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Don’t let anyone tell you that the level of technological innovation and the amount of manufacturing capacity across the photovoltaics sector are on the wane in the United States. My own eyes and ears tell me otherwise. Since March, I have toured some 25 research, development, pilot, and volume production facilities in various parts of the country, including companies from the Mexican border up to the Bay Area in California, the burgeoning PV cluster in and around Toledo, OH, and most recently, the centennial state of Colorado, home of the esteemed National Renewable Energy Lab and several up-and-coming thin-film and inverter firms.
Some musings based on my facility visits have already made it into this column, but in the coming weeks I hope to unleash a torrent of techno-travelogue and analysis, sharing my observations about the state of a goodly portion of PV R&D and manufacturing in the USA.
Speaking of the NREL mothership, I spent a day there last week, during which I spoke with Martha Symko-Davies and Brian Keyes, cocaptains of the Department of Energy’s PV Technology Incubator program. The pair discussed how the current solicitation differs from past rounds and how the program works to help accelerate technology commercialization. Since letters of intent from interested U.S. small businesses are due on Sept. 16, our conversation turned out to be quite timely.
One key difference in the program is the combining of the fledgling “preincubator” program with the “incubator” section into one consolidated offering. Why the change? “Efficiency,” Keyes explained. “They were both popular programs and to run them separately just taxed the available resources we have here.”
“People can bin themselves into any bin that they need to be in,” Symko-Davies piped in. “We found a lot of people applying into both, and saying they had a prototype or they had a new concept. It was like they were just trying to get the funds, and they were repackaging themselves into one or the other, and then they weren’t really qualified for one, they were really in more of a preincubator mode. We saw a lot of that going on.”
The program now has two tiers: Tier 1 for companies in a preincubator position, Tier 2 for those ready to take their prototypes to pilot production scale. In another tweak to the incubation situation, Symko-Davies said the amounts of money to be doled out in those firm fixed-price contracts will be bumped up from $500,000 to a cool million for the first-tier companies, and increased from $3 million to $4 million for the second-tier winners.
She noted that “fewer and fewer companies” can move from prototype to pilot. “You really have to do something very high impact and have your ducks in a row.” Keyes interjected about how there are “much more difficult entrance and exit criteria too,” with his colleague adding that “we don’t want to set somebody up for failure. We want another Abound Solar, we want another Innovalight. We want to make sure they are truly ready.”
“We really look at the lessons learned every year,” she continued. “We have the latitude to make these changes if someone should be a Tier One.”
Another change in the PV incubator involves an attempt to include national labs other than NREL in the program. “This is the first round that we’ve actively tried to pull in other national labs to assist the awardees,” explained Keyes. “It’s voluntary on the part of the other labs, [while] for us it’s a part of our mission and it’s part of the subcontract program itself that we do make priority exposure to the researchers and the equipment here.
“We put out an RFI [request for information] to the other labs, [to see] who’s interested in helping these technologies and helping this particular program. We’d love to expand the capabilities beyond what we have here.”
The team is gathering input from interested national labs, according to Keyes, “to give the responders some idea of the capabilities they’ll have exposure to.”
The process could happen “all the way through the subcontract negotiation. If the responder comes to us and says this capability exists and we’ve worked with them or we’d like to work with them, then we could bring the national lab into the negotiation process at that point, and discuss what kind of capabilities are there, what kind of access is available,” he said.
“So it’s something new that we’re trying, which has the potential to be very valuable, and there will undoubtedly be some learning to take place as to how best to implement this.”
The latest version of the program also has “a little bit more emphasis, about 5% more, on business plans,” noted Symko-Davies (pictured at right). “When these companies get to the stage gate, can they truly be successful, are they going to be able to have market entry sooner rather than later, how are their investors doing, etc., because that all plays a really important role.
“One of the reasons I think that Abound Solar was so successful is because they had a real strong business plan put together. They’d already raised $100 million, they knew what they were going to do, and they got this award.”
After winning an incubation award in the initial round in 2007, Abound (then called AVA Solar) worked with NREL to scale up from prototype to pilot, taking its cadmium-telluride manufacturing capability from 20 × 30cm minimodules to full 60 × 120cm production panels.
The thin-film company’s Mark Chen told me that the relationship with the lab (which continues in other areas) was an important “credibility factor… the NREL stamp of approval helped us in raising funds.”
Symko-Davies pointed to another subtle revision in this iteration of the incubator program. “We also put a little more emphasis on due diligence of site visits, with even more visits with a greater number of companies,” she noted. “On paper you can’t see as much as you can when you’re physically there and get to see the team interact.”
As with the previous rounds of the program, the idea is to incubate a wide swath of PV technology options.
“It’s all about portfolio diversity, and how we can enable them as well here at NREL,” said Symko-Davies. “We have the PDIL [Process Development and Integration Lab]. We’re looking for a broad portfolio but also, how do they mesh with the researchers here? If you have a nanostructure and you’re trying to make a conformal coating as you size this up, is this something we can help with? We also look at how it meshes with DOE’s portfolio of what they’re funding, so we’re really trying to be balanced.”
“We say ‘high impact’ for an incubator that maybe even a VC wouldn’t want to touch,” she explained. “If the company doesn’t survive, what science is getting out there for the industry? All of this is taxpayer’s money. There could be something very unique and different to help further along another company.”
“When we started the incubator, we really wanted to do something different to enable the companies, so that’s why we did the firm fixed pricing,” she continued. “We want to be in line with what the VCs are demanding. People laughed at me, ‘18 months?! Martha, what are you thinking? This needs to be more like 24 months!’
“But these companies can do it in 18 months, and they need to be doing it. To truly become a big player in the future, they have to be on a rapid pace. I wanted to do something where I could really be diligent about taxpayers’ dollars, about really helping a company along and pushing them hard.”
The deadline for submission of letters of intent for the PV Technology Incubator is Sept. 16 The review process and site visits will take place into November and December, with the selections being made toward the end of the year or beginning of 2011. The formal RFP process begins for the subcontracts after that announcement.
For those interested in the program, the solicitation for letters of interest, webinar presentation, and amendment to the original LOI can be found here.
NREL CAMPUS PHOTOS BY TOM CHEYNEY
