Greentech Media has an article on the demise of thin film solar company Nanosolar (another victim of the shakeout following the solar investment boom of 5 years ago) - Nanosolar, Thin-Film Solar Hype Firm, Officially Dead.

It's official. Nanosolar, the CIGS thin-film solar panel aspirant which produced little but hype and broken promises, is done. Its assets are being auctioned off.

This should come as no surprise to GTM readers. We reported on the layoffs, the skeleton crew, and the "restructuring for sale" back in April. If you speak CIGS, then you know that "restructuring for sale" translates to "Hanergy, please buy us."

But a white knight never emerged as it did for MiaSolé, HelioVolt, and Ascent -- and so, Nanosolar joins Solyndra, AQT, SoloPower, etc. on the list of failed CIGS solar firms.

The thin film solar sector is still moving forward though, with dramatic cost improvements in the offing for CdTe based films - Thin film PV breakthrough may cut solar costs by one third.

A new Silicon Valley developer of thin film solar PV modules, backed by an Australian venture capitalist, has claimed an engineering breakthrough that could cut the manufacturing costs of PV modules by one third. RSI has broken cover after five years of development to announce it has created a 1.5 square metre cadmium telluride PV (CdTe) module, twice the size of conventional modules.

It says this will enable solar PV modules to be manufactured at a cost of less than 40c/Watt, around one third cheaper than current mass-produced thin film and silicon based modules – and hastening the charge towards grid parity for solar PV.

First Solar, currently the world’s largest thin film solar PV module manufacturer, had predicted reaching 40c/W by 2017 through increases in efficiency. RSI says it can deliver that cost in 2014 by doubling the size of the module through a process known as Rapid Efficient Electroplating on Large- areas (REEL).

thin film market leader First Solar still seems to be going strong as well - First Solar Advances 162 MW of Unsubsidized Solar in Chile.

First Solar's strategy of expanding into new, sustainable solar markets looks like it's paying off. The thin-film solar panel manufacturer and project developer has applied for permits for the $370 million, 162-megawatt Luz del Norte project, according to a filing with Chile’s environmental licensing department. The project will use more than 1.7 million panels, with construction slated to start in June 2014.

Greentech Media has an update on progress at thin film solar company Nanosolar - Nanosolar 2.0: New Attitude and New Deals for Up to 1 GW of Solar Panels.

Nanosolar, the CIGS (CuInGaSe) solar module aspirant, has been cutting a lower profile compared to its brash early years.

The 300-employee, San Jose, California-based firm has reset its management team with a focus on operations and seems to be making some progress on the technical and commercial fronts.

As one of the first wave of capital-intensive, VC-funded, next-generation thin-film solar companies, the company raised a lot of cash (more than $400 million in private equity) but was prone to over-promising and under-delivering. Faced with an economic slowdown, a precipitous decline in global module pricing, a bit of boardroom carnage that brought in a new CEO (Geoff Tate, formerly of Rambus and AMD) -- the firm stayed relatively quiet in 2010 and regrouped. (Tom Cheyney of PV-Tech did get an audience with the firm in their most notable press account of 2010.)

The new CEO told me, "We've made huge progress; we've grafted an operations process onto the company."

Nanosolar has re-emerged in its 2011 incarnation, presumably a bit humbled, but set on having 115 megawatts of capacity online by the end of the year. What bluster remains in the company comes in the form of an ambitious cost and efficiency roadmap with these goals:

* Below $1.00 per watt factory cost by the end of this year
* Low $0.80s or high $0.70s per watt by late next year
* In the $0.60s in 2013
* Below $0.60 per watt in 2014

Our analyst team estimates their current cost in the $1.35 per watt range. Tate suggested that cost reduction will come from improved sourcing, ramping yields, growing volume to spread the overhead across more units, and optimizing the recipe.

Nanosolar produced 2.5 megawatts of panels last year. This year they'll ship "double digit" megawatts and "triple digits" in 2012, according to the CEO. Cell production capacity will be 115 megawatts by the end of 2011 and the next step jumps the firm to 250 megawatts of cell capacity in San Jose. Panel assembly is performed at their factory in Luckenwalde, Germany.

The firm is shipping 10 percent efficiency panels today with a target of 12 percent efficiency next year. Expectations are for 13 percent in 2013 and 14 percent in 2014. Tate joked that he'd like to keep the trend going to 99 percent efficiency in 2099. In any case, a 4 percentage point increase in efficiency in four years would be unprecedented by any solar firm.

Technology Review has an update on thin film solar company Nanosolar, noting their 640 MW per year fully automated manufacturing facility for CIGS solar cells in Germany is now operational (though only producing 1MW per month of panels initially) - Advanced Solar Panels Coming to Market.

