Former solar startup Solexant has announced a rebranding of its corporate identity to Siva Power in a move that will include the formation of a world-class technical advisory board, a focus on CIGS technology and the utilization of a new, more profitable manufacturing platform.
Operating now as Siva Power, the transition marks the culmination of a two-year planning phase for the company; a transition that revolves around the creation of a new manufacturing platform that can produce gigawatt-levels of solar equipment at sub-$0.40 per watt costs.
"Unlike silicon PV, our new approach provides a pathway to building the solar industry's ‘factory of the future' with gigawatt production capacity, and the worlds lowest cost in solar," said Siva Powers CEO, Brad Mattson. "Two years of data-driven research and analysis has led us to pursue a co-evaporated CIGS via monolithic integration on glass technology."
As Solexant, the company had intended to build a 100 MW cadmium telluride (CdTe) production line, but those expansion plans were shelved. Instead, Siva Power will triple its R&D budget in order to investigate new technologies that can bring about lower cost production. The company settled on CIGS technology as its most viable path towards the goal of sub-$0.40 per watt costs.
That R&D phase has now been completed, with the company in the process of raising funds in order to construct its inaugural production line, thought to be somewhere in the region of 300 MW of capacity, making it three times larger than an average thin film production line.
Technical advisory board
Siva Powers new board has been chosen for its expertise and knowledge of CIGS technology, and comprises Markus E. Beck a renowned CIGS technologist as CTO, and Doctors Rommel Noufi and John Benner 33-year veterans of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL – as advisory board members.
"It has been frustrating to see CIGS technology breaking efficiency records for many years, but not see that technical success translate into success in the commercial arena," remarked Rommel Noufi. "In Siva Power I see the technology, the team, and the technical and business leadership to bring CIGS to the scale it deserves. Im excited to become an advisor to Siva and to help steer CIGS into the future."
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