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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The German company is now called Soltecture to reflect its marketing and sales of an entire solar energy system, from its own solar panels to other equipment such as racks and inverters. The company is also moving from its original recipe of using copper, indium and sulfur (CIS) for the solar panels to creating panels from copper, indium, gallium and selenium (CIGSe).

“It’s time for a new chapter. Sulfurcell was a name based purely on technology,” said Henrik Krupper, chief sales officer Soltecture, during a press conference call.  “We now focus on optimizing and standardizing complete solutions around buildings.”

Soltecture started commercial shipments of its CIGSe panels to European customers two months ago, Krupper said. The company is still making CIS panels but plan to add gallium to them (CIGS) starting in the second half of this year, said Nikolaus Meyer, Soltecture’s CEO and co-founder, during the same conference call. The company considers CIGS its first-generation product and CIGSe the second generation. For the U.S. market, the company plans to launch the CIGS panels in July and the CIGSe panels in August this year, Krupper said.

Soltecture is one a crop of solar companies that have started launching CIS/CIGSe solar panels in recent years. This type of technology foregoes the use of silicon, the most common material found in solar panels today, in favor of alternatives that have the potential to rival silicon panels in performance and price. These startups are facing tough competition from the silicon technology competitors these days, however, because the price of silicon panels has fallen by more than 50 percent in the last few years. This price decline has taken place just as these CIS/CIGSe technology developers began to sell products and build new factories.

The change in chemistry improves the percentage of sunlight that gets converted into electricity. Adding gallium improves the efficiency by 1 percentage point, Meyer said. The CIGS (with sulfur) panels should be able to achieve an average of 8 percent aperture efficiency while the CIGSe panels get 12 percent.

A solar panel typically comes with a silver-color frame to box-in the solar cells, which make up the blue or black surface of a panel. Aperture efficiency refers to what percentage of sunlight that the solar cell surface can convert to electricity. Solar panel makers’ customers care more about the “total area” efficiency that takes into account the area of the frame. The size of a panel affects the efficiency calculation, and installers or project developers want to know how many panels they can fit into a given project space.

The average total area efficiency of a Soltecture’s CIGSe panel would be around 11 percent, Meyer said. Other CIGSe solar panel makers have reported similar figures. MiaSole, for example, is making CIGSe panels at 10.5 percent of average total area efficiency.

Soltecture most recently raised €18.8 million ($25 million USD) from Intel and other investors. The round, announced in January this year, makes it possible for the company to boost its sales and marketing efforts, which have become more critical now that the company has moved into mass production. The company, founded in 2001, started pilot production of its CIS technology in 2005 and increased that 35 MW of annual production capacity last year.

Like many of the fellow CIGSe panel makers, Soltecture wants to expand production beyond 100MW in order to better compete with silicon solar companies. CIGSe companies such as SoloPower and Stion have lined up public and private funding to build factories.

Soltecture changed its name from Sulfurcell to make clear its ambition to be a provider of a complete set of solar electric equipment, something Meyer told me about in January this year. The company has designed its ultra thin, black solar panels to become part of a building by replacing, for example, part of a façade. To do so will require more specialized designs of the racks that support the solar panels and the placement of other components. Soltecture has designed its own racks and outsources inverters and other pieces of equipment for its offering.

Aside from pursuing building-integrated projects, Soltecture also is targeting commercial rooftops and touting the light weight of its systems for those roofs that may not hold the heavier setup that uses silicon solar panels. Fellow CIGSe solar panel makers Global Solar and Solyndra also are promoting their gear for commercial rooftop and building-integrated market segments.

Photo courtesy of Soltecture

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The German company plans to use the equity funding to expand production of its solar panels that use the next-generation material — copper, indium, gallium and selenium (CIGS) — as the semiconductor to convert sunlight into electricity, said Nikolaus Meyer, CEO of Sulfurcell.

Sulfurcell makes both solar panels from copper-indium-sulfide (CIS) and CIGS panels, and its CIS panels have an average efficiency of around 8 – 9 percent, Meyer said. The CIGS panels, in comparison, should be able to convert 11 – 12 percent of sunlight that hits them into electricity.

The company is already shipping its CIS panels, and plans to start shipping its CIGS thin-films by the end of the month, though it hasn’t disclosed customers’ names. Sulfurcell hopes to start shipping panels with 14-percent efficiency in 2013.

Sulfurcell has taken some time to reach mass production. The  company was founded in 2001 as a spinoff of Helmholtz Centre for Materials and Energy (formerly called the Hahn-Meitner Institute), and started shipping the first panels from a pilot line in 2005. Its early investors included Vattenfall Europe and GdF Suez.

