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With hefty funding, solar start-up takes on big guns
Palo Alto, Calif.-based Nanosolar is only a few years old, but it has laid plans to take on multinational corporations, such as BP and Sharp, in the solar industry.
The company on Wednesday is expected to announce plans to build a manufacturing facility in California that will eventually produce 430 megawatts of solar cells per year, making the company one of the largest solar producers in the world in the span of a few years. Nanosolar will also build a plant in Germany for taking the solar cells and fitting them into solar panels.
Cost is the company’s primary weapon, said CEO Martin Roscheisen. Rather than producing solar cells made out of rigid silicon, the company has come up with a way to embed CIGS (copper-indium-gallium-selenium) into thin polymer films. Ultimately, a solar panel from Nanosolar will cost about one-fifth to one-tenth the cost of a standard silicon solar panel, and expanding factory capacity will be easier, according to the company.
By Michael Kanellos
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
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