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As the stakes grow, B.J. “Billy” Stanbery knows how to keep his cards close to the vest. The chairman and cofounder of HelioVolt just saw the 10-year-old company’s new equity/lifeline investor, SK Group, push $50 million of chips into the CIGS thin-film PV venture’s pot—but he’s not willing to show his hand just yet. While thrilled to see a South Korean chaebol with its vast resources decide that “CIGS is the best horse to ride into the future” and that HelioVolt is the pony to run that track, he didn’t offer much in the way of detailed information about the race tactics and strategy.
Stanbery, along with biz dev VP Iga Hallberg, spoke with me about the strategic investment and provided a few updates on recent progress made by the copper-indium-gallium-(di)selenide technology developer and panel manufacturer. Here’s what did come out of our conversation.
The two companies started talking in December 2010.
He wouldn’t disclose the equity percentage represented by SK’s investment in HelioVolt.
There are no immediate plans for future investments by SK at this point.
There are no ongoing negotiations with other potential investors nor efforts to conduct another funding round.
Getting in bed with SK Group means HelioVolt now has access to world-class factory, oil pipeline, and other construction expertise; wide-ranging engineering capabilities; different third-party financing options backed by a deep balance sheet (AKA instant bankability); access to different customers; and greatly improved negotiating power that can be leveraged in its relations with tool companies and other entities across the supply chain.
The monies will go toward testing the “feasibility” of HelioVolt’s “commercial production technology,” expanding the company’s operations, and getting down to work on evaluating the next generation of production tools slated for use in volume manufacturing, Stanbery explained.
Noting the “continuous process of developing processes and equipment, the tall Texan noted that the infusion of cash puts the company in a “better position to accelerate deliveries” of tooling.
The next round of equipment will come from incumbent suppliers and contract manufacturers as well as new vendors, he smiled, naming no names.
Since space inside the 20MW fab at HelioVolt’s HQ in Austin is “quite tight” and there's not “a lot of room,” as Hallberg noted, the company will need a new location to build its first large-scale production facility.
So far, the site selection process has not begun, but the expansion plans will be announced next year, according to Stanbery. Look for 100MW-ish capacity-addition increments when the trigger on the construction project is pulled, although the company is looking beyond to gigawatt scale.
Average conversion efficiencies on HelioVolt’s existing CIGS module production lines are hitting right around 11.7% (the same as First Solar last reported) and yields are averaging better than 90%, he noted. “Rapid progress” continues to be made—early 2011 champion efficiencies are now the median—and he expects those numbers to increase quite a bit further.
“We think once you surpass the commercial leader, we still have a lot of momentum left and that puts us in a good position to compete,” he believes. “It’s a significant achievement in terms of manufacturability—that’s the thing we’re most excited about, is that our manufacturing technology is so robust.”
When it comes to manufacturing costs though, Stanbery keeps his eyes on First Solar and his cards to himself.
“We clearly expect, in volume production, to be able to produce at a cost lower than First Solar,” he said.
When pushed for a semiprecise cost figure, since the thin-film PV kingpins have numbers in the low 50 cents range on their roadmap in a few years, the HelioVolt high roller wouldn’t budge, repeating his “less than First Solar” reply.
But he did confirm that the re-energized CIGS company does not need to reach gigawatt-scale to hit costs less than the benchmark firm’s projected marks. “We’ll be able to pass them at only a few hundred megawatts capacity,” he claimed.
Well before any new capacity is added, before the end of this year actually, HelioVolt should have its first “bin” of modules certified with UL and IEC marks.
“We are very close to completing all the testing,” Hallberg shared, “and we believe we should be completing our certification rapidly.”
When I interviewed her in late January, she said then they hoped that certification would be completed by the end of the second quarter. That didn’t turn out to be the case, as the VP attributed that bit of enthusiastic overoptimism to a lack of experience—it’s the first time the company has gone through the certification process.
A contributing factor to that learning curve was HelioVolt’s decision to submit units for multiple certifications at the same time, resulting in having to continue to submit panels along the way, she explained. Also, not that many thin-film modules are being tendered for certification in the US, so the company had one of its engineers working very closely with the testing agency.
One upside of the protracted test/cert process is that once HelioVolt’s initial modules are authorized and get those all important marks, “we’re going to be submitting the next bin for certification because our efficiencies are continuing to go up, which means we’ll have multiple bins certified shortly.”
Hallberg was also pumped about another indicator of HelioVolt’s progress: they’re starting to ship product.
One customer’s system—a mixed rooftop, carport, and tracker 23KW PV installation being built in nearby San Antonio—should be commissioned in the next month or so, she said. A couple of other shipments are also almost ready to go.
Up on the rooftop of the company’s facility, the test array continues to evolve, with modules being swapped in and out on a regular basis, according to the biz dev gal. A new wall-unit like, rotatable spandrel comprised of fully encapsulated panels has been installed, replete with maximum power tracking capability.
But for her, the most exciting piece of the 11-12KW collection of panels (both HelioVolt’s CIGS and some competitive models) is the now-populated CoolPly mounted systems attached to the roof, set at 0-, 10-, and 20-degree angles. The off-axis, off-angle collection provides an interesting test facility, she noted, since so many commercial roofs (the company’s main target market) “don’t have the best options for orientation and installation.”
The SK Group investment—and belief—in HelioVolt and its technology represents another piece of recent, more upbeat thin-film counterprogramming to the ongoing “as goes Solyndra, so goes CIGS” (or solar in the USA, for that matter) misinformation flow.
Stion, which has its own equity/technology partner in TSMC, just opened a new factory in Hattiesburg, MS, and can claim NREL-verified module efficiencies exceeding 14%. In addition, TSMC’s solar unit will soon open its own CIGS fab in Taiwan.
MiaSolé reports it will hit 150MW capacity at its Silicon Valley facilities this year and expects to ship 80MW of its discretely integrated modules. One of its key partners? Intel, which knows a thing or two about ramping high-tech manufacturing to ginormous scale.
Avancis, Saint-Gobain’s CIGS company, boasted of record small-module efficiencies at EU PVSEC, and its joint-venture factory with Hyundai is under construction and slated to begin production next year.
A couple of weeks before the Solyndra dam broke, flexible CIGS purveyor Ascent Solar announced its own Asian equity lifeline from TFG Radiant, an alliance of Chinese conglomerate Radiant Group and Singaporean concern Tertius Financial Group, in a strategic partnership potentially worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
Where will HelioVolt stand when the hand has been dealt? With the fresh infusion of funds from SK Group, it won’t be as easy to bet against the CIGS TFPV company’s prospects, as long as Stanbery and Co. play their cards right.
