorporating the lessons of infotech a lot faster.

Recurrent Energy Raises Biggie Funds: Solar financing startup Recurrent Energy said Wednesday morning that it has raised a whopping $75 million from Hudson Clean Energy Partners. And the startup says that’s just the initial commitment from Hudson. Several solar execs have noted to me recently that if the investment tax credit, which supplies 30 percent of the cost of a solar system, is not renewed soon it could be particularly detrimental to the new startups that have built a business around solar financing. Did Recurrent need a deep-pocketed investor to reassure its customers in the face of a delayed ITC?

Hawaii’s Sopogy’s Got New Gear: Hawaiian solar thermal startup Sopogy has a new product to talk about — SopoNova 4 — which the company says is its most efficient and lowest cost micro solar thermal product available. Earlier this month Sopogy said it had started construction of one of its solar power farms on Hawaii’s Big Island at the Natural Energy Laboratory of Hawaii.

Ausra Going (Back) Down Under: Solar thermal company Ausra officially announced the opening of Ausra Australia, which will sell the company’s solar thermal technology to the Australian market. Ausra founder David Mills first developed and deployed the company’s technology in Australia.

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Hawaiian Micro Solar Thermal Startup Sopogy Breaks Ground

Katie Fehrenbacher — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 14:31:17 +0000

The small-scale solar thermal startup Sopogy, which we reported just raised $9 million from investors including the investment vehicle of eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, Ohana Holdings, says that it started construction on one of its solar power farms on Hawaii’s Big Island at the Natural Energy Laboratory of Hawaii. The systems, named Keahole Solar Power, will be built in phases, the first of which will generate electricity for just 100 Hawaiian homes; the fully completed project could be as large as 1 megawatt, to power 500 homes.

That’s still relatively small compared to many of the massive solar power plants that are being slated for the deserts of the U.S. Southwest. Unlike those huge systems, the five-year-old, Honolulu-based company uses smaller, “micro-” sized systems that can be used where space is limited. The systems are small enough to be used even on rooftops, and deliver on a scale in the single megawatts. Each individual collector can produce 500 watts, and the collectors can be strung together for more wattage.

Sopogy says its solar farm on the Big Island is the first to make “large-scale use” of its solar technology and will be built in phases, over several acres. Darren Kimura, Sopogy CEO, said in the company’s release that the systems installed are also stronger and more durable than competitors’ solar thermal technology so that the farms can survive Hawaiian storms and heat.

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TinyApps: Small Is Beautiful

Samuel Dean — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 23:00:45 +0000

When most of us web workers choose to adopt new software applications, they’re often big, robust programs. However, if you pay attention to small, mission-critical applications too, you can find a lot of really useful gems. One of my favorite sites for trolling for these is TinyApps.org.

At TinyApps, whether you’re looking for small footprint programs that you can stash on a USB key, or just a small application that solves a single problem for you, you’ll often find what you need. Best of all, the site is a directory of freeware and open source applications.

TinyApps categorizes the programs it collects mostly by platform, but also by types of applications. Are you looking for useful utilities for Mac OS X? You can find Mac Internet tools, text tools, wireless utilities and more here. The Mac portion of the site also houses a huge number of useful graphics utilities. Example: InstantShot! is a quick-and-dirty screenshot utility that’s small enough to easily tote on a USB key.

Within TinyApps’ collection of Internet tools you’ll find lots of interesting applets. For example, PicoPhone is a VoIP client with an 88K footprint.

It’s also worthwhile to keep an eye on the blog at TinyApps. It’s not updated daily, but the updates are usually interesting, and I’ve been pointed to several useful applications by this blog. Right now, the blog has an interesting discussion on proposed improvements to Apple’s Airport Firewall. There was also recently an interesting thread on cleaning up HTML, and free utilities for doing so. If you’re willing to consider small utilities that can get unique jobs done, TinyApps is worth paying attention to.

Do you favor any sites for small applications and software utilities?

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