Solyndra, one of our favorite not-so-stealthy CIGS solar firms, signed some big supply agreements late last month. Here are some other Solyndra tidbits:
- We’ve covered Solyndra’s valuation story in the past.
- Why would Soyndra spend $60,000 on lobbyists?
- $5 million of Solyndra’s $93.5 million equipment financing facility in late 2007 came from Icon Income Fund Ten; “The equipment is comprised of two fully automated manufacturing lines that combine glass tubes and thin film semiconductors to produce solar panels.�
The company also has some recently published patents.
The patent for “Elongated PV Cells in Casings� is authored by two former employees, Ratson Morad, now with Daystar, and Benny Buller, now with CdTe thin film leader First Solar (First Solar, incidentally, projects annual production of 1GW in 2009). The other listed inventors are Christian Gronet and Markus Beck, Chief Scientist at Solyndra. (Question: Why do patent holders and early employees leave a company like Solyndra?)
Here’s the abstract from one of the Solyndra patents:
- A solar cell unit comprising a solar cell and a transparent casing circumferentially disposed onto the cylindrical shaped solar cell is provided. The solar cell comprises a substrate, where at least a portion of the substrate is rigid and nonplanar. A back- electrode is circumferentially disposed on the substrate. A semiconductor junction layer is circumferentially disposed on the back-electrode. A transparent conductive layer is circumferentially disposed on the semiconductor junction.
Here’s a link to a drawing of the cylindrical form factor from the patent document. Solyndra also has some patent action in interconnecting and securing these very innovative and seriously non-standard solar units.
This is a spectacularly audacious VC bet by CMEA (Tom Baruch, CMEA partner on the Solyndra board), Redpoint (John Walecka of Redpoint on the Solyndra board), and the rest of Solyndra’s investors.
They’re betting:
- That the CIGS materials system beast can be tamed.
- That all that specialized manufacturing and process tooling can be engineered to spec, replicated, and scaled.
- That the non-standard panels can be easily handled and installed.
- That the installations can be financed by risk-adverse and still-smarting financiers.
According to some rumors in the VC community, we’ve also heard that a “non-standard� financing event is soon to be revealed. More on that as it breaks.
