CIGS, Sprayable Batteries, Smart Grid and More From Dow Jones Conference

CIGS, Sprayable Batteries, Smart Grid and More From Dow Jones Conference
October 21, 2008 at 10:18 PM
The Dow Jones Alternative Energy Innovations conference is taking place this week and, if you can’t make it, here are a few highlights.

Telio Solar more fully unveiled its strategy at the event. (The company has mostly been in stealth mode, but here’s an early story.) The company, the latest entrant into the CIGS market, has licensed a CIGS cell from the Institute of Energy Conversion at the University of Delaware and has devised a manufacturing process to go around it. Telio’s process, which revolves around chemical deposition and evaporation, takes 17 steps in all, CEO Gapseong Noh told me in an interview.

But the best part is that it heavily leverages the machinery and processes from the LCD world: 60 percent of the steps — including many of the cleaning, chemical sputtering and laser scribing stages — come straight out of the semiconductor world. (Noh and other execs come from Samsung, the LCD king.)

By leveraging LCD manufacturing know-how and the cell design, Telio says it has been able to drastically cut costs. It built a pilot line for under $4 million in about six months. You probably can’t even get another CIGS CEO to raise his hands above his head and spin around three times for under $18 million.

Before the end of the year, Telio wants to produce a 300mm x 300mm prototype with around a 10 percent efficiency. By the beginning of 2010, it wants to be in mass production with a 30-MW facility and to be on par in terms of cost with First Solar.

Although it leverages existing standards, Telio has concocted some proprietary process stages. A chemical bath for depositing some of the ingredients is one of Telio’s major achievements, he said.

Planar Energy Devices, meanwhile, talked up a solid state lithium battery that is produced via printing. The company has licensed technology for solid state, large format batteries from Oak Ridge National Labs and printing technology from Bell Labs. The end result, in theory, is a way to make any surface a battery by applying layers of anodes, electrolytes and cathodes to it. The company will aim its thin-film batteries at the RFID and security card market first, and later cell phones and cars. If successful, this will take much of the bulk out of notebooks and phones because a separate battery wouldn’t be needed: Planar’s battery material could be sprayed onto interior surfaces in a phone.

NREL has an equity interest in the company, CEO Scott Faris pointed out. The company is hand-building prototypes now and hopes to be in full production by 2010.

Cool Energy touted a Stirling engine/solar thermal system for home that could provide hot water, heat and electricity. In all, the system could provide 75 percent of a family’s baseload power, 95 percent of its hot water and 60 percent of its electricity, all for an $8,000 piece of equipment, says CEO Sam Weaver. Some I spoke to were skeptical. The Stirling engines also accomplishes all of this at medium temperatures. Usually, solar thermal systems require high temperatures. Thus, wait and see on this one.

Smart Grid is also a hot topic. Powerit Solutions, which provides demand response systems for large commercial real estate developers and industrial sites, will unfurl a newly revamped suite of services on January 1. The company, a Swedish-U.S. affair, says it can release peak power by 10 percent to 40 percent. The trick is that the company analyzes a customers power usage and then tried to anticipate peak power needs so it can scale up or down in advance. The service costs around $80.000 but customers see a payback in about two to 18 months, says Claes Olsson, CEO.

Hyperion Power Generation, which has created a small nuclear devices for power generation, also seemed to get high marks from the audience. (Disclosure: Hyperion will also appear at our own Greentech Innovations End to End Electricity conference on November 18.)

Ultracapacitor maker APowerCap also seemed somewhat popular while Jon Bonnano talked up the slack-moored offshore wind turbines of Principle Power.

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