Solar cells made of the CIGS semiconductor, which is composed of copper, indium, gallium, and selenium, have long been considered a potential challenger to conventional solar cells made of silicon. At least in the lab, CIGS cells have reached efficiencies comparable to silicon-based solar cells. And in theory, they could be made using inexpensive printing processes, leading to much less expensive solar power. But developing manufacturing processes that maintain the high efficiencies has proven difficult.

Nanosolar claims to have solved these problems. Its solar cells still aren't as efficient as laboratory cells--the best of them convert 16.4 percent of the energy in sunlight into electricity, as opposed to over 20 percent in the lab. And on average, the company's solar panels convert just 11 percent of that energy into electricity, says Martin Roscheisen, Nanosolar's CEO. But that's high enough to compete with conventional solar panels, he says, due to modifications that improve performance and lower installation costs. He estimates that in sunny locations, power plants made using these panels could produce electricity at five to six cents per kilowatt hour, based on Department of Energy methods for calculating the amortized cost of solar panels over their lifetimes. That's near the cost of electricity from coal and significantly less than most solar power, which costs about 18 to 22 cents per kilowatt hour.

GreentechMedia reports that thin film solar company Nanosolar is slowly making headway constructing a solar farm and factory in Germany - Nanosolar Broke Ground on 1MW Power Plant, Launched German Panel Factory.

Nanosolar and Beck Energy began building a 1-megawatt solar power plant in Germany last October, a delay that was caused by the permitting process and poor weather conditions, said Nanosolar CEO Martin Roscheisen Thursday.

Roscheisen provided some updates of the company's progress in manufacturing and power plant development in response to a critical story in the January issue of Photon International. Roscheisen disputed several assertions made in the article, "Nanosolar: No news from the world champion in blowing smoke," contending that the magazine relied on "outdated quotes and information."

The article said Nanosolar and Beck Energy faced a significant delay in building the 1-megawatt power plant, which was supposed to be built on a former landfill in eastern Germany between May and November last year. It's not clear when the writer visited the site in Luckenwalde, but the story said, "And with 2009 upon us: the sign is the only thing at the construction site."

The San Jose, Calif.-based thin-film startup announced the power plant project in December 2007, when it also said it had started commercial shipment of its copper-indium-gallium-diselenide (CIGS) panels to Beck, its first customer (see Nanosolar Chooses German Town for Solar Plant and Nanosolar Begins Production).

Roscheisen on Thursday provided a photo showing the construction activity for "one of our European solar power plants," (see above) and wrote in an email reply that construction in Luckenwalde began last October "and in November active construction was taking place." He said the installation work shown in the photo is taking place in Germany, but declined to name the city.

Roscheisen also declined to say when the project will be completed, saying the construction schedule is determined by the installer.

The Photon article said Nanosolar was supposed to start commercial production in 2007, but has little to show for since. At a Photon conference in San Francisco last December, the article said, Roscheisen announced that the start of mass production at Nanosolar's panel assembly factory, also in Luckenwalde, would be delayed until March this year. Roscheisen was quoted to say that the company planned to "officially inaugurate our production on March 24 in Berlin." Luckenwalde is just south of Berlin.

Roscheisen said the March date wasn't referring to a manufacturing milestone but an event timed for the visit of Germany's environmental minister and European Union officials.

"Irrespective of this date, the factory is already operating," Roscheisen wrote. All the tools for the factory were "up and running since the end of last year." In the past, Nanosolar assembled its CIGS thin-films into panels at its much smaller assembly line in San Jose, Calif.

The factory construction is completed to accommodate a production capacity of 620 megawatts. But the company is running in "one-shift mode only -- this is sufficient for the time being due to the massive capacity of this factory," Roscheisen wrote. He declined to say when the factory will start operating around the clock.

He reiterated his statement from December 2007 that the company had started shipping commercial panels by then. The company had been making CIGS cells for panel assembly in San Jose, Calif.

TreeHugger points to a quote from the CEO of Nanosolar, graphically illustrating why biofuels can't compete with solar powered electric cars in the long run - Quote of the Day: Martin Roscheisen, CEO of Nanosolar, "Biofuels don't cut it".

"This is one of my favorite charts: A comparison of the distance a car can drive based on either of the following forms of energy, each produced on 100m x 100m of land (2.5 acres). How come that biofuel does not really cut it? Electric cars are about four times more energy efficient than fuel based cars, no matter whether they are based on biofuel or other fuel. This is because any fuel engine mostly creates heat and thus wastes the majority of the available energy units. Combine this with plants not being very efficient solar energy harvesters relative to semiconductor based solar electricity, and the result is this huge difference."

