Solar Power Investments

In case you haven’t heard it, T. Boone Pickens is a worried man when comes it comes to the energy situation these days. America, according the legendary oilman, is in a heap of trouble—-and it’s only going to get worse.

And with the election season looming, he is quickly becoming the energy equivalent of Ross Perot, complete with charts, graphs and white board presentations delivered with a familiar Texas drawl.

But unlike that other famous Texas billionaire whose was long on talk and short on action, Pickens has put his money where his mouth is and has a plan to fix it all.

In fact, he even calls it the PickensPlan, and he has budgeted $58 million of his own to market the idea to an America caught up in the grips of a second energy crisis.

Of course, Pickens does have a particular solution in mind when he steps up to mic. Not surprisingly, it is wind and natural gas— industries where he’s already heavily invested.

Noticeably absent from the plan, however, is any large role for solar power investments. Pickens mentions solar only briefly in his plan.

That to me is a giant mistake…

Solar Power Breakthroughs

Now for those of you whose eyes glaze over at the mere mention of solar power, let me tell you this about the new solar power: it is light years away from where it was as little as 5 years ago.

And no matter how much it may be ingrained into your mind that solar energy is just some sort of distortional fantasy, nothing could be further from the truth.

Not only have the times changed, they are in the process of being transformed in ways that will alter the way we think about solar power forever.

Leading this stunning transformation, as usual, is a next generation technology. It’s called thin film solar. And while it didn’t really make Boone’s plan, its numbers are enough to make any billionaire sit up and take notice.

It’s smaller, cheaper, and more efficient than its silicon based predecessors and it now stands poised to shake the industry from out of its past.

In fact, according to a recent report by Lux Research, thin film solar will make up 28 percent of the solar market by 2012. In dollar amounts, solar thin film is projected to bring in $19.7 billion in sales over the next 4 years. That’s a significant sales leap for a technology that is just starting to roll out of the factories.

And since those numbers are hardly the types of figures that you can roll your eyes at, numerous companies are working to stake themselves a thin film claim.

One of them is Nanosolar Inc., a private Palo Alto company that was founded with a little seed money from the Google guys themselves, Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

Founded in 2001, Nanosolar said last month that it has created the industry’s largest solar production machine: a thin-film coater that has the capacity to produce up to 1 gigawatt of solar cells annually. That is enough electricity to power about 750,000 homes and is significantly higher than the 10 to 30 megawatts of production capacity commonly employed today.

Moreover, Nanosolar claims its new machine can produce cells that can achieve efficiencies as high as 14.5%. That added validity to the company’s claim that it could profitably produce product for as little as $1/Watt.

In short, it was the company’s claim to the solar equivalent of finding the Holy Grail.

But that could be just the start for an industry that is moving away from silicon based cells and into the future with CIGS (copper indium gallium diselenide) based thin films that can be rolled off of printing presses.

In fact, the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) recently created thin film solar panels that reached 19.9 percent efficiency in the lab, setting a new world record. That nearly puts thin film on par with the 20.3% efficiencies of their silicon based cousins if the results can be mass produced.

Solar Power Investments

But Nanosolar, of course is hardly alone. Many other thin film companies are also competing in the space including Miasole, Heliovolt, DayStar Technologies (DSTI), Ascent Solar Technologies (ASTI) and Global Solar just to name a few. It is a crowded space.

So while some folks like Boone may still have a hard time taking solar seriously as a bigger part of the energy solution, next generation thin film technology may be enough to change their minds.

But either way, Pickens is absolutely dead on with his dire warnings and is even willing to consider other options.

“We need a plan,” he has said. “A fool with a plan beats a genius with no plan. And we have been almost a fool with no plan.”

That’s a little bit of Texas common sense that even the folks in Washington DC should be able to understand.

Just don’t forget solar power along the way.

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