The Thin-Film Solar Market

Thin-films are solar panels that use little or no silicon for sunlight-to-electricity conversion. Most of the solar panels on the market today rely on silicon. Thin-film technologies promise to deliver cheaper products at comparable efficiencies, but they typically can only do that if they are produced at large scale. Many of them are small, with less than 100 MW of annual production capacity, while some of their peers that use silicon have hundreds of megawatts of factories.

Developing the process to make CIGS panels was a milestone for Sulfurcell and a key reason for the new funding from many existing investors including Intel Capital, Climate Change Capital Private Equity and Bankinvest Group, Meyer said. Sulfurcell raised €85 million ($135 million USD) in 2008 to nail down the CIGS process, and was able to show a 12.6 percent panel from its lab last year. The company has raised about $175 million since its inception.

Despite two decades of investment experience, Intel Capital is finding out what other VC firms have come to realize: Picking solar winners is difficult. Intel Capital spun out silicon solar cell maker Spectrawatt in 2008, and back then, the company raised a $50 million round with backing from Intel Capital, Cogentrix Energy, PCG Clean Energy and Technology Fund, and Solon. But as of last month, SpectraWatt was planning to lay off 117 workers and close its factory,

Solar Innovation

Sulfurcell’s factory can currently produce 35 MW of CIS panels, plus 5 MW of equipment to add selenium to make CIGS panels, Meyer said. By the end of this year, Sulfurcell should have 20 MW of equipment for making CIGS panels, and plans to produce 75 MW annually, he added.

The company has set up a U.S. office and expects to get the proper certification for the U.S. market later this year. Its customers include the Prime Group in India and an unnamed Chinese company that last year inked a deal to buy more than 10 MW of panels.

Sulfurcell has designed its own equipment for depositing the semiconductors: a choice Meyer said has enabled his engineers to better control the thickness and uniformity of the materials. These two goals are particularly difficult to achieve for the CIGS process, primarily because of the number of materials involved. Competing thin-film technologies use one or two materials.

One thing that makes CIGS attractive is that the most efficient CIGS panels that have been produced, in labs of course, command higher efficiencies than the best lab-made thin-films that use the alternative thin-film material cadmium-telluride or the more traditional amorphous-silicon. “You cannot be the best if you don’t develop a superior process yourself,” Meyer said.

Using its proprietary equipment has made it possible for Sulfurcell to move more quickly from CIS to CIGS, said Heiko von Dewitz, investment director at Intel Capital. “Plugging a new technology into an existing process allows you to accelerate the advanced technology in an efficient way,” von Dewitz said. “You don’t have to scrap your existing lines when you introduce new manufacturing technology.” In contrast, other CIGS companies have turned to using existing machines (often times from other industries) to manufacture materials, which they say reduces costs.

Sulfurcell uses glass to sandwich the CIS/CIGS layers. This design is more cost-effective than ones by CIGS companies that deposit the materials on flexible metal foil, Meyer said, because using the foil requires added steps of cutting CIGS sheets into strips before assembling them into panels. CIGS companies that use flexible metal substrates, such as Nanosolar, MiaSole and Global Solar Energy, will maintain their processes also reduce manufacturing costs and produce light-weight panels that can better blend in as part of buildings.

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Photo courtesy of Sulfurcell.

Just how much of that money may be headed towards clean technology, Intel didn’t specify. Intel Capital has invested about $125 million in more than a dozen green startups to date, out of an estimated $6.2 billion invested it has invested in more than a thousand companies over the past two decades. But given that greentech outpaced IT and biotech to claim top spot for venture investment in the third quarter of 2009 — bringing the sector’s 2009 VC haul to some $4.85 billion — it seems likely that Intel and the other partners in this so-called “Invest in America Alliance” will be looking hard at green companies to help them gain returns on their investments.

A sampling of Intel’s green investments to date span the gamut from solar manufacturers and smart grid software and networking startups to companies making more efficient semiconductors and computing products. In January it participated in a $31 million round of funding for thin-film rechargeable battery maker Cymbet. In July it said it had invested $10 million in five startups — demand response aggregator CPower, WiMax-based smart grid networking software vendor Grid Net, home monitoring and energy management provider iControl, Irish electronics manufacturing efficiency specialist Powervation and “hybrid-core computing” developer Convey Computer.

