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Solar startup Stion plans move to San Jose, remains stuck in stealth mode |
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Mar 14, 2008 at 03:17 PM |
The Edenvale area of San Jose is becoming a little hotbed of photovoltaic activity, but the latest company set to move there remains in stealth-mode information lockdown.
As the San Jose Mercury News reported Wednesday, Stion has become the third PV firm over the past year or so, joining CIGS concerns Nanosolar and SoloPower, to succumb to the city of San Jose's offer of redevelopment monies for manufacturing tooling ($700,000) and workforce training ($100,000) as part of Mayor Chuck Reed's "green vision"/emerging technologies fund agenda. The company will move from its current Menlo Park location into a one-time IBM building in the south San Jose neighborhood.
But if you want to find out anything else about Stion, the pickings are pretty slim.
The company Website contains an opening "About Us" page, a "Management Team" page, contact page, and a "Careers" page, with several engineer, technician, and scientist job openings listed. There are also links to PDFs of the two press releases issued by Stion, one from late June 2007 announcing the company's scoring of $15 million in Series B financing, the other from mid-December 2007 announcing the appointment of semi/semi tool industry vet Vineet Dharmadhikari as its COO and senior VP of engineering.
Although we can read that Stion (formerly NStructures) was founded in 2006, that its high-efficiency thin-film module technology is based on the work of nanomaterials guru Howard Lee, and that it would "cut dollar-per-watt costs at the systems level," there's not much else: no products or technology overview, no details on the company's history, no white papers or backgrounders. In what little space is provided, we can see that the investors in Stion include some heavy-hitters in the renewable and high-tech space, such as Khosla Ventures, Lightspeed, General Catalyst, Braemar, and Moser Baer PV, and that ex-Shell Solar honcho Chet Ferris is president/CEO, inventor/cofounder Lee is CTO, and Dharmadhikari is COO/SVP.
Although touted conversion efficiencies of 25-30% have been mentioned elsewhere, the "minimization of total installed system costs" angle has been discussed a bit, and the Merc story said there are 35 employees, my thorough Internet search revealed little additional information about Stion. It's not even clear what kind of solar cell/module technology/materials the company is using, whether it's organic or inorganic, a vacuum or nonvacuum manufacturing process, what kind of applications are envisioned, etc.
We do know what Stion's active material is not, however, based on a quote I found in a June 26 story from CNet's news.com. "It is not silicon based. It is not cadmium telluride. It is not CIGS (copper indium gallium selenide)," said Frank Yang, manager of business development. "In due time, we will make it publicly available."
When I tried to get Yang to comment this week, he emailed me the following reply: "At the moment, we prefer not to comment further on the Company [sic] in a public medium beyond what was contained in the San Jose press release. However, we will most certainly keep you posted in the future when there are material [no pun intended?] events that merit significant coverage."
A well-placed source in the thin-film PV community (who prefers to remain anonymous) tells me that Stion is "tight lipped." My source says that "initially there was indication they were working on CIGS, but they have vehemently denied it lately," adding, "honestly I do not know what they are investigating.... They say (on their Website) that they are working on fourth-generation thin film, which in my opinion is a joke---but good to fool the VCs." When I mentioned Solyndra, another notoriously stealthy PV startup, the source "will not put Solyndra in the same league as Stion. Solyndra is more real than Stion---they will have CIGS products in the market this year."
We have a few hints about Stion's chosen PV approach. First, there's Dr. Lee's background. He has done extensive work on tunable light-emitting quantum dot technologies at Lawrence Livermore National Lab, so it's not a stretch to speculate that q-dots might be the "secret sauce" in the company's material stack. (Here's a link to a 2000 article about Lee's work in LLNL's Science and Technology Reviewmagazine.)
Then there's the company's own job board. Many of the listed positions require experience in areas such as "solution-based deposition," "vacuum deposition," "sputtering," "ebeam," and "thermal evaporation." One line from the help-wanted blurb seeks process development engineers and techs to help "develop and optimize thin film deposition processes using PVD techniques such as sputtering, e-beam and thermal evaporation for the fabrication of thin film photovoltaic (PV) devices."
Seems like a pretty big hint that at least some of Stion's process flow relies on an vacuum-based PVD approach, although there may be nonvacuum activities going on as well, given the call for people to help optimize "solution-based deposition processes." (Could these be functional inks, inkjet-printed or otherwise? Of course some solution dep is done in-vacuum.) In the CIGS process world (I know, Stion has said they are not a CIGS player, but bear with me), some companies have gone a PVD/sputtering route (Miasole, Daystar), others have taken a evaporation or coevaporation path (Global Solar, Ascent), and others have pursued some sort of nanoink approach (Nanosolar, ISET)---or a combination/hybrid of several processes.
So far, Stion's stealthy solar startup strategy has stemmed serious speculation. Isn't it time for the company to open up its corporate kimono and let the sun shine in, just a wee bit?
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