Something new under the sun (and it could change everything)

www.statesman.com
Wednesday, September 13, 2006

Beneath the din of our latest oil panic, with otherwise sane people dooming us to the end of civilization as we know it, scientists such as B.J. Stanbery quietly carry on the work of changing the world.

In 2001, Stanbery founded a company here in Austin, HelioVolt Corp., with a commitment to revolutionizing solar energy. He has created a solar material that is exponentially more efficient and cheaper to produce than current technology. And he believes it will make us think of solar energy in an entirely new way.

Stanbery has the attention of fellow scientists, investors and a growing number of officials in the U.S. Department of Energy. This week, The Wall Street Journal presented Stanbery with one of its three top Technology Innovation Awards. More than 600 companies submitted applications. For this and several other awards HelioVolt has received in the past year, we add our congratulations.

The indefatigable Stanbery never tires of explaining his choice of calling. After getting degrees in physics and mathematics at the University of Texas and while working on a master's degree in physics at the University of Washington, Stanbery took a job with Boeing Co. developing solar technology to power satellites. "That was when I decided to devote my career to making solar power cheap and ubiquitous," he said. Stanbery has solved the "cheap" part.

Rather than silicon, which makes up most solar cells, Stanbery has been working with a compound of copper, indium, gallium and selenide — CIGS for short. The compound is heated onto plates, a process Stanbery refers to as printing. The resulting plate, with two or three cents worth of the CIGS compound, would cost $1 if made with silicon and would not conduct nearly as well.

It is in the application that the discussion gets tricky. Many people worry that at the current rate of generation, solar power is too expensive, too subsidized, too unreliable and in too short a supply to ever be called on to fuel the turbines in power plants. For Austin Energy, for example, solar power contributes just 1 megawatt of electricity at four times the cost of wind power, which provides more than 210 megawatts to our power generation.

Stanbery believes our thinking needs to be reversed. Unlike oil, coal, gas and nuclear power, which demand a concentrated collection and distribution system — the power grid — the sun's energy is most efficiently collected building by building, over an area as wide as the imagination. What HelioVolt hopes to sell is a solar material that can be inexpensively integrated into almost any building materials, from roofing, to siding to windows. The greater number of HelioVolt buildings, the less stress on our traditional power generation and a reduced demand for new power plants, substations, power lines and the personnel to build, operate and service them.

Stanbery admits that some traditionalists are skeptical of his ideas, but with the outlook gloomy for oil, experts are predicting the investment in solar energy will triple to more than $12 billion nationwide by 2010. Working with $8 million in venture capital, HelioVolt expects to produce CIGS solar-powered products for testing by the end of 2007.

While Stanbery and HelioVolt do the tough work, all he is asking is for Americans to think a little differently about energy.

Thinking is certainly more productive than panicking.