The latter two investments highlight Intel’s ongoing interest in making computing more efficient, whether it be through advanced software or power-efficient semiconductor manufacturing — a task that shares technology with the making of solar cells. Intel led a $50 million round for its own solar spinout, SpectraWatt, in June 2008, and in July 2008 put $12.5 million into Voltaix, which makes chemicals and gases for the chip and solar cell fabrication industry, as well as €24 million (or $37.5 million) into German thin-film solar module maker Sulfurcell.

While Tuesday’s announcement was aimed squarely at the patriotic call of boosting domestic jobs and technology competitiveness, Intel hasn’t limited its greentech investments to America — the company has spread its wealth among green startups over four continents. In October 2008, it announced a $20 million investment into two Chinese companies — thin-film solar module maker Trony Solar and electricity storage maker NP Holdings Ltd. It has also invested in Taiwanese efficient display lighting maker Applied Green Light and Dubai-based home automation maker Pulse Technologies.

He likens the Chumby platform to a cell phone’s application store and says, “What we’ve felt we lacked in the ecosystem is the critical mass of apps and services that can leverage broadband televisions.”

For anyone who recalls the Chumby as a countertop device for accessing widgets, you’re thinking of the right company. It’s merely joining a growing pack of those looking expand its efforts beyond hardware to become a platform. In January it signed a similar integration deal with Marvell to get its widget platform onto digital picture frames. For more on bringing the web to televisions check out the full story on GigaOM.

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Last month, Hemlock Semiconductor announced plans for a $3 billion expansion of its polysilicon production, mainly for solar cells, which some industry watchers said could signal a solar boom ahead. While chips are a matured industry, solar is just getting started — in June, research firm iSuppli predicted that investment in solar-cell production would match investment in semiconductor manufacturing by 2010.

Over the last year, semiconductor companies have seen the opportunity and rushed into the brighter industry. The overlap between the two industries is clear: chip companies have long histories of building low-cost manufacturing processes to shape and slice silicon, the key ingredient in traditional solar modules.

And the trend is global. Intel spun out a solar-cell startup called SpectraWatt and invested $37.5 million in German thin-film solar company Sulfurcell. IBM partnered with Tokyo Ohka Kogyo to develop thin-film solar panels. National Semiconductor launched a solar-inverter technology called SolarMagic. Semiconductor Manufacturing International announced plans to make polysilicon for solar cells, and Tokyo Electron and Sharp also announced a joint venture to develop new solar-manufacturing equipment.

But it’s unclear whether the solar industry really makes sense as a semiconductor savior. After all, a number of analysts have predicted that the solar market could be darker over the next few years, with a solar-panel oversupply, and a drop in module prices likely coming. The slowing of global economies also means more businesses and home owners — and even government agencies — could delay or reject spending the upfront costs needed to install a solar-power system.

Subsidies in the hottest solar markets, like Spain, could also shrink as those markets mature more. Spain’s new solar program, approved in September, set a 500-megawatt limit for solar incentives next year and a 460-megawatt cap for 2010, which could significantly slow installations in the country. And while programs in the United States, Italy, France, Portugal and Greece will take up some of the slack, they probably won’t be able to pick up all of it, according to Jenny Chase, senior analyst with New Energy Finance.

Not all semiconductor insiders believe that solar is the way to go. Novellus Systems CEO Rick Hill in September said he doesn’t believe that solar makes the most sense for chip companies. Mark LaPedus at the chip industry publication EE Times wrote this week that he’s “a little disappointed” with the adoption rates in solar and thinks that green for the chip industry is “somewhat overrated.” And Cypress Semiconductor bucked the trend in September when it gave away its remaining shares of solar-manufacturer SunPower.

But with all the activity, it’s clear that many semiconductor companies believe they have something to offer. And in a soft semiconductor market, where layoffs are the order of the day, it wouldn’t be surprising if even more companies turned to solar to hedge their bets. Aaron Thurlow, global sales channel manager for National Semi’s renewable-energy segment, said he expects that will happen. “It’s probably still early [in the shift] for some of the large companies, but it’s starting now and it’s very exciting,” he said.

The trend has long been met by both welcome and trepidation from companies already in the semiconductor and solar markets. At least since Applied Materials bought Applied Films in 2006, solar companies have been wondering if chip companies will bring in more competition and higher volumes of modules into the market.

It’s unclear how much of a leg up the silicon manufacturing background gives chip companies when they enter the solar market. Some analysts, such as Ron Pernick, a principal with Clean Edge, think that the natural advantage of chip companies in solar is significant. Others, such as Michael Rogol, managing director of Photon Consulting, say it depends on the size of the company, and that big companies may lose out to smaller ones on cost and flexibility.

