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Eric Wesoff | April 9, 2009 at 6:51 AM 2 Comments

The Yoda of PV

Live blogging from the BIPV Summit in San Diego—

Stanford “Stan” Ovshinsky, now 86-years old, is the Yoda of the solar market. In his words, “I lived through the great depression but I didn’t know what was that great about it.”

He, along with his wife, co-founded ECD in 1960 and are some of the pioneers of renewable energy technology.

He’s the inventor of ECD’s flexible solar (triple junction a-Si) as well as many of the nickel-metal-hydride batteries used in today’s electric vehicles. He has 400 U.S. patents.

Ovshinsky was the keynote speaker at todays’ BIPV summit in San Diego.

Raised in the machine shops and factories of Akron Ohio in what was then the rubber capital of the world, Ovshinsky started raising money in 1977 to advance amorphous and disordered material.  In 1980 he started building a machine.

Ovshinsky’s critics and competitors call his original machine a white elephant—eight generations of commercial machines later, ECD has a production machine with 30 megawatts of annual capacity.  It’s a low-cost continuous web machine akin to  newspaper and photographic film production (technologies that Stanford acknowledged might not be around much longer.

“You’ve got be make it cheap, not low cost”

Stan left ECD in 2007 and started Ovshinsky Innovation LLC.  He left because the board did not share his vision of tremendous growth.

A subsidiary of his new firm, Ovshinsky Solar, looks to build 1 gigawatt of solar electrical production at a cost lower than coal.  Ovshinsky agrees with Dr, Steven Chu, the Secretary of Energy in believing that solar has to be five times better.

A few quotes:

  • “We need to use science and technology to change the world.”
  • “What drove me wasn’t awards, or money or power. ECD, in its’ time, was a place for people of all races to reach their potential and work together for a common cause to change the world.”
  • “If you put it on a personal basis, what you are doing is making a fair and equitable world and saving a planet worth saving.”

A great man and an inspirational life.

You can read mores about Stanford Ovshinsky here and here.

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Comments [2]

  • TruthSeeker 04/9/09 8:46 AM

    No, Mr. Ovshinsky is no Yoda.  He is the Charlatan Extraordinaire, and has been able to do so much damage to his shareholders and JV partners, that a Sith Lord would be jealous.

    Mr. Ovshinsky is on record claiming his laminates could “produce electricity from the sun for as little as 0.2¢ per kilowatt-hour” (see Business Week, July 18, 1977, Industrial Edition, page 20).  In today’s dollars that’s about 1c per KWH - when state-of-the-art solar panels can barely get to 15-20c per KWH today, and are not expected to reach 10c per KWH at least until 2012.  ECD’s own state-of-the-art laminates cannot do better than 25c per KWH today.  Accidentally, by December 1978, his claims were “scaled down:”  he was now promising that “his cell would produce electricity at about 5 cents a KWH”  (The Washington Post, December 2, 1978, First Section; A3).  That is about 25c per KWH in today’s dollars, and now almost a reality, but it took 20 years of hard work by his JV partners and investors - because, despite Mr. Ovshinsky’s claims, ECD’s technology is the result of the funding and technology contribution by many companies, including Atlantic Richfield, UNC Resources, ARCO, Sharp, Canon, Bekaert, and possibly a few others, all of whom got swindled in return for their valuable contributions.

    So, no, ECD’s current technology is neither low-cost nor cheap.  ECD’s costs of manufacturing are $2 per Watt, with panel-level efficiency of just over 6%.  First Solar, the current low-cost leader, has costs of manufacturing below $1 per Watt and panel-level efficiencies of about 11%.

    Just go to http://ovshinskyinnovation.com and see what the “genius” is up to.  “Look for our new website coming soon” - haven’t we heard that before?

     Reply
  • StevePluvia 04/9/09 9:33 AM

    Excellent work TruthSeeker.  ECD—or Energy Conversion Devices has a product that in my opinion is not competitive and has no path to a cost of production that will make it cost competitive.  I believe the company is a Zero bid in the making.  If you add SG&A to ECD’s production costs, their product costs $2.46ish/watt to produce which means they will lose money on every inch of PV they produce.  Their claim they can produce for below $1/watt by 2012 is pure BS IMO.

     Reply

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