Siva Power has been quietly working, focusing on research and development for the least expensive thin-film modules available. But now it’s time to transition from R&D to production, and the company is ready to take the next big step.
“If we make it through this, it will be the best Cinderella story,” said Brad Mattson, Siva Power CEO. “We haven’t quite found our prince yet, but we’re working on it.”
Siva Power’s headquarters in Santa Clara, California, serve as a testing ground for future wide-scale production of CIGS thin-film modules.
Siva Power got its start eight years ago (back when it was known as Solexant), during what Mattson describes as the “heyday of solar.” Many companies were raising hundreds of millions of dollars (specifically Solyndra, MiaSolé, Nanosolar) and ramping up production of thin-film modules in the United States. At the same time, China steamrolled the market by building thousands of production lines, immediately dropping production costs and flooding the market. When the U.S. companies’ goal of getting to $1/watt production costs was quickly outmatched by China’s 70-cents/watt, the bottom dropped out for U.S. thin-film production. Solyndra and Nanosolar disappeared, and MiaSolé was bought out.
Mattson said what saved Solexant was its smaller pool of funding at the time, which didn’t allow the company to go full-bore on production like the other companies. Mattson was hired as CEO in 2011 and stopped Solexant’s production and tripled the R&D budget to try and beat China.
In addition to restarting Solexant as Siva Power in 2013, Mattson also helped usher in a new technology: switching from cadmium telluride (CdTe) to copper indium gallium selenide (CIGS) thin-film.
“Essentially we found those technologies were pretty good to get you to 70- or 80-cents/watt, but to be competitive today, you want to be cheaper than China, so you need to be 30-, 40-cents today and 20- to 30-cents in the future,” Mattson said. “Those first generation thin-film technologies just couldn’t get you there. We’re still thin-film, but it’s a completely different scale of thin-film product and manufacturing technology, a scale no one has achieved before.”
Siva Power began installing a test platform at its headquarters in October 2015 to test the high volume, high rate, large-area linear-evaporation source, which is the heart of Siva’s manufacturing line. A larger platform will be installed at a yet-to-be-built production facility.
The company has spent the last four years working on R&D and is confident it has a CIGS product that can rival China and produce a giga-factory on U.S. soil. The issue now for Siva Power is moving from a technology company into manufacturing, and securing funding is a process, to say the least.
“We talk to a lot of people, kiss a lot of frogs,” Mattson said. “It’s almost $200 million to build a factory, especially at the scale we want to build it at. A lot of investors are still hurting from the loss of billions of dollars on that first wave eight years ago.”
For the United States to become a solar powerhouse, Mattson said production has to be done at home.
“The U.S. tends to fund new technologies, but when it comes to building manufacturing plants for them, we don’t want to do that,” he said. “We’ll let China do it, or let someone else do it. That’s one of the problems in America, we just invent and then someone else makes it, usually in Asia. We’re trying to stop that.”
Dependent on financing, Siva Power hopes to have revenue in two years. Mattson said there are talks with different states and the incentives they’d offer to build a factory at home. The company secured $10 million in new funding earlier this year (including a $3 million Dept. of Energy SunShot grant) and hopes to wrap up financing at the end of 2015. It will then take a year to build a factory and another year to get it going. So (fingers-crossed), 2018 might be the Year of Siva Power.
And if that’s the case, Mattson said everyone would benefit from a gigawatt-production line in the United States in a few short years.
“When we enable another halving of costs on what they’re doing in China, it opens up that much more market,” he said. “It benefits the end-user who is just getting electricity, but think about the downstream markets—the SolarCity, Sunrun—all those big development companies. They’re creating big jobs now. You drive the cost down a little further, another million homes are at grid parity. I think it keeps opening up the market. Solar is the solution.”
