Photovoltaics on Track for Long-Term Role
Alexander E. Braun, Senior Editor -- PV Society, 6/1/2009
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| Craig Hunter, Vice President and General Manager, Intermolecular Solar Business |
Craig Hunter is vice president and general manager of the solar business at Intermolecular (San Jose), which specializes in combinatorial R&D. Before joining Intermolecular early this year, Hunter was an entrepreneur in residence at Sequoia Capital, focused on the photovoltaics industry; and previously had worked at Applied Materials, where he led the company's entry into the thin-film solar business. In this interview, Hunter discusses the economic and technical future of PV. Below are highlights.
Listen to the full interview (Runtime: 17:43)
SI: Intermolecular is known as a company that assists chipmakers, material suppliers and equipment manufacturers with their R&D, and they do this by producing data very quickly by carrying multiple experiments in parallel. How will this translate into the photovoltaic arena?
Hunter: This combinatorial method of R&D really is very applicable to working with crystalline silicon devices, with thin-film silicon devices, with cadmium telluride, CIGS, and even with future devices such as inorganic or organic PV devices. Because in all of these cases, we're working with semiconductor materials, we're working with dielectric materials, we're working with device integration challenges. So it's very much analogous to what's been taking place in semiconductor.
Of course the nature of the industry is quite different in many respects, but the integration challenges and the need for rapid learning is similar in both cases. ... In the case of solar, companies generally spend quite a bit less in R&D on an absolute as well as a percentage of revenue basis. But the need for learning to drive higher and higher conversion efficiencies, to drive lower and lower manufacturing costs, is similar.
SI: There's no question that we must go into alternative, renewable sources of energy. In the case, particularly, of photovoltaics, however, the expansion that the industry has experienced has been mostly due to the government subsidies that they've received. Now, in this sad economic situation that the whole planet is undergoing, how do you see that situation working out?
Hunter: I think that the dynamic is already in place for a very long-term role for PV. In fact, I would say there's no turning back. The PV industry, even though it's been supported in recent years and will be supported the next few years by government incentive programs, the scale is already being developed — has already been deployed and is being deployed — where the manufacturing economics are going to be there.
The way I tend to look at the dynamic in the industry is I came from the LCD industry; I was working previously in the LCD subsidiary of Applied Materials, and I saw in that industry a very interesting business dynamic. Flat panel displays — LCD technology — has been around for a while. But back in the early 1990s, that technology was very expensive to manufacture, and in fact the performance was not very good. And here today we're talking about LCD technologies, I think, rapidly approaching 50% market share for the global television industry, if it's not already surpassed that. And how did that happen? How did it go from very high cost, poor performance to very low cost, great performance? What happened was the LCD industry found a killer application, which was notebook screens, where there was no competing technology. And people were willing to pay high prices for relatively poor performance at that time because there was no choice. For a laptop computer, you needed a flat screen that was lightweight, and it didn't matter that it wasn't as good as the CRT on your desktop; you just needed it to be part of your computer. The scale of that application was big enough that companies were able to develop real manufacturing scale. ... And there's been more than 95–97% cost reduction over the course of 12 years in terms of the dollars per square meter to manufacture an LCD, and at the same time they were able to get the performance up.
Now I look at solar and I say, Okay, what's going on there? Is there a similar analog? Is there a killer application where people would be willing to pay a relatively high price for a solar panel for a relatively low performance today, at this stage of the technology development? And the answer is no, there is no laptop computer application analog for solar. But what solar has is governments that are willing to play that role; governments that are willing to step in and provide an incentive structure to say, "Okay, we want this technology to work. It's important for the future of the world to have a clean source of energy..."
And they've put enough of an incentive on the table over the last number of years that it's drawn big companies and small with a variety of technologies into the industry. And now the scale is being developed where that learning curve I mentioned in LCD is really starting to take place already in a big way in the solar industry. So if you strip away everything — even if incentives were to completely die tomorrow, it's my opinion that the scale of the industry is already significant enough, and the cost position of the industry is already low enough that it's a sustainable industry. Now, that's not going to happen. There are government incentives, and in fact if anything, there's a trend toward more government incentives being deployed for solar. So I think you have all the makings of a genuine serious-scale industry that's going to be on a learning curve to drive lower and lower cost.
