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Credit: 1366 Technologies

Yesterday we posted a Technology Review video interview with Emanuel Sachs (1366 Technologies’ chief technology officer and professor of mechanical engineering at MIT) in which he and Craig Lund (1366’s director of business development) discuss some of the new technologies the company is incorporating into PV panels.

Sachs did what I think is a very important and (shorter) follow-up video in which he argues that 1) creating efficiencies on the materials processing and manufacturing side of photovoltaics is currently playing a bigger role than scientific discoveries in getting solar power to the point where it is competitive with traditional energy sources, and 2) at the point of parity, battery/energy storage technology becomes the dominant concern.

Sachs says, basically, that at any given point, when a PV panel is manufactured it is an amalgam of several recent processing advances, and the current development of photovoltaics is akin to the stages that occurred with microelectronics.

“Today’s silicon device uses lots of lots of different innovations that have taken place. A company doesn’t need to invent the entire process sequence. They can grab what it needs and then, maybe, add something special that will distinguish them in the process space. . . This is a breakthrough in scale of production. That’s what PV is about because you have to cover huge portions of the earth’s surface . . . These are breakthroughs, too. These are breakthroughs in manufacturing and production. People in this country are not accustomed to thinking of these as breakthroughs. Other parts of the world have a very different view because they understand where the money is made . . . It’s fine to pursue [science breakthroughs] but don’t misunderstand what we already have.” [emphasis added]

That’s a pretty profound argument that really challenges those of us who tend to be obsessive about the science innovations versus improving the details related to how the feedstock is prepared and the then brought together as a panel.

I thought the chart in the video would be useful to look at, and Craig Lund kindly provided the version that appears above. Click on the image to enlarge it.

ADDING: I later checked with Lund regarding Sachs’ view about where the trend indicated in the chart was heading. He informed me that Sachs believes the accumulation of manufacturing innovations will continue to drive down the cost of crystalline silicon PV until 2025 when the cost of solar generated electricity will be significantly cheaper than coal.

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Credit: Tommy McCall, ELI

A study released last Friday indicates that, despite popular perception, fossil fuels get the lion’s share of U.S. energy subsidies, and that much of those subsidies are going to aid non-U.S. oil production.

The Environmental Law Institute, in partnership with the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, reviewed fossil fuel and energy subsidies for Fiscal Years 2002-2008. They found that fossil fuel subsidies amounted to $72 billion over that period. Subsidies for renewable fuels were only $29 billion in the same time period, and $16.8 billion went to corn-based ethanol production. (Nuclear energy data was not included in the research.)

The ELI says the fossil fuel subsidies come in a number or forms:

The subsidies examined fall roughly into two categories: (1) foregone revenues (changes to the tax code to reduce the tax liabilities of particular entities), mostly in the form of tax breaks, and including reported lost government take from offshore leasing of oil and gas fields; and (2) direct spending, in the form of expenditures on research and development and other programs. Subsidies attributed to the Foreign Tax Credit totaled $15.3 billion, with those for the next-largest fossil fuel subsidy, the Credit for Production of Nonconventional Fuels, totaling $14.1 billion. The Foreign Tax Credit applies to the overseas production of oil through an obscure provision of the U.S. Tax Code, which allows energy companies to claim a tax credit for payments that would normally receive less-beneficial treatment under the tax code.

“The combination of subsidies – or ‘perverse incentives’ – to develop fossil fuel energy sources, and a lack of sufficient incentives to develop renewable energy and promote energy efficiency, distorts energy policy in ways that have helped cause, and continue to exacerbate, our climate change problem,” notes ELI Senior Attorney John Pendergrass. “With climate change and energy legislation pending on Capitol Hill, our research suggests that more attention needs to be given to the existing perverse incentives for ‘dirty’ fuels in the U.S. Tax Code.”

For an explanation and notes regarding the above graphic, click here for a full version (pdf).

[UPDATE] - The AP reports that President Obama is calling for a global elimination of subsidies for fossil fuels.

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That’s what supposed to occur for the nanophospate lithium-ion battery maker, although the exact dates for IPOs are often a little soft. Right now it looks like 9/23/ or 9/24. A123 first announced its intentions to go public last August.

A123 Systems was one of the four battery making groups who each received a quarter-billion dollar “blessing” from the DOE.

Several of the A123 founders and staff are ACerS members, including MIT’s Yet-Ming Chiang, who is schedule to receive the Society’s Corporate Technical Achievement Award on behalf of the company in October at the upcoming MS&T’09 conference in Pittsburgh.

There is more on this IPO here.

