Their analysts had reassessed the market for amorphous silicon photovoltaics—that was the extent of the explanation. Bill Joy did not respond to messages requesting an interview about Solasta’s shutdown, but it seems likely that several external factors contributed to KP’s decision. First, in response to high worldwide demand, new facilities had sprung up recently to manufacture crystalline silicon, the price of which then began to drop, cutting into the price advantage enjoyed by amorphous silicon. According to Mike Clary, the demise of cap-and-trade legislation in the U.S. Senate was also a “huge” factor in KP’s move; by declining to apply a cost to carbon emissions, Clary says, the Senate, in effect, dramatically slowed renewable energy development. Also key to the decision was the failure to find a second investor. The shutdown, Clary sums up, was “more a commentary on the state of the market at the time” than on the Solasta technology. Naughton blames the shutdown partly on unrealistic expectations that grew from KP’s roots in information technology. “In IT,” he says, “a half dozen engineers can hack code for three weeks straight and come out with something of value. And you can’t do that with materials. The whole venture capital community underestimated the realities of moving forward restricted by materials. The scientists, me included, underestimated that.” Clary disagrees, saying, “KP’s expectations were realistic given the diligence that had been done on the [Solasta] technology. . . . KP stuck with it a long time. We never saw runaway success in terms of efficiency. We saw something that was good but not runaway success.” As to the idea, expressed by Naughton and Kempa, that Solasta had been undercapitalized, he says KP’s investment was intended “to prove there was an effect of a significant nature. I don’t think you need tens or twenties of millions to prove that.” at the national renewable energy laboratory news of Solasta’s shutdown was received with shock, says Martha Symko-Davies, who oversees the program that provided the company’s $2.7 million grant. Having just exceeded 10 percent at the time of the shutdown, Solasta was “making extremely good progress,” Symko-Davies says. “I’ve had other companies that are trying to do similar technologies, and Solasta was leaps and bounds ahead.” Of the fact that Solasta technology is now licensed by KP (as preferred shareholder) to a Chinese university, after millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars were invested in the firm, she says, “That pretty much kills me.” In the United States, she adds, “We do not have a strong enough system [for supporting green technologies] relative to the entire world, let alone China.” Kris Kempa agrees. “China,” he says, “makes an enormous investment in green technology, and it’s long term compared to the American approach. An enormous amount
of money is thrown at all sorts of technologies, even though they may not be the best ones in the end. But it creates an environment for vibrant research.” Kempa argues that the effort to show fast results crowded out fundamental research that would have brought Solasta a better outcome. The last samples sent to NREL used such a low nanopillar height that they were barely Solasta devices at all; Kempa wonders whether their efficiency, a near world record for amorphous silicon at more than 10.5 percent, was actually coming from the nanocoax or just from Solasta’s growing prowess at laying down amorphous silicon. Instead of shortening the pillars, Solasta should have modified their shape, he says, a fundamental solution that would ultimately have allowed the team to start increasing pillar length, and thus efficiency. The technique had been tried in fall 2009 and showed promise of solving the conformality problems, but it was not the fastest way to 10 percent, and so it was back-burnered. “We [used] thousands of small tricks to avoid the best solution,” Kempa says. “Our device in the end became a patchwork of shortcuts.” And yet Solasta doesn’t sound like a failure to Strevens, of NYU. “The fact that the technology was sold,” he says, “suggests that it was worth something and that these ideas will continue to be developed.” Kempa himself says Solasta “was not a scientific failure, absolutely not. It was not even a technological failure. We still have the best nanostructured solar cell ever made.” Nonetheless, he doesn’t completely regret the company’s demise. “We were in such a pressure, such a stress,” he says. “To me it was a little bit of a relief.” Kempa has hardly abandoned scientific research, the Solasta letdown notwithstanding. As ever, he has multiple projects ongoing, in fields ranging from nanoplasmonics to nano-optics to radio optics. Ren, for his part, has secured grants amounting to a yearly budget of $1.5 million to focus on energy conversion challenges over the next several years. And Mike Naughton is involved with half a dozen current research projects. In one, he and colleagues from the biology department are creating nanostructures to serve as sensors for detecting, among other things, cancer cells and chemical explosives. In another project, he’s working with organic materials that superconduct at low temperatures, and in yet another he’s hoping to develop nanostructured subretinal implants for use in treating blindness. He seems to have moved past Solasta, but he still harbors complicated feelings about what transpired there. “If I try and stand back and look at it in the money person’s shoes, you’re in it to make money,” Naughton says. “When you look at it from my side, it’s ‘We put our heart and soul into this, and we could have used more run time.’” n David Reich is a writer in the Boston area.
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