"I for one have vowed that the Prius I bought six years ago will have been the last fuel powered car I’d buy in my life. Presently, it is baking in the sun all day while I’m at work. My future all-electric car would charge up while idling under a solar carport."

The Nanosolar company blog has a post on their fast thin-film solar printing process.

As we are busy ramping our operation, we almost forgot to recognize achieving a major milestone in solar technology: The solar industry’s first 1GW production tool. Here it is:

Most production tools in the solar industry tend to have 10-30MW in annual production capacity. How is it possible to have a single tool with Gigawatt throughput?

This feat is fundamentally enabled through the proprietary nanoparticle ink we have invested so many years developing. It allows us to deliver efficient solar cells (presently up to more than 14%) that are simply printed.

Printing is a simple, fast, and robust coating process that in particular eliminates the need for expensive high-vacuum chambers and the kinds of high-vacuum based deposition techniques from industries where there’s a lot more $/sqm available for competitive manufacturing cost.

Our 1GW CIGS coater cost $1.65 million. At the 100 feet-per-minute speed shown in the video, that’s an astonishing two orders of magnitude more capital efficient than a high-vacuum process: a twenty times slower high-vacuum tool would have cost about ten times as much per tool.

Plus if we cared to run it even faster, we could. (The same coating technique works in principle for speeds up to 2000 feet-per-minute too. In fact, it turns out the faster we run, the better the coating!)

CNet reports that IBM is also getting into the thin-film solar market, in partnership with Japanese company Tokyo Ohka Kogyo (TOK).

The computing giant on Monday is expected to announce a deal with a Japanese semiconductor equipment manufacturer to make thin-film solar cells from CIGS, a combination of copper, indium, gallium, and selenide.

Neither IBM nor its partner, Tokyo Ohka Kogyo (TOK), plan to manufacture cells themselves. Rather, they will develop technology that can be licensed to solar companies in two or three years, said Supratik Guha, lead scientist for photovoltaics at IBM Research.

IBM has already built a prototype device. Once made at large volumes on a glass substrate, the cells are expected to deliver electricity at less than one dollar per watt at peak times--a long-held target of many solar outfits.

"We have the skills that we have developed in other areas--standard silicon semiconductors, materials chemistry--and we're looking to utilize those skills in the photovoltaic space and develop IP (intellectual property) and know-how that other people don't have," Guha said.

Traditional solar cells are made from silicon, but alternative thin-film materials are becoming a larger share of the market. Thin-film cells are less efficient at converting sunlight to electricity than silicon, but they require much less material to produce a cell, making them cost-competitive. Solar high-flier First Solar sells thin-film cells from cadmium telluride.

CIGS is a material that a number of companies are betting on, including Nanosolar, Global Solar Energy, Miasole, and Heliovolt. These companies are not producing cells at large volumes yet, but use of CIGS is expected to catch on quickly next year as their factories come online.

"CIGS will be the big story of 2009 because we know how many companies are putting in multimegawatts of CIGS (production capacity) in 2009," predicted solar expert Travis Bradford, president of the Prometheus Institute, who spoke at a recent Greentech Media solar briefing.

IBM's CIGS manufacturing technique came out of research IBM had done about 10 years ago in flexible electronics.

It's a break with the most common CIGS manufacturing process, called co-evaporation, in which active chemicals are immersed in a solution that gets removed in a vacuum.

IBM's "solution-based processing" calls for the chemicals to be dissolved in a liquid and then dried. It does not require a vacuum, doesn't require as much energy to run, and can be done faster than co-evaporation, Guha said.

IBM is also looking to leap-frog existing CIGS manufacturers on efficiency with a target of about 15 percent.

The efficiency of the CIGS cells on the market now is at about 9 percent or 10 percent. HelioVolt recently announced that it hit 12.2 percent efficiency with a process that is faster than co-evaporation. Global Solar said it expects to get to 14 percent, eventually.

The record for efficiency was done by the U.S. National Renewable Energy Research Laboratory (NREL) earlier this year, which reached 19.9 percent efficiency through a co-evaporation process.

Nanosolar have a blog posting announcing that their first thin film solar products will be for municipal power plants, and make an argument for why these are most efficient and cost effective starting point. Hopefully they start producing in volume soon - I think the competition between CSP, PV and thin film vendors will make the solar power market develop a lot fatser than would otherwise be the case.

