The economist on a recent article:
"The flood of money into clean energy is better news for society than it is for investors
COMPUTER chips and solar panels are made of the same basic stuff: thinly sliced silicon. Until recently, however, Silicon Valley did not take much interest in the alternative use of its principal raw material.
That has changed. California's entrepreneurs are piling into clean-energy technology. In June a group of Silicon Valley luminaries invested $100m in Nanosolar
, a firm which hopes to cut the cost of producing solar panels dramatically.
The investors include some of the founders of eBay, the world's biggest online auctioneer, and Germany's SAP, a giant software firm. Nanosolar's seed money came from Sergey Brin and Larry Page, who started Google. Last month their "do no evil" search-engine company announced plans to build the largest corporate solar-power installation at its Silicon Valley campus. The panels will supply about 30% of its electricity. "
Check this out:
Makers of a new kind of solar power cell have chosen San Jose as the site of their first large-scale factory in America.
Nanosolar Inc. will occupy a former Cisco Systems facility in south San Jose, converting it into a manufacturing plant for "thin-film" solar cells, which are produced in narrow flexible sheets. The company, based in Palo Alto, also will open a factory in Germany, the world's largest market for solar technology. The $102 million plant on San Jose's Hellyer Avenue will make enough solar cells each year to
generate 400 megawatts of electricity, roughly enough to light 300,000 homes. The facility will be ready for commercial production next year.
San Jose will have innovative solar plant / 'Thin-film' cells don't use silicon