bit.ly Thin-Film Solar Startup Debuts With Billion in Contracts A startup with a secret recipe for printing cheap solar cells on aluminum foil debuted today, in what could end up a milestone for the industry. Nanosolars technology consists of sandwiches of copper, indium, gallium and selenide (CIGS) that are 100 times thinner than the silicon solar cells that dominate the solar photovoltaics market. Its potential convinced Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page to back the company as angel investors in its early days. Two big announcements marked its coming out party: The company has billion in contracts and can make money selling its products for per watt of a panels capacity. Thats cheap enough to compete with fossil fuels in markets across the world. Specifically, the companys management thinks it can help utilities avoid the difficulties of getting big coal and nuclear power plants built by offering the option to build small solar farms they can set up close to cities. Cost-efficient solar panels such as ours can be deployed in 2- to 20-megawatt municipal solar power plants that feed peak power directly into the local distribution without requiring the expense of transmission and with a plant deployment time as short as six months, said Nanosolar CEO Martin Roscheisen in an e-mail to Wired.com. Coal or nuclear cant do that, cant do it as cost efficient and cant do it as rapidly deployable. Thin-film solar has been a major focus of US alternative energy …
