The new stars of Silicon Valley
The new stars of Silicon Valley are the scientists engineers and business people of Nanosolar in Palo Alto. Having taken their website down last week announcing that they would be back on September 9, they were true to their word. Speculation was that perhaps a takeover was in the wind. Thankfully this did not eventuate. Instead the announcements were positive milestone achievements which might silence the critics of the last few years. On Wednesday Nanosolar announced to the world the completion of their factory producing their new Nanosolar Utility Panel (TM) in a factory in Luckenwalde, and immediate availability of the panels. This factory is a state-of-the-art robotic assembly plant incorporating the foil cells being made in Palo Alto. The capacity of the panel plant is currently 640MW per annum. Manufacture of the foil utilising their funky CIGS ink, is possible at a rate of 1GW per annum per machine. The machine looks like a $2m capital item and it would not be a stretch to fit 20 of them in a small factory. The days of the 20GW p.a. manufacturing site are now here. Panel assembly will have to keep up. If I was making silicon wafers for photovoltaics, I would be looking worried today.
The contractual commitments from power companies and other partners, is about $4.1bn. It appears the $0.5bn invested by the venture and private equity partners, including the likes of Sergey Brin and Larry Page, have been well spent. The list of investors has been pulled from their website, but the google cached version shows these investors:
- Mitsui – the 300 year-old Japanese keiretsu.
- Carlyle Group – largest investment group in the world
- Swiss Re – the largest reinsurer in the world
- Benchmark Capital – the eBay financiers
- Lone Pine Capital
- Mohr Davidow Ventures
- EDF – the world’s largest energy utility
- Energy Capital Partners
- Klaus Tschira’s First Ventury
- Jeff Skoll
- Pierre Omidyar
- SAC Capital
- GLG Partners
- LGT Capital Group
- Grazia Equity