This was posted on the Stockhouse Board by VDsquared:
Maker of Silicon Wafers Wins Millions in U.S. Loan Support
WASHINGTON — The Energy Department plans to announce on Friday that it will provide a $150 million loan guarantee to a company in Massachusetts that has developed a radical new way to make the silicon wafers for solar cells at a far lower cost.
The company, 1366 Technologies, has invented a way to cast the wafers at the desired dimensions — 200 microns thick, or about eight thousandths of an inch — rather than slicing them from a big block and losing up to half the material as dust.
The technology could cut the price of manufacturing a solar cell by roughly 40 percent, the venture says. (The company’s name refers to the amount of solar energy, in watts, that hits a square meter of the earth’s atmosphere.)
“This project is a game-changer that could dramatically lower the cost of photovoltaic solar cells,” the secretary of energy, Steven Chu, said in a prepared statement.
Jonathan M. Silver, the head of the Energy Department’s loan guarantee program, said that 1366’s innovation was “the result of exactly what the Department of Energy is trying to do, to develop a cradle-to-market innovation strategy that helps identify transformative technologies early in the process, and makes it possible for them to grow and mature more rapidly, and leapfrog many of the steps along the way.”
Mr. Silver said his office had committed more than $12 billion in loan guarantees to 15 solar projects so far, some of them manufacturing plants and some of them energy producers. Of that, $3 billion has been announced this month.
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