At Nanosolar, we believe very much that meaningful scale for solar will come foremost from utility-scale solar power plants, in particular from municipal solar power plants of 2-10MW in size. These are rows of solar panels mounted onto the ground of free fields at the outskirts of towns and cities, feeding electricity directly into the municipal power grid.

A 2MW municipal solar power plant requires about 10 acres of land to serve a city of 1,000 homes — that’s acreage generally easily available at the outskirts of any city of such size in even the most developed countries. Have one of these in each of several hundred cities and a Gigawatt of power is delivered — locally to where the power is needed and in a digestible size each.

In a municipal solar power plant, solar panels are mounted onto rails above the ground so that grass and flowers can continue to flourish in between and below the rows of panels. Care is taken that sufficient amounts of rainwater can drop through between adjoining panels so that the flowers and organisms below are not starved. In fact, in dry regions, the solar panels even benefit the ecosystem by increasing the moisture level in the soil.

Municipal solar power plants integrate very naturally into the existing landscape as well as the existing electricity grid. By feeding power directly into the (local, medium-voltage) distribution grid, they avoid the (long-haul, high-voltage) transmission grid which is expensive to build and expand, and they also avoid the expense of a substation for down-transforming transmission voltage to municipal voltage. It’s a form of distributed generation but at the wholesale level — ”Wholesale Distributed Generation” (WDG) – and it has been determined (using CPUC methodolgy and data) that there is a locational benefit of about 35% over wholesale power cost. These are real dollars that WDG power providers and rate payers can split in a win-win cost advantage.

In any region with a decent amount of sunshine, there is no more economic way of reliably providing municipal power during the day than through a municipal solar power plant. That’s because municipal solar power plants combine the locational benefit of avoided transmission with the time-of-day benefit of solar and the economics of scale.

Ground-mounted solar power plants are installed in industrially streamlined ways, with specialized tractors deploying standardized substructure components according to standard system block designs to achieve optimal cost efficiency.

While rooftops are surely a good application too for solar panels, it is a business that’s difficult to scale rapidly in a truly meaningful way. Crawling onto rooftops and mounting solar panels in compliance with building codes is fundamentally always a somewhat less efficient proposition.

In fact, municipal solar power plants are one of the most rapidly deployable forms of power: whereas it takes 10-15 years to get a new coal plant done (if ever given their carbon risk) or 5 years for a concentrating solar-thermal plant (also requiring a connection to the transmission grid), a municipal solar plant can be completed in as little as 12 months.

Furthermore, a unique feature of photovoltaic power plants is that they utilize power inverter electronics with increasingly intelligent features. Enlightened utilities around the world are now recognizing these as a very good way to manage and improve grid power quality. This is especially a point of pain at the outer branches of the electric grid where power quality is hard to manage otherwise.

Thin film solar company Nanosolar has now shipped its first solar panels and begun an auction for the second panel produced - now cancelled by eBay because Nanosolar decided to donate the purchase price to charity (the third pnael has been donated to the Tech Museum in San Jose, california), leading to speculation that the (direct) cost of solar power is now cheaper than coal (and falling).

While it is still too early to tell whether or not Nanoslar can meet their goal of producing cells at $1 per watt, the fact that the company has constructed a manufacturing plant and begun shipping the product to a paying customer (in Germany) is a good sign.

The first plant is reportedly capable of producing 430 megawatts a year of cells, which is a respectable amount compared to the total amount of photovoltaic manufacturing capacity currently in place.

Nanosolar's cells are made of Copper Indium Gallium Selenide (CIGS). They aren't the only company working in this area - competitors include Heliovolt and the struggling Miasole. Other thin film solar manufacturers are working with materials like Amorphous Silicon (a-Si) - for example Power Film, XSunX and United Solar Ovonic - or Cadmium Telluride (CdTe) - for example First Solar. Konarka also sell "power plastic" (soon to be marketed in Australia by Skyshades) using "Graetzel cells" based on a thin coating of ruthenium and organic bipyridine molecules over a titanium substrate.

One potential issue to watch as manufacturing volumes are scaled up is the availability of the various materials that make up thin film cells.

Availability and price of Tellurium are already concern to analysts of First Solar, though there is speculation that copious amounts of Tellurium can be mined from deep sea ridges.

There appear to be similar concerns about availability of indium in particular (and to a lesser extent gallium) for CIGS cells, though as usual concrete data on total reserves for these seems to be in short supply as well.

Nanosolar's technology is reportedly capable of achieving higher efficiency rates (up to 19.5%) than are achieved with other thin-film technologies. However, these efficiency rates have only been seen under laboratory conditions so far. Mass produced CIGS solar cells usually have efficiency rates of 12%-15% – making them about half as efficient as their silicon PV counterparts.