UPDATE I: This post indicates that the “pricing” for A123 shares is beginning today. I am assuming this refers not to the actual sale of A123 shares, but a step in trying to determine the initial price that the shares will be sold at, probably some sort of “book building.”

UPDATE II: The targeted initial asking price for shares has now jumped 23%. According to this report, pricing begins Wednesday (9/23) and sales begins Thursday (9/24).

UPDATE III: Seems underwriting investment banks are brimming with confidence after testing the waters over the last two days. They have upped the initial asking price by about 20 percent and the number of shares by nearly 10 percent:

Battery maker A123 Systems Inc. raised its initial public offering to 28.1 million shares at $13.50 per share early Thursday, just before the stock makes its first appearance on Nasdaq.

This is up 2.4 million shares from a filing from Tuesday, when the company estimated the initial public offering price to be between $10 and $11.50 per share.

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The new reference material mimics the form of beryllium to which workers would be exposed, providing more accurate monitoring and more effective clean up of contaminated areas. (Credit: R. Dickerson, Los Alamos National Laboratory)

Researchers at NIST have produced a new reference material for beryllium. The rare-earth metal used as a hardener in high-performance alloys and ceramics can cause berylliosis — a chronic, incurable and sometimes fatal illness. The new reference material is expected to dramatically improve methods used to monitor workers’ exposure and aid in contamination control as well as toxicological research.

The new Standard Reference Material, Beryllium Oxide Powder (SRM 1877), consists of high-fired crystalline beryllium oxide that has been thoroughly characterized physically and chemically. The particles that make up the powder have an average diameter of about 200 nanometers and have been separated into aggregated clusters that will pass through a 20 mesh screen. NIST scientists Greg Turk and Mike Winchester used a high-performance inductively coupled plasma optical emission spectrometry technique developed at NIST to certify the ratio of pure beryllium in the beryllium oxide.

According to Winchester, previous analytical tests for exposure monitoring relied on an easily dissolved form of beryllium that was not representative of typical field exposures. The new SRM more closely mimics the form of beryllium to which workers would be exposed. This should facilitate toxicological studies that are more representative and informative, plus allow more sensitive monitoring and better clean ups of contaminated areas.

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Technology Review has a video (24 min.) of a recent interview with Emanuel Sachs, 1366 Technologies’ chief technology officer and professor of mechanical engineering at MIT. He explains the physics of solar cells and how 1366 is using the techniques described below to try to make them more efficient. (Note, there is a brief sponsor video that runs first.)

This Lexington, Mass., solar startup claims to have developed three processes that can be incorporated into existing solar cell manufacturing lines to improve cell efficiency. According to the company, these technologies can be used to produce multicrystalline solar cells that are 18 percent more efficient at converting sunlight into electricity, and about 20 percent cheaper.

The current industry standard for such solar cells is 15 percent to 16 percent, according to Joonki Song, a partner with Photon Consulting, based in Boston

An accompanying Technology Review article describes the new technologies:

In a normal silicon solar cell, electrons generated in the silicon must make their way out of the material to produce an electrical current, traveling first to the top layer of the silicon and then along this layer to narrow silver lines called “fingers.” The fingers then conduct the electrons to the busbars, two or three prominent silver bands seen on the surface of most silicon solar cells. These bands shade the silicon under them, reducing the amount of light the cells can absorb.

The first new process developed by 1366 Technologies produces grooved busbars that prevent light from being reflected out of a solar panel. Instead, the grooves cause light to be redirected along the glass on top of solar panels. That light can then be absorbed by unshaded areas of the solar cell.

The second process improves the cell’s electron-conducting fingers. Although these silver lines are much narrower than the busbars, there are many more of them on a solar cell, and together they shade a significant portion of the silicon. Sachs developed a process for making much narrower lines without sacrificing their conductivity. Instead of using conventional screen-printing technology, his process involves etching troughs into the surface of the silicon and depositing silver particles into the troughs. Metal is then added to these particles via electroplating to build up the fingers. The trough keeps the lines narrow but allows the silver to be stacked relatively high, maintaining conductivity. Typically busbars and fingers shade 9 percent of a cell surface, 1366 Technologies says, but with the company’s new processes, this shading can be reduced to 2 percent. Others have developed techniques for reducing shading, but these have been expensive.

The third process decreases the amount of light reflected off the surface of the cell’s silicon by texturing its surface. This is an approach that’s been taken by others, but the texturing is done in a very regular pattern that creates less surface area than other approaches. Surface area is a problem in solar cells, because electrons are often trapped at the surface of materials, Sachs says.

1366's special grooved busbar ribbons can reflect light within a PV unit. Credit: 1366 Technologies.

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