Fast Company, December 2008/January 2009

company ever to jump to the main stock exchange’s DAX 30—alongside BMW and Deutsche Bank and ThyssenKrupp. “That really feels a bit strange,” he says in his lightly accented English, his tone almost self-deprecating, like it can’t quite be true.

After lunch, Dietrich and I don lab coats and booties to inspect the driver of this miraculous performance—one of the fve industrial-scale Q-Cells production lines up and running in Thalheim (two more are under construction). Dietrich leads me to a wide space flled with labyrinthine snakes of gleaming white metal and smoked glass linked together by robotic appendages and conveyor belts. “It looks like some ’70s science-fiction movie,” he tells me, hollering a bit over the machinery’s hum as we watch flat squares of gray silicon cycle briskly through the system. These wafers, Dietrich notes, are barely half as thick as the ones used in 2003, and they come from REC, a Norwegian company that set up the frst wafer plant dedicated solely to the solar industry. We follow along as the wafers pass through furnaces and chemical baths, get smeared with silver-aluminum paste and “printed” with electrical contacts. They turn deep blue and develop a mirror’s sheen. In the fnal leg of the labyrinth, they are tested for efciency (generally bet ween 15% and 16.6%), stacked in cubes of 100, and packed in logoed boxes for worldwide shipment. The lines run three shifts a day, 24/7, churning out about 150 million cells per year—585 megawatts’ worth this year, scaling up to a full gigawatt by the end of 2009. The foundation of a new German industrial powerhouse.

Q-Cells, unique among frst-generation solar companies, has jumped into the fray as well, launching a spin-off CdTe producer called Calyxo.

Unfortunately for the Germans, second-generation solar already has a superstar: Arizona-based First Solar, which has developed a Cd Te panel for a production cost of an astounding $1.14 per watt, less than half the cost of its nearest rival at its debut. And by the end of 2009, the company plans to manufacture its revolutionary panels at gigawatt scale. CNBC’s Jim Cramer has dubbed First Solar the “Intel of solar,” helping to inflate its stock 1,000% over the course of 2007, peaking at 253 times earnings. The company’s name now rolls off the tongues of even its most combative competitors with naked admiration.

Thanks largely to First Solar, second-generation thin-flm technologies are now expected to grow even faster than the crystalline industry and to move from about a 14% market share to as much as 28% by 2010. That kind of growth attracts a crowd, of course, and already a would-be usurper claims to have bested First Solar’s vertiginous dive down the cost curve with

a rival technology. Nanosolar, based in San Jose, produced new CIGS panels for a test project last December that it claims will sell for 99 cents per watt—80% below the average for crystalline PV and more than 10% less than the production cost of First Solar’s thin-flm panels. That’s low enough to firt with grid parity in many markets even without a feed-in tariff. Nanosolar has secured $500 million in venture funding, $300 million of which it claims is still in the bank. That includes a $50 million deal with EDF of France, one of the world’s largest utility companies— just the sort of partnership that lends instant credibility to a risky new technology like CIGS.

Nanosolar’s numbers have attracted such skepticism that its CEO, Martin Roscheisen, felt compelled to post a video clip to his blog demonstrating his company’s new production tool in action. The video (which has drawn nearly 100,000 viewers since it was posted to You Tube in June) is a minute long and completely silent, with home-movie production values. Its sole subject is a large white chamber,

continued on next page

Another innovation you’ll find inside a BMW.

As the solAr industry reaches maturity and expands into new markets, specialization has fast become the preferred business strategy. Highly efcient but relatively expensive crystalline PV cells such as Q-Cells’ or SunPower’s make sense if you’re trying to power a home with limited roof area, but their efciency comes at a lofty price. If you have an acre of rooftop (or a 100-acre feld), then thin-flm cells, which use nanosize layers of silicon or futuristic metal alloys—either cadmium telluride (CdTe) or copper-indium-gallium-diselenide (CIGS)—promise to do the job for a fraction of the cost. The thin-flm game is dominated by ambitious startups, but

The BMW Hydrogen 7 boasts a 12-cylinder engine with a top speed of over 140 mph. But equally impressive is that it produces near-zero emissions. Which means the exhaust produces water vapor, not carbon dioxide. It’s an idea that makes more than an environmental statement. Learn more about our clean future vision at bmwusa.com/ideas.