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New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson likes to say that his state is “becoming the center of North America’s solar industry,” but California, Ontario, and others might take issue with his understandable boosterism. Still, you’ll get no argument that the so-called “Land of Enchantment” can lay claim to being among the leaders in the solar revolution taking hold across the country.
In both manufacturing and power plant development, the state has made significant strides in recent months, adding hundreds of megawatts to its pipeline and--with the latest announcement of start-up Solar Distinction’s plans to build a module factory and R&D center in the Albuquerque area--yet another company looking to produce solar products locally.
The organization behind the new firm with the distinctive name is the Noribachi Group. The New Mexican cleantech private equity fund and venture “accelerator” (they avoid the term “incubator”) was founded in 2007 by “Silicon Valley expats,” Farzad and Rhonda Dibachi, according to one of the group’s directors and self-described “cat herder in this Solar Distinction role,” Bruce Wiggins.
He told me during a phone interview that the solar start-up was created last October, with the goal of manufacturing standard and specialty PV panels in the state. The custom modules will go into the solar lighting and consumer products made by three other Noribachi ventures already in operational mode—Visible Light Solar Technologies (which has a just-commissioned 32,000-sq-ft factory in Albuquerque), Qnuru, and Regen.
Down the line, Solar Distinction looks to develop “new-generation AC solar panels” and more modules “that combine cell with materials that disguise the cells,” he said. An example of this chameleon-like design strategy include a Visible Light system already retrofitted on gaslamps in Albuquerque’s old town area. The LED lighting devices feature triangular-shaped polycrystalline-silicon panels laminated with micah that power the illusion of an antique flickering street lamp created by the light-emitting diode arrays.
“You can’t tell there’s a solar cell on the light,” Wiggins explained.
The Noribachi team behind the freshly minted PV company will decide within 30 days on a module factory site in the greater Albuquerque area, according to the director. They will either renovate an existing structure or start from scratch with a green-field project, as long as whatever plot is chosen includes enough land to install a 1 or 2MW solar field adjacent to the facility, which will supply power to the operations and double as a testbed for their products.
The timeline for equipping and ramping panel production for the first 25MW line is pretty aggressive, with Wiggins pointing to the end of 2010 for first shipments if they can find a site with a decent building or mid-2011 if they start with “raw land.” Once the initial production is up and running, plans call for another 25MW to be added in a year or two.
When I asked him whether Solar Distinction might choose a turnkey solution for starting up its part-standard, part-specialty module manufacturing, he said that is “a distinct possibility. We will probably purchase new equipment and have them help us put the line in.” The company has begun discussions with equipment and cell suppliers, with a decision likely to occur by June.
While not ruling out the possibility of researching thin film or third-gen PV, Wiggins and his colleagues plan to stick with tried-and-true poly- and monocrystalline cell technology for the time being. (The trio of sister companies currently use either Chinese-made panels or elements bought in the States and integrated in its factory, in Visible Light’s case.)
“There’s lots of room for improving the manner in which those cells are used,” he explained. “We believe that the existing technology has not been exploited even to a tenth of a percent of what it could be. There’s a huge amount of room there before you have to go to the more exotic kinds of materials.”
“There’s a myriad of commercial and industrial uses that aren’t being made now. Our view of the world is to put solar at the point of use and to develop storage systems that permit you to not only produce the power but to store the power and then to use the power within a short radius of where the production occurs, so you don’t have all those transmission issues.”
Building-integrated and building-applied PV, consumer electronics, outdoor solar lighting, remote power appliances for construction crews, solar electric boosters for water heaters, micro power plants on unused commercial or government land—all are part of Solar Distinction’s possible portfolio of product apps, according to Wiggins.
One slick piece of enabling technology to make the Noribachian distributed-generation vision a reality is what he called “a smart circuit board that regulates the input power from either the solar or the grid as it’s needed, it regulates the charge on the battery that’s included in the product, and the discharge of that power to the use. It can regulate it into an infinite variety of applications.”
Having already received a $500,000 job creation grant from the state’s Economic Development Department to go toward staffing the panel production facility, Solar Distinction’s chief cat herder believes they will get fast-tracked permits from the city of Albuquerque and stand to benefit from a variety of state and federal incentives and tax breaks. The company may opt for industrial revenue bonds to help finance construction and equipment purchases, he said.
Although he wouldn’t divulge any dollar figures, Wiggins did say “we know what we absolutely need and know the amount we want,” claiming that the Noribachi approach to doing business is “highly capital efficient…we use dollars far better and more efficiently than most people do.”
The group has no plans to go into the integration side of the solar biz, although it may partner with integrators and installers, he said. But there’s a rub.
“Part of what we’re trying to do is develop products that eliminate integration to the greatest extent possible,” Wiggins pointed out. “We are, if anything, the anti-utility. When you go to the distributed model of solar at the point of use, and if you can solve the integration issue and the storage issue, then basically you don’t need the utility, assuming you have enough solar power to do what you need to do.”
PHOTOS BY KIP MALONE, COURTESY OF VISIBLE LIGHT SOLAR
