Solexant moves to CIGS and rebrands as Siva Power
Solexant Corporation has announced a new corporate identity as Siva Power. The new identity is the culmination of a two-year transition to a platform that the company says creates a profitable path to sub-$0.40 per watt solar power, along with unprecedented production scale. The company also announced a new technical advisory board.
"Unlike silicon photovoltaics (PV), our new approach provides a pathway to building the solar industry's 'factory of the future' with gigawatt production capacity, and the world's lowest cost in solar," says company CEO Brad Mattson. "Two years of data-driven research and analysis has led us to pursue a co-evaporated CIGS via monolithic integration on glass technology."
Drawing upon Mattson's past success in scaling new semiconductor technologies through process, equipment and materials innovation, the company cancelled its expansion plan to build a 100 MW CdTe production line in Oregon, and instead tripled its R&D budget with a goal of investigating new technologies that offered much lower cost production.
After investigating several promising solar technologies including GaAs, InP, CZTS, CdTe and CIGS, Siva determined that CIGS technology was the only viable path to less than $0.40/watt.
Siva Power has completed its R&D phase and is raising money to build its first production line. At a massive 300 MW, this facility is larger than any other full production line by a factor of three times other thin film lines and 10 times typical silicon lines.
Siva Power says CIGS is emerging as the best technology for the future. In the United States, the Department of Energy anointed CIGS as the technology of the future, creating the PV Manufacturing Consortium (PVMC) dedicated to accelerating CIGS transition from R&D to manufacturing.
Solar manufacturing leaders in China, meanwhile, have shown increased confidence in the technology as well, recently acquiring three CIGS companies. Solar Frontier in Japan has also become the world leader in CIGS and second only to First Solar in thin film production.
To capitalise on the growing consolidation around CIGS, Siva Power hired renowned CIGS technologist, Markus E. Beck, as CTO earlier this year. Building on that foundation, Siva Power has formed a Technical Advisory Board and added two of the world's most renowned CIGS and PV experts.
Besides Beck, the new advisory board members include Rommel Noufi and John Benner.
Rommel Noufi is a pioneer in thin film solar cells and in particular, CIGS. Noufi spent over 33 years at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) dedicated to the advancement of PV and CIGS technology. His leading work in co-evaporation techniques led to a deep understanding of the basic technology and several world-record CIGS devices.
John Benner, a 33 year veteran of NREL, focused on PV technology is now Executive Director of the BAPVC, or Bay Area Photovoltaic Consortium, the west coast counterpart to PVMC. The BAPVC, working out of Stanford University and University of California, Berkeley, is investigating advanced techniques in CIGS along with many other PV technologies.
"It has been frustrating to see CIGS technology breaking efficiency records for many years, but not see that technical success translate into success in the commercial arena," says Noufi. "In Siva Power I see the technology, the team, and the technical and business leadership to bring CIGS to the scale it deserves. I'm excited to become an advisor to Siva and to help steer CIGS into the future."
