1366 CEO Lays Out Strategy, Funding Plans

1366 Technologies, a silicon solar module maker out of MIT, will show off a prototype manufacturing facility in Lexington, Mass. next week. After the Presidential Election it says it will seek $50 million for a 25- to 30-megawatt commercial plant, said CEO Frank van Mierlo in an interview.

Although entrepreneurs and venture capitalists are currently enamored with cadmium telluride and CIGS, crystalline silicon is going to be tough to displace in the solar world, van Mierlo said. 1366 claims the manufacturing processes it has developed can cut the cost of multi-crystalline solar modules by 25 percent. By 2012, the company hopes to produce modules for around $1 a watt, which will make solar competitive with coal. First Solar is less than two dimes away from the magic $1 per watt mark, but it’s the one success story so far in alt-chemistry.

“The fundamentals are much more in favor of silicon than most people believe,” he said. “The new material guys have a tough road ahead of them.”

“We are not trying to do a new material or something fancy,” he added.

Silicon’s advantage comes largely in familiarity and the fact that it is unusually well suited for industrial manufacturing. Engineers have tinkered with it for decades and understand how to create structures out of the material and shrink it. Since the 1950s, several chipmakers have tried to displace silicon with germanium or gallium, but silicon has always won out. (A few years ago, I interviewed Gordon Moore, the Intel co-founder, and asked him why silicon chips still steadily improve in performance. Part of the reason, he said, was that we got lucky with silicon.)

It is also fairly common on our planet: Oxygen is one of the few elements that is easy to find. By contrast, indium, employed in CIGS modules, is a rare metal that display and TV manufacturers purchase in the largest quantities.

How is 1366 going to drop the cost of multi-crystalline solar modules? For one thing, the company replaces silver paste with copper in the metal contacts. The company has also textured the silicon in the cell to capture more light. Makers of mono-crystalline solar cells like SunPower have employed texturing to capture more light, which in turn raises the efficiency. This has been tough with multi-crystalline cells.

“WIth multi-crystalline, the grain orientation is all over the place,” he said.

While 1366 plans to produce solar cells, it will also invariably license some of its ideas to other manufacturers. Ideally, this will make it easier for equipment makers to produce machines geared toward its modules. Other companies such as Day4 Energy are pursuing similar strategies.

“Our real competition isn’t our fellow cell solar panel makers. Our real competition is coal,” he said.

Founded in 2007, 1366 grew out of research conducted by MIT professor Emanuel Sachs. The company raised $12.4 million late last year. It also won a startup competition at one of our conferences in May in the Boston area.

And in case you were wondering about the name… No, it is not the year the Black Plague snared most of its victims. It’s shorthand for the solar constant: approximately 1366 watts per square meter comes to earth from the sun. It varies only a little with the seasons.

The manufacturing facility will be shown off on October 16.