Either way, Julia Hamm, executive director of the Solar Electric Power Association, said semiconductor companies’ involvement is important for helping solar companies deliver solar power at the holy-grail cost of grid parity. Companies that have reached high volumes in other industries can help speed solar toward larger scale and drive costs down, she said.

In addition, household names could help make consumers more comfortable with solar, she said. “There is value in name-brand recognition, to be able to go into a room of people who previously know nothing about the solar industry, and say ‘Intel, BP, Applied Materials, GE.’ People say ‘What, those people are in the solar industry?’ And suddenly people listen.”

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Cable & Wireless is one of those telecoms whose fortunes have followed the trajectory of William Shattner’s small screen career. It may have been Captian Kirk at one time, but now all it does is pitch cheap tickets and hotel rooms. Sorry, I meant it is a telecom company selling services to businesses.

Regardless, it is not such a bad rumor and makes sense for AT&T, which needs to make a move that moves the needle on its revenues, and C&W fits the bill. Cable& Wireless has a market capitalization of $8.5 billion and sales of $6 billion. AT&T clearly needs to do something — it is losing traction in the U.S. residential market at a dangerous clip, with customers defecting to wireless or cable companies.

A few months ago, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson, in an interview with USA Today, talked about making an audacious move — a big global partnership or a deal. “If you’re not pushing forward hard, nothing happens …. You don’t do that by making little incremental moves. You’ve got to make big moves,” he told the daily. Maybe this (buying C&W) qualifies as a big move in Dallas San Antonio!

image courtesy trekcore.com

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Voltaix, headquartered in Branchburg, N.J., was the former ChemOvonic division of Energy Conversion Devices, from which it was spun off in 1986. The company plans to use this funding to build out its business to sell into the growing thin-film solar industry and sees particular potential in the realm of building integrated photovoltaics. However, not all thin-film manufacturing require Voltaix’s chemical products, and startups are working on printing systems that don’t require vacuum chambers or dangerous gases to achieve even and cheap deposition.

Intel Capital has been increasingly investing in both cleantech and solar. The firm spun out SpectraWatt and led a $50 million round for the solar startup. Then earlier this month, Intel put some $37.5 million into German thin-film solar module maker Sulfurcell. Outside of solar, Intel invested an undisclosed sum into Grid Net, a smart-grid software developer.

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Intel’s VC arm Intel Capital made the investment as part of a €85 million (or $133.8 million) financing round raised by Sulfurcell, which also included Climate Change Capital Private Equity, AIG, Demeter Partners, Zouk Ventures and BankInvest. Heiko von Dewitz, investment director for Intel Capital, tells the EETimes that Intel invested in Sulfurcell because the company’s solar modules are highly efficient. The investment is also complimentary to Intel’s SpectraWatt funding, von Dewitz is quoted as saying.

Sulfurcell was spun out of the Hahn-Meitner Institute 11 years ago by Nikolaus Meyer and Martha Lux-Steiner. The company says it already started commercial production in 2006, which would make it one of the earliest companies making thin film based on CIS out there. Nanosolar started producing its CIGS-based (Copper-Indium-Gallium-Selenide) solar thin-film in December, and Global Solar has said it will start selling its CIGS-based thin film solar in July.

Intel is just the latest chip company to start investing in solar production. IBM announced a new joint effort with chip gear maker Tokyo Ohka Kogyo to develop thin-film solar panels based on CIGS in mid-June. Then there was the news last week from National Semiconductor (NSM) introducing a technology called SolarMagic, which it claims can recoup as much as 50 percent of solar systems’ output lost due to shade and debris. For years, Cypress Semiconductor has done well with its solar-cell maker SunPower.

Chip companies can see the money in sunlight. Particularly thin-film solar, which last week Lux Research said would account for 28 percent of the solar market by 2012. Venture capitalists are getting ready for the boom, too, and earlier this week a startup called Innovalight, which makes photovoltaic silicon ink for thin-film solar printing, said it had received $5 million in equipment lease financing from ATEL Ventures.

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You can sign up for a free developer account to see how it works, and flip to a pay-as-you-go real account at any time. The service is not cheap – it starts at $1.20 per letter in the US, including paper, envelope, printing, folding, address verification, and postage. There are discounts available for higher volumes, starting at $100 in prepayment, that can bring the cost down to 79 cents per letter. But if you’re dealing with a high-volume application, it might be cost-competitive with printing and sending the letters yourself.

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