Silicon Valley's next big thing: 'clean tech'
Engineers aim to transform solar, fuel-cell, and biofuel projects into viable industries.
from the May 11, 2007 edition
Page 3 of 3
Some clean-tech startups will fail, admits Mr. Khosla. But he and others argue this boom is built on sterner stuff than the dotcom boom. For one thing, it's built on extremely diverse technologies, insulating the industry if one technology stumbles. For another, it has a relatively high barrier to entry. It takes expensive equipment, research space, and staff to get a clean-tech startup off the ground.
"You can't just create a company in a bedroom and a weekend like people were doing in the '90s," says Seth Fearey, chief operating officer of Joint Venture: Silicon Valley Network, a market research and advocacy group in San Jose.
Clean technology "is coming out of a solid foundation – the semiconductor industry," he adds. "This new industry is based on an existing workforce, existing talent, existing research programs."
This is particularly true of solar power, around which much of Silicon Valley's clean tech is clustered.
SunPower, one of the region's top solar companies, turned to T.J. Rodgers, founder of Cypress Semiconductor, to help apply the lessons of mass producing semiconductors to the mass production of solar panels. Applied Materials, a major semiconductor equipment firm, is now moving into solar-panel manufacturing, too.
The adoption of mass-production efficiencies have already pushed prices down for solar panels. The price for a watt of solar power, adjusted for inflation, went from $21.83 in 1980 to $2.70 in 2005, according to Applied Materials.
Within five years, a SunPower spokesperson predicts, the price of solar power will rival – without any subsidies – the price of conventional power.
Installers of solar panels, like SolarCity in Foster City, Calif., are also hammering out inefficiencies. The company offers savings of 15 to 30 percent to neighborhoods that band together to purchase panels.
This process is a Silicon Valley hallmark, says John McClure, vice president of corporate strategy at Applied Materials. "It takes science experiments and makes them into mass